Majestic ponderosa survives three centuries only to succumb to the mountain pine beetle
(published Aug. 28, 2008 in the Kamloops Daily News)
By CATHERINE LITT
Daily News Staff Reporter
The blue sedan rumbled along the dusty gravel road, its tires spitting pebbles through a trail of powdery dirt.
Oliver Coster had driven this road many times before. He knew every turn, every bend, every cattle crossing, all the invisible property lines that separated the endless ranches from the endless homesteads.
But mostly he knew the trees.
Campbell Range Road was his stomping grounds; always had been. He had grown up in this range country high above Barnhartvale on his family’s farm and had logged pines in the area as a young sawmill owner in the 1940s. There wasn’t a ponderosa within miles that he hadn’t come across in one way or another during his 84 years of life.
Yet few had transfixed him like the one he was on his way to see that afternoon.
“I’ve done a lot of wood chucking in different places but I’ve never run across one lately as big as that,” said Coster.
“It leans right over the hydro line and right over the road.”
On Tuesday, the Dallas senior drove along Campbell Range Road to see an old-growth ponderosa, and he knew time was working against him.
The tree had already been tagged with orange spray paint, its reddish bark revealing the all-too-familiar signs of pine beetle infestation. It was just a matter of time before the tree would be cut down.
Coster, though, wanted to show his friend Tivola Howe the huge pine while it still towered over the other trees, and so he drove with her along that dusty rural road for one last look at a grand old ponderosa.
As the car came around the final bend in the road, Coster and Howe looked skyward for the towering tree but only saw clouds where they should have seen branches. The massive ponderosa had already come down.
Coster eased the car to a stop and stepped out. “We’re too late,” he said. “It’s already done.”
For the next several minutes, Coster and Howe walked around the felled pine tree, running their hands across the bark, trying to count the rings on the cut end. They marveled at the length of the trunk. It had crashed to the forest floor intact and seemed so extraordinarily long they couldn’t see where it ended in the distance.
“It was a big tree,” said Coster.
Howe nodded. “How it survived all those years,” she wondered, “ . . . with all the winds up here.”
To see it now, its limbs removed and scattered across the ground, its once-grand stature erased from the skyline, was sad. There was no other word for it.
It was a sad end to a magnificent life that had survived, by Coster’s estimate, 300 years; survived wind storms, snowfalls, brush fires and lightning, only to be downed by the mountain pine beetle.
Trees die in the forest all the time but few are as big as that old pine, and few will be remembered the way Coster will remember that ponderosa.
Back at his house in Dallas later that afternoon, Coster opened a package of snapshots he and his daughter had taken two weeks ago while the tree was still standing.
In one photograph, Coster is smiling broadly as he leans his back against the ponderosa.
The base of the tree is so wide, it seems as if he is standing against a wall of bark.
Posted on August 28, 2008
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