Robert Van Pelt, ‘a laser-gun-wielding scientist who’s turning the arcane world of tree-hunting upside-down’, according to Charles Montgomery in the Vancouver Sun of 20 October 2001, will be our speaker the evening of February 20th. ‘Back before Van Pelt arrived on the scene’, Montgomery continues, ‘tree-hunting was a competition dominated by upstarts and amateurs, men . . . driven by instinct rather than science . . . . Robert Van Pelt hunts on foot, just like any other big tree man’ – and there are a number of these obsessed men, from all walks of life, up and down the west coast – ‘but it is the way he measures prize trunks that is raising the ire of tree traditionalists. Armed with $30,000 worth of laser technology, a sketch book and a calculator, Van Pelt has hit all the so-called champion trees with a meticulous new size test, and has turned the continent’s big tree hierarchy on its ear.’  

The hunt for the northwest coast’s biggest trees began in the mid-‘80s, according to Montgomery, when ‘environmentalists were just waking up to the fact that loggers were cutting some of the last remaining stands of really big conifers on the coast. Explorer and wilderness advocate Randy Stoltmann launched B.C.’s register of big trees, partly to drum up interest in the threatened giants. Stoltmann and other tree hunters identified hundreds of significant trees and managed to save them through aggressive media campaigns, including the giant Sitka spruce groves of Carmanah Valley on Vancouver island.’ It was, then, a timely move for Robert Van Pelt when in 1985 he moved west from his native Wisconsin, where he was interested in discovering the largest pines, to become a cook at a lodge in Washington’s Olympic Mountains. But there he met a certain tree, and evidently fell in love. Unfortunately the object of his new love affair was ‘beautiful, but long dead’. It was, according to records, the world champion Grand Fir, and was located only a short distance from Robert’s kitchen, ‘only now it was a moss-draped log sinking into the forest floor’. Robert was fascinated by the fact that nobody noticed that nobody was keeping track of such things, and that a ‘big-tree program coordinator’ was needed. ‘Moreover, there were records waiting to be broken! Van Pelt was the man. He nominated a new champion Grand Fir within two years, and followed with 34 other national champion trees in the years since.’

Robert left his kitchen to become a research associate in forest ecology at the University of Washington, and, aside from coming up with a new, more accurate way of measuring trees, has since published several books about big trees, including Champion Trees of Washington State and Forest Giants of the Pacific Coast. He insists that competition among tree hunters is not of interest to him, but the size numbers do count. In Canada, for that matter, competition is less strident than in the United States, and the reference to ‘champions’ virtually does not exist. As Robert said to Montgomery, ‘I love my almanacs and my Guinness Book of World Records. And trees, well, they are my obsession, there’s just no other way of putting it. We are talking about the biggest, the oldest, the tallest things on Earth.’

The new, expensive, more accurate measuring equipment which he has introduced into the field has caused many trees to be lowered in the size rankings, but it has determined that the largest known Douglas Fir in the world is one on the west coast of Vancouver Island near Port Renfrew. Called the Red Creek fir, it contains 349 square metres of wood. A few kilometres north of it is the second largest Red Cedar in the world, the largest, by a fraction, being one in Washington. The two largest known Yellow Cedars are north of Campbell river, not up on Cypress Mountain, alas. The largest Amabilis Fir, however, ‘grows in a rocky gully on Black Mountain, near the ski lifts of Cypress Bowl’.

Robert now lives in Seattle and has been Director of the Washington State Big Tree Program since he started it back in 1986. It was at this time that he also became the state coordinator of the National Big Tree Program. He received his PhD in 1995 from the University of Washington, and indicates his main research interests to be old-growth ecology, canopy structure and its control of the understory environment, spatial patterns in old-growth forests, and tree plant geography. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington and Evergreen State College, where he is engaged in canopy research in Douglas fir and Redwood forests. He teaches several field classes on Pacific Northwest old-growth and forestry issues. The father of four, he shares his love for trees with his wife Kathy, who is the Urban Forester for the Metro Parks in Tacoma.

No one who likes big trees – and remember, many rhododendrons are trees, though we would have to travel some distance to find the largest ones – will want to miss Robert Van Pelt’s lecture the evening of February 20th, ‘Giant trees in the Puget Sound and Pacific Northwest – a Global Perspective’.

 Joe Ronsley

Robert Van Pelt