![]() Its furrowed bark, thick and old, was filled with moss, its base covered in a mound of its own dead needles. ![]() “A lot of death and a lot of time, that’s basically what created this,” he said, as he walked down the path ahead of me.Īfter a few twists and turns in the trail, we encountered our first giant, one of the huge trees for which the place is named: a Douglas fir, so tall that we couldn’t even see its first branch and so wide it would take at least five people to wrap their arms around it. CJ, the pragmatic one in our group of friends, had his own take. The 51-acre protected area, an island of Bureau of Land Management territory surrounded by timber companies, gets more than 180 inches of rain a year. Lichen crept along the branches of hemlocks and firs above our heads. Fir saplings sprouted from downed logs, joined by the odd oily mushroom or bracket fungus. Life thrust through the soft forest floor. On the drive to the trailhead, we had passed the signs of Oregon’s timber industry - semis filled with long logs and machines moving felled Douglas firs with giant claws, arched necks swiveling, windshields reflecting the cold sky. It was chillier than I thought it would be, and my fingers began to turn red as we stood there on the gravel, the only noise the distant rumble of the North Fork of the Siletz River.įortified with a pre-hike snack of homemade Christmas cookies and fruit leather, we started down the narrow path, heading toward the river. The winter sun had finally started to shine through the fog, and the thick trees on either side of the road cast deep shadows. ![]() The day was already getting on by the time we arrived at the trailhead. And we both had begun to understand our roots in timber country in a different way, pushing past the teenage angst of small-town living and coming to see our hometown as part of a much larger picture. We had gone to high school and college together in Oregon, and he was now in forestry school. So I asked CJ Drake, a friend who was also in town, to come with me, because it was tricky getting around out there, and because he, too, loved the valley. I had not seen the giants in eight years, but I had thought about the area often over the last few months. An awkwardly sized town, big enough for a Wal-Mart but surrounded by farmland, Dallas lies 15 miles west of Salem and doesn’t offer many reasons to visit. The Valley of the Giants is a small public-land inholding hidden amid the carved-up timber country of western Oregon, a patch of old-growth forest that offered an escape from my home just outside of Dallas, Oregon. This winter, at home for the holidays, I talked an old high school friend into visiting one of our favorite stomping grounds.
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