“This is it,” Wes Niemi tells us, and Bob Van Pelt parks the car across from a gated Weyerhaeuser road near Mount St. Helens. As Van Pelt sorts his gear in the back of the wagon, it is obvious he’s after something big. He carries two impressive–looking survey lasers (Laser Technology’s Criterion 400 and Impulse models), battery packs, tripod, camera and field book with tethered pencil.

He shoulders a thirty–five–pound tripod and laser, packs another in its case, and we head off. After a short hike along the gravel road we cut down into the woods. Niemi, a retired forester, dedicated fly fisher and part–time giant hunter, discovered our quarry today, a large Douglas–fir, on a fishing trip last fall. He made a return trip to measure it and thinks it may rank in the ten biggest Douglas–firs on the continent. Niemi has nominated two state–record trees, and Van Pelt takes this lead seriously.

Van Pelt is built like a linebacker but moves through the forest as nimbly as a ground squirrel. He currently tracks biodiversity in redwood crowns, and his canopy research, some of it 250 to 300 feet up in California’s redwoods (reached by climbing ropes), keeps him in shape. I want to ask him more about this, but he’s already well ahead.

The forest floor is strewn with downed logs and carpeted with spring–green oxalis leaves and lacy fronds of oak and lady fern. “These are all great indicators of a productive forest,” Van Pelt calls back. Soon he stops. Niemi’s tree is unmistakable, a massive Douglas–fir with a huge burl on its lower trunk and a wide, spreading crown that disappears high in the canopy.

Van Pelt immediately goes to work. We measure the tree’s diameter at breast height. After a good bit of fussing, I think we’ve got it, but he sets up his tripod and laser to level the tape. After another round of adjustments, I read the circumference: 39.8 feet. It’s more than twelve feet in diameter, but he needs to take a few more measurements, thirty–one to be exact, to get an accurate picture of the tree and see how it stacks up against the biggest in the world.

A longtime admirer of magnificent old trees, I’ve visited a number of forest giants in the West. I’ve been known to carry a scaling tape into the mossy Northwest forests where I live to see if some newly found giant approaches any of the record trees in diameter. They never do. But their craggy beauty, longevity and quiet presence always convey a note of hope—if not for my species, at least for theirs.

Whenever I have asked foresters or researchers about the largest trees they’ve found, they’ve had a single answer: “You need to talk to Bob Van Pelt.”

I met Van Pelt at a forest canopy conference several years ago. With a little prodding, he showed me drawings of some giant trees he had measured. The drawings were exquisite, finely detailed and meticulously precise. They blended art with science to capture the unique character of each tree and did so with scrupulous botanical accuracy.

Two years ago, Van Pelt published his definitive book, Forest Giants of the Pacific Coast. It is an intimate glimpse, in the author’s words, of “some of the earth’s greatest creations.”

Forest Giants includes Van Pelt’s drawings along with color photographs of the largest members of twenty major conifer species native to the West. The photographs accompany short descriptive essays, range maps and measurements, but not directions, for each tree. (“The trees are unprepared for the kind of trampling they would receive if advertised,” he says.) For the really big species—giant sequoia, coast redwood, Douglas–fir, western red cedar and Sitka spruce—the top ten contenders are profiled.

Van Pelt’s book was into its second printing by the time I caught up with him in Washington’s southern Cascades. I spotted him immediately across the cafe parking lot. He is something of a giant himself, a big, gentle, soft–spoken man with alert blue eyes and a bushy red beard.

We climbed into his Subaru wagon (license plate BIGTREZ), turned up the valley highway and drove through miles of second–growth forest. Along the way he told me how he got started sizing up giant trees. He developed a keen interest in trees on outings as a Boy Scout in the Midwest. His other boyhood passion was facts and figures. “I always had a Guinness Book of World Records nearby.” In college, the passions merged.

He had a degree in physics and was working, fittingly enough, at the Giant Forest Lodge in Sequoia National Park in the early 1980s. There he came upon a book by the dean of old–growth forest studies, Jerry Franklin.

He came north to work in Olympic National Park, encountered some record–size trees and volunteered to coordinate the Washington State Big Tree Program. When he took over, Washington had thirteen national champion trees. Today the state has almost fifty. His enthusiasm and scientific rigor helped revitalize state programs in Oregon and California as well, bringing more scientists and forest ecologists into the effort. Over the years, his passion, dedication and drive became the stuff of legend.

After moving north, Van Pelt joined Franklin’s team at the University of Washington, where he earned a doctorate in forest canopy ecology. He remains at the university, teaching and conducting postdoctoral research. All the while he continues to track down, measure, record and illustrate some of the largest trees in the world.

“We lost two of the ten largest Doug–firs since the book was published,” he says. Both died of natural causes, a root rot called velvet–top fungus. “It’s the leading cause of mortality in old Douglas–fir,” he explains, “after humans.” Van Pelt recently found a beauty in the north Cascades. It’s eight feet in diameter 140 feet up, he tells me. He is hoping for one more to fill out the ranks.

After taping off the canopy radius of today’s quarry, Van Pelt resets his tripod and takes careful, calibrated measurements up the tree. He moves and resets at several locations to get clear shots through the surrounding forest. The laser records ground elevation, distance to the tree, sighting angle, the tree’s diameter at various elevations, lean and height. With it, he can accurately calculate the volume of wood.

Van Pelt approaches his work with the exactitude of a surveyor. He calls out readings, and I record them in a bright yellow field book. “These instruments were designed for survey work,” he says, “but newer, GPS–linked models have made them obsolete for everything but measuring trees.” The thought obviously delights him.

Over the next two hours, he takes readings from six locations around the tree to get its full dimensions. At each site he sketches in details referenced to measurements. These and his photographs will guide his drawings.

The standards for determining champions in the National Big Tree Program, according to American Forests, are based on a system of points calculated by combining circumference, height and crown spread. Since these measurements are averaged, Van Pelt also tracks trees individually, singling out trees with the largest diameter, height and volume of wood. His database contains the goods on more than 5,000 trees.

I ask if this tree will make the top ten list for the species. He shakes his head. “The 100–foot measurement killed it,” he says. “It wasn’t even eight feet through.”

The final set of readings to calculate the tree’s height, 255.3 feet, taken from back down the logging road, are particularly tricky. I’m amazed at the effort that goes into this, but Van Pelt assures me this is an easy tree.

“There are a couple of trees I backpacked thirty miles overnight to measure,” he says. “One was in Yosemite, and another was in a high valley in Olympic National Park.”

Van Pelt drove more than 200,000 miles and hiked over 700 to record the 117 giants listed in his book. Many trips, like this one, didn’t yield a record tree or even a near–record. The inevitable question arises: “Why do it?”

He likes to joke, Mallory–style, “Because the trees are there.” He loves them, of course, but he also believes it is important to know species at the edge of their limits.

“I think the extremes, be they size or range—populations at the edge of their limits—have the most to tell us. This is where we need to look at a population or a species to see where it’s been and where it’s going.”

He explains that each tree species has its threshold, a height very few individuals exceed. Growing site, location, elevation, all have a bearing.

Curiously, he is much less interested in age. “Most of the trees in my book aren’t even close to the oldest of their species,” he says. “Besides, there aren’t increment bores long enough to core these trees, and I’m not convinced coring doesn’t harm them.” He explains that the oldest trees grow slowly at higher elevations where a number of diseases do not flourish. The largest western hemlocks in temperate rain forest valleys rarely reach 400 years before they succumb to any number of fungi. At higher elevations, they can reach 800 to 1,000 years.

The biggest trees are long gone. They grew on the best growing sites in lowland valleys, and they were the first to be logged. Van Pelt has examined logging records and suspects that the biggest coast redwoods were larger than giant sequoias. He mentions a redwood, cut in 1911, that yielded logs larger than the General Sherman tree, the world’s largest sequoia. A turn–of–the–century logging photograph shows a western red cedar being felled that measured seventy feet in circumference, the largest ever recorded. And there was a huge Douglas–fir in the Washington Cascades measured by two survey parties in the early 1900s at over 390 feet in height. It surpassed anything standing today.

But these early records are rare. Far better, he suggests, is checking in with the living giants still standing.

As we drove back down the Lewis River valley in evening light, I steered the conversation back to my favorite species, Douglas–fir. Van Pelt suspects that Oregon’s Coast Range once had the largest Douglas–fir and Sitka spruce in the West. The coastal valleys host the best growing conditions. But the state is poorly represented with record trees today. The coastal valleys are almost entirely in private ownership and were heavily logged. “They just nuked them,” he says.

A remnant of that kind of forest can still be found in the Quinault valley in Washington’s Olympic Mountains, where Olympic National Park and Olympic National Forest have preserved lowland coastal stands surrounding Lake Quinault. “Five of the ten largest Doug–firs are growing there,” Van Pelt says. He shakes his head, “The funny thing is, they’re not supposed to be there. That’s all Sitka spruce-western hemlock forest.”

But the biggest Douglas–fir of all, the largest member of the entire pine family, as he points out in his book, is the Red Creek tree in British Columbia. Van Pelt was first shown the tree in 1988 and returned ten years later to measure it. Just under fourteen feet in diameter, 242 feet in height, but the column of its trunk remains massive, measuring seven feet through at 144 feet off the ground.

Five years later, he is still impressed.

“British Columbia is awesome,” Van Pelt says. “And virtually unexplored.” There is something in his voice that suggests it is unlikely to stay that way for long.