Hey, Little Hawk, you know how Metchosin tells a Sitka spruce from an Engleman spruce? If she backs into the Sitka spruce, she says "Dammit!" and if she backs into the Engleman spruce she says "Goddammit!"

Down here in Texas they have stuff they call Cedar, but it's a scrub juniper. There are in fact no "true" cedar in North America, they're all in the cypress family, last time I checked.

Back in my Forest Service days I worked on several districts in the west side of the Cascades in my home state of Washington, and one of those seasons was at Verlot, north and east of Granite Falls. I did various timber-related jobs over the years, and up there they sent us out doing all sorts of stuff that seemed to involve very steep slopes and going over or around immense trees. In one instance, we were marking boundaries for a new cedar sale that was next to an existing clear cut. The wind typically will knock down some of the edge trees, giving the forest at the edge of the clearcut the look of a comb missing a few teeth. When these down trees are mature western red cedar, there's rarely a way to go over them, you have to hike all the way to one end or the other and go around it. The roots are shallow and the wads are gigantic.

I was working with two other foresters and had climbed up the steep hill to go around the root wad of a huge (probably 14' DBH at least) cedar that lay pointing downhill between several other huge still-standing cedars. I'd taken whatever measurement I was going to, then I decided I'd climb up that root wad and walk down the top of the recumbent tree, and using a limb from the standing cedar next to it, I'd do an assisted "jump" to the ground to join my coworkers.

The roots were marvelous to climb, earthy-smelling and strong, and as I moved over that edge and stepped onto the bark of the tree, grasping the outstretched limb, my feet went out from under me. Unstead of just sitting down hard on top of the log, or even falling off of the log, it was like slipping on a banana peel. I had a firm grip on the next tree's branch with my left hand, and I was like an extension of that branch as my body flew through the air for what felt like a 180 circuit of that standing tree. I flew over the tops of my coworkers heads, who stood open-mouthed in amazement as I made a perfect landing, standing upright on the duff-covered ground on the other side of the standing cedar as I let go of that branch.

"Are you done yet?" was all their amazed response. I could never repeat that in a million years, and it was a real thrill. I had a brief feeling of what it must be to be an arboreal primate. What a rush!

Western Red Cedar and some general interest and technical information about it. There's one in Olympic National Park that is 761 inches in diameter at breast high (DBH).

SRS