'Grove of the Matriarchs': Centuries-Old Trees Thrive Off the Beaten Path in Gifford Pinchot

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John Squires unfolds a map until it covers a table, spilling over the edges, and traces his finger along the capillaries of roads winding through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

It’s somewhere off of Forest Road 25, he says, or is it 23? Tracking south, about 20 miles into the forest from U.S. Highway 12, he’s got the general location. But the intersection we’re looking for with another little-used forest road is nowhere on the map. We move to a computer, where I open a comprehensive database of Forest Service land. Scroll down, he says. No, back up.

We’re sitting in the Packwood Timberland Library, and Squires is trying to show me where to find the “Grove of the Matriarchs.” It’s a well-kept secret, this stand of ancient trees that he says he hasn’t visited in years. When he first told me about the spot, I thought he was referring to the Grove of the Patriarchs, the famous trees in Mount Rainier National Park with a spacious parking lot and a well-traveled boardwalk to guide hordes of tourists to their millenium-old hideout. 

But no, that doesn’t seem like Squires’ kind of hike. His family goes back generations in Packwood, and today he’s sporting a fraying, dirt-stained sweatshirt and a camo hat as he looks over my shoulder at the map. He puts a hand on his bushy white beard, moves it up to adjust his glasses. John Squires seems to know the sorts of things they don’t tell you at the ranger station.

For example, how to find a hidden grove of trees that predates the United States, growing up from swampy muck near the intersection of two forest roads.

“There!” he says, pointing. “I think that’s the spot.”

One road branches off from another, forming a crooked, upside-down Y. On the map, they’re both simply labeled with four-digit numbers. The sliver between them, an afterthought of pixels the same shade of green as the rest of the map, harbors some of the oldest trees in the national forest. Or so Squires says.

Over the next week, I ask a trio of current and former Forest Service employees if they’ve ever heard of this grove. They all plead ignorance. If the Grove of the Matriarchs exists, it seems that Squires discovered and named it himself. 

By now, there’s nothing left to do but go on a scavenger hunt. I open Google Maps to find directions; it takes me several minutes to relocate the spot. I tell my girlfriend Mandy about my latest quest.

“When are we going?” she asks.

I pitch the story to my editor, making a convincing case. 

“There’s these big trees that may or may not exist. There aren’t any trails out there, but I’ve got the spot on the map where this guy thinks he remembers seeing them. Can I go?”

Somehow, she doesn’t roll her eyes, and I leave her office before she can change her mind.

Thursday morning, Mandy and I head east, driving out from the soupy fog that’s set in over Centralia and into brilliant sunshine as we approach the mountains. We turn south from Randle and follow a forest road’s narrow corridor through the trees. On this bright day, shafts of sun blaze like stage lights in the narrow windows where they slip between the tree cover. 

We drive past various campgrounds and trailheads, but there are few other cars to be seen on this October weekday. Finally, GPS tells us we’ve reached the spot, and we cross paths with a logging truck heading up from the dirt road that marks the intersection. We keep driving until we find a spot along the road that’s open enough to park. 

From here, we’re on our own. We walk back along the pavement, discovering the two-tracks of a long-disused road veering off into the woods. The opening takes us in the general direction of the creek we know is below, and we follow it down. Saplings are growing up from the soil, and a ring of stones remains from someone’s campfire. Clearly, no vehicle has been down here in years. 



The two-track splits, and we follow the path on the left, the low road, until the creek comes into view. We make our way through bottomland filled with alders, finally opening into the sunlight as we reach the gravel bar of the waterway. Leaving a cairn to help us find our way back, we hang a left and follow the creek downstream, knowing the water leads roughly back to the intersection of the roads. 

For awhile, the open gravel bar offers an easy path, and the creek-carved corridor serves as our trail. At a turn, though, the bank comes up to the water’s edge, with a tangle of foliage and logs making further passage difficult. The other side of the creek looks more open, but I’m pretty certain the big trees — if they’re out there — are on this side of the water.

Even with the open view afforded by the creek bed, the dense growth in the foreground closes in too quickly to get any sense of whether any behemoths are hiding in the interior. We can’t see the trees for the forest.

Keeping to the left side of the creek, we make our way up and over the bank, and start to pick our way slowly through the obstacle course. Ankle-grabbing vines, sopping wet ferns, half-rotten trees — horizontal and still a chest-high climb. Life seems to spring from every centimeter of this Pacific Northwest forest, and travel without a trail is a tedious, arms-and-legs endeavor. 

Climbing over a criss-cross of several fallen trees, I see our path ahead is through a floor of muck. Squires had told me the grove was in a swampy area — could this be it? We step down and go ankle deep into the ooze, which tries to wrest off our shoes every time we pick up our feet. It’s slow going, the obstacles no less dense here in the mud. 

I look left and gasp. Not 100 feet away is the biggest tree I’ve ever seen outside of the redwood forests of California. It’s a cedar, wide enough to make its neighbors look like matchsticks. It takes us several minutes to walk over to the tree, where we find firm ground beneath its moss-covered flanks. 

Writer Timothy Egan describes these forests as having “trunks as wide as garage doors,” and he’s not exaggerating. I’m glad Mandy has tagged along; it takes another human to get a sense of this tree’s scale, a Saturn V rocket covered in bark. We put our hands on the trunk of an organism that has been thriving since before the Revolutionary War, that was already old when Lewis and Clark started heading this direction.

I’ve neglected to bring a tape measure, but this cedar looks to be a dozen feet or more in diameter. We decide to use the metric really big. Looking up, we see a tangle of branches swooping down, draped with beards of moss. The tree is swallowed up by the canopy before the top is visible. 

The bark is reddish when it’s in shadow, silvery where stripes of sunlight play their way across the trunk. A skirt of moss reaches up from the soil.

We move on through the vibrant green of the forest floor, the leaves of the more ground-proximate plants brightening in their intermittent interplay with the sun. Steam rises from wet leaves and mossy logs, ghostly when it catches the light. We find another cedar, not quite as big as its cousin, but equally majestic. 

Mandy stays below to look for mushrooms, but I bushwack my way to the top of a hill, where I find the knoll hosting three or four more massive trees. Up here, the ground is more open, so I can easily walk from one to another. A fir rises up in a small opening in the canopy, isolated enough that I can see all the way to its top, perhaps 200 feet above the forest floor. 

As Mandy hikes up to join me, I find a trio of giants that has grown up in close proximity. Standing within that dark triangle, it feels like being at the bottom of an elevator shaft. The canopy opens up enough to see more tall treetops ahead, so we keep moving, stopping in a dry creek bed to examine the golden carpet left by an aptly named bigleaf maple. Mandy identifies a thistle with the guidebook she’s brought along. 

We’re walking up on a giant fir when we realize we’re just feet from the road. We could have seen this tree on our drive in, had we known where to look. This whole time, we’ve probably never strayed more than a quarter-mile from the pavement, but it feels like we’ve been much further away. I realize our distance from civilization hasn’t been measured in miles, but in centuries. It’s easy to forget the beer cans littering the roadside after you claw your way into a neighborhood that’s been mostly undisturbed for ages.

No doubt these woods have rung with the whine of chainsaws — we see several massive stumps on our way out — but somehow a few trees in this pocket have escaped the fate of their neighbors, have escaped the Disneyland parade of tourists that gawk at Mount Rainier’s ancients every day.

And so the logging trucks roll past, and the hikers Instagram elsewhere, and the trees down by the creek mind their own business, isolated not by distance but terrain. No one will visit these trees tomorrow, and our afternoon among them will be a glancing blip amid centuries of afternoons in peace. For us, though, those few hours in their presence feels like much longer. It’s jarring to return to the car, to head toward town. Before we know it, we’re back in Randle, then on our way to Centralia. 

Reaching the Grove of the Matriarchs doesn’t take long. It takes ages.