Douglas Fir. Stephen F. Arno

       INTRODUCTION:

       Nature’s All-Purpose Tree

      Most westerners familiar with native forests probably think they know the Douglas-fir, which is after all one of our most common trees, indigenous to all the western states, western Canada, and the high mountains in Mexico.

      However, few people realize the many forms and strategies Douglas-fir adopts to occupy more kinds of habitats than any other American tree. The species comprises two varieties—coastal Douglas-fir and inland, or Rocky Mountain, Douglas-fir—and includes the giants of the coastal forest, luxuriant conical trees in young stands, stout old sentinels along grassy ridges, and wind-sculpted dwarfs clinging to high mountain slopes. Douglas-fir occupies both damp habitats, such as ravines and north-facing slopes, and droughty ones, such as south-facing slopes, and nearly all sites between.

      In moist environments, coastal Douglas-fir is a pioneer species— one that depends on fires, logging, and other major disturbances to create the open conditions that allow it to establish and avoid stifling competition from shade-tolerant species like western hemlock and Sitka spruce. These shade-tolerant species, unlike coastal Douglas-fir, can produce abundant saplings beneath the mature tree canopy and eventually form thickets of young trees that, without another disturbance, gradually replace aging Douglas-firs and take over the forest in perpetuity.

      Douglas-fir also inhabits some of the hottest environments, such as sunbaked rocky islands in Washington’s San Juan archipelago, and the coldest ones that any trees can tolerate, including subalpine forests along the Continental Divide in Montana and Wyoming.

      Both coastal and inland Douglas-fir are exceptionally resilient and quick to colonize following disturbances such as wildfire, logging, land clearing, and even residential developments, where it may later appear as a beautiful volunteer in a suburban yard. In the drier, fire-dependent forests of the interior West, some people view inland Douglas-fir as a sort of uncontrollable noxious weed, even though human efforts to eliminate fire are largely responsible for its proliferation. In inhospitable environments, Douglas-fir alone forms the native forest whether there are disturbances or not, such as in the high semi-arid mountains of southwestern Montana and southeastern Idaho, where the inland variety is the only erect tree. To sum up its adaptability, Douglas-fir is nature’s all-purpose tree.

      Douglas-fir has proved valuable to humans as well, beginning with the many native peoples of North America who have lived among and used these trees for millennia. The species has long had a reputation for producing good lumber and firewood, and native people have used it in numerous other ways, such as for making tools and preparing medicines (see chapter 5).

      Coastal Douglas-fir formed the foundation for early development and commerce by Euro-American settlers in the Pacific Northwest, where a few hundred sailing ships overloaded with Douglas-fir lumber were dispatched to distant ports each year in the mid and late nineteenth century (see chapter 4). Douglas-fir continues to yield more high-quality construction lumber than any other tree in the world, and because of its superior wood qualities, it has been cultivated for timber products on six of the seven continents.

      Paradoxically, long after it became the world’s premier construction lumber, the tree’s botanical identity and common and scientific names remained in dispute because its cones and foliage were very different from any other known species at the time. And its common name continues to confound because, as described in chapter 1, Douglas-fir is actually not a true fir.

      As a research forester for the US Forest Service, I (Stephen Arno) have worked and lived among a variety of native Douglas-fir forests from the Pacific Coast to the east slope of the Rocky Mountains for more than half a century. Continually amazed at this species’ ubiquity, resilience, and usefulness to humans, I wanted to present a comprehensive profile of this world-renowned but underappreciated tree. I have collaborated with Carl Fiedler on other forestry-related books and journal articles, greatly benefiting from his contributions, so I was delighted when he agreed to join me in writing the book you now hold.

      I first became aware of Douglas-fir as a five-year-old living on Bainbridge Island, which is nestled in Puget Sound near Seattle, Washington. My first paying job was to carry slabs of thick Douglas-fir bark that drifted onto the beach up a tall wooden staircase to supply my mother with her favorite fuel for the kitchen stove. The slabs would break loose from old-growth logs banging against each other in booms (floating masses of saw logs encircled by a string of logs chained together end to end) that tugboats towed from place to place.

      Douglas-fir was by far the most familiar tree of my childhood. Over a period of a few years in the mid to late 1940s, my whole family helped my father excavate a massive old-growth Douglas-fir stump that crowded our driveway. Dad used saltpeter to speed up rot, and laboriously dug out and then chopped and hand-sawed through the huge roots. Finally he managed to jack the stump loose. Next he hired a neighbor with a World War II surplus duck, a six-wheeldrive amphibious landing craft, to pull the monster out of its pit and drag it out of the way. It then served me and my friends as a 7-foottall jungle gym.

      Later as an outdoorsy youngster, my stomping ground was on the nearby Kitsap Peninsula, on the west side of Puget Sound. The land had been scoured and compacted by an immense glacier during the last ice age, and as a result was largely covered with poor soils. Nevertheless, I observed in wonder that in most places, stumps from the original Douglas-fir forest, which had been logged a half century earlier, were commonly 4 feet or more in diameter.

      Wherever the original forest had been spared, it was dominated by craggy-barked Douglas-firs 4 to 8 feet thick and commonly more than 200 feet tall. Logging and sawmills were the mainstay of the rural economy in western Washington, and I learned that the Puget Sound mills had once loaded sailing ships with Douglas-fir lumber bound for San Francisco and other port cities. I also learned that in 1871 my grandfather, then six years old, and his extended family had sailed stormy seas from San Francisco to Puget Sound on the return voyage of a lumber schooner. According to my aunt’s historical account, grandpa was the only family member who didn’t get seasick and was thus able to help the crew and his family with chores.

      We moved to the outskirts of Bremerton on the Kitsap Peninsula in 1950. My parents bought a small house on about 120 feet of low-bank waterfront, which was inexpensive then. When one of us spotted a log from our front window floating by in the swift current, I hustled out in my 11-foot boat, tied a rope around it, and towed it to our beach. Then I cut the log up for firewood using our 6-foot crosscut saw. Known to old-time loggers as “misery whips,” this type of saw had been used for well over a century. Douglas-fir provided the best all-around firewood, so we used little else to heat our house.

      As I got older, I noticed that Douglas-fir grew almost everywhere, including on the parched rock outcrops in the rain-shadow zone northeast of the Olympic Mountains as well as in the Olympic Rain Forest, and among subalpine meadows atop mile-high Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. I’ll never forget the godsend provided by a big old Douglas-fir growing amid the cliffs of a river gorge in southeastern Olympic National Park.