It may not have the girth and renown of Stanley Park’s Hollow Tree but Dave and Nola Menzies think a centuries-old cedar stump on Burke Mountain is worth saving as development encroaches ever closer.
Dave Menzies, 77, found the stump when he was exploring the woods near the couple’s Burke Mountain home, where they’ve lived since the 1970s. The retired firefighter and fire inspector makes frequent forest forays with his metal detector to root out artifacts from the mountain’s logging past, hiking along old, grown-over trails that were once used by shake-splitters for transporting cedar logs.
It was along just such a trail he encountered the big old hollow stump, its interior charred likely decades ago from — Dave Menzies surmises — a forest fire that swept across the mountain in 1914. The trunk of the tree fell over and was absorbed into the forest floor years ago, possibly weakened by the fire, as he can find no evidence that it had been logged.
Dave recalled his first impression of the stump, which is big enough that up to 10 people could stand in its hollowed interior: “I was in awe."
Over the years, he and his wife have brought their children and grandchild to visit the stump and marvel at its history.
Dave Menzies estimates the stump could be 500 years old — maybe as old as 1,000 years — and it probably soared 200 or 300 feet into the air at the peak of its health.
“You don’t get to see them this close anymore,” he said. “I can sense it has the history.”
But its days may be numbered.
Developers are moving into the area. Roads have been built, trees have been tagged. The wild mountain is being tamed by subdivisions of expansive homes.
“Everything is just turning into progress,” said Nola Menzies, 75.
She’d like to see the stump saved, protected from the march of bulldozers through the woods or maybe even uprooted and moved to where it can become an educational monument to what the mountain once was.
“It’s real, it’s natural,” she said.
But first, people have to know about it, which is why the Menzies have pulled on their gumboots and stomped across the loamy, rain-saturated forest floor to show it to a reporter.
Said Dave Menzies, peering up through the hollowed stump towards the sky: "This is amazing."
