The Coastal Rainforest of Giant Spruce

Step off the beach and into the forest above Cannon Beach, and you enter a genuine temperate rainforest. The headlands of Ecola State Park receive roughly eighty inches of rain a year, and along the coast some spots take in over one hundred inches, feeding one of the densest concentrations of living matter, per acre, of any ecosystem on Earth. The giants here are Sitka spruce.

Some are more than two hundred years old, with buttressed trunks eight feet across, their bark draped in curtains of bright green moss, licorice fern, and pale lungwort lichen. Sitka spruce are picky. Unlike most conifers, they need moisture through the summer, so they grow only in the narrow coastal fog belt, where the ocean's breath keeps the air damp even in dry months.

Beneath them, western hemlock rises, and the ground is a nearly impenetrable tangle of sword fern, salal, salmonberry, and Oregon grape. Move quietly and you may see Roosevelt elk grazing in a clearing or a bald eagle riding the wind above the canopy. This is what much of the Oregon coast looked like before the loggers came, a cathedral of trees fed by fog and rain.