We did a few hikes this trip through dense old growth rain forest. Big century old trees, Douglas Fir and Cedar, occasional outbreaks of Large Leaf Maple and Alder. The understory is heavy with bushy clumps of Sword Fern or mixtures of the green shiny leaves of Salal and Mahonia. Down here on the ground, hiking through the ancient forest, you see prime examples of natural recycling. When the trees get too big, they fall over and become planters for the next generation. Everywhere are big trees that have grown out of the fallen decayed logs and stumps of previous giants.
And something about this is so familiar….. I have seen all of this before. Long before I ever came to the Pacific Northwest. There is some anticipation lurking in the back of my mind, waiting to spring forward. Whenever I turn a corner I expect to see something magnificent and alien. What is it?
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| Planter Trees |
I was having these thoughts as we walked through the predominantly Cedar forest on the edge of Lake Crescent on the North side of the Olympic National Forest. We had been staying for a few days on the North coast of the lake at the parks Log Cabin Resort. We had driven over to the south side of the lake to see the historic lodge there (very nice) and to park at the trailhead for the popular hike to Marymere falls. We had hiked about a half mile from the 101 underpass when there was this “Wooosh” noise and a bright light off in the forest. We pushed ahead cautiously, and there in a large stand of Doug Fir we found what my brain had been telling me must be here someplace….. A Stargate.
This shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, of course, everyone knows that the ancients put most of the Stargates around the galaxy in the middle of large forested planets that look identical to the Pacific NorthWest. The trees are all Doug Fir and Cedar. The ferns are all Sword Fern. And they are everywhere on ever inhabited planet across the galaxy. P3X-774, for instance. This the planet of the Nox and even though it was settled by them before the Ancients built the stargates, they still have vegetation that looks just like the trees and ferns in my backyard. Their hair may be blue, but their mahonia berries are red. And how about P3X-403, the original home of the Unas? Even though the Unas were primitive and the first hosts of the ga-uld, they still had a nice Pacific Northwest forest to live in.
Stargate after Stargate the SGC team under the command of Colonel Oneil would step through the artifically created wormhole and end up in some forest looking just like the Olympic Forest. The Colonel even remarked on it once saying “The Universe certainly has a lot of trees”. Yes it does.
The reason for this proliferation of simularity across the galaxy is, I believe, the universal truth that the Pacific Northwest is the perfect climate to live in. Because of this, life mimced this perfectness everywhere, and the ancients would just plop down a stargate there because they liked to go for long walks through the ancient and majestic groves. Now some philistines might say that the real reason is that the SG1 tv show was filmed in Vancouver BC and they realized that this sort of forest would look Alien to most of the people in the United states (save those from Seattle and Portland), but I don't fall in with such conspiracy theorists.
This stargate doesn’t seem to have a DHD so we won’t be activating it to travel around the country (a shame, I have memorized most of the Abados cartouche) so I guess we will just be continuing our walk to the Marymere falls. They turn out to be just on the other side of the river we have been following and then up a steep trail another hundred yards or so to this lovely little side creek fall tumbling down out of the Olympic Mountains.
Ok, and I admit that not all of these pictures came from our Marymere falls hike and our cabin at Lake Crescent.
A few came from our walk out to Big Cedar Tree.
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