You come to a small Canadian port town.  You ask around.  And you enter Wonderland, a real place beyond imagining.
    There's a place called Port Renfrew.  They have forests- forests to make those in Avatar pale in comparison.  Trees beyond belief- Trees like the Ents of Middle Earth have never seen.  This is a very special place to me, though I have only gone in photos on the Internet. Perhaps you can go- it's in Canada, on Vancouver Island, near Vancouver.  Once a logging town, tourism has so far protected many (most?) of the great Trees- including four designated Recreation Areas, at least three of which didn't exist a few years ago, and perhaps protected the great unprotected forest as well simply through Tourism.  Hopefully the whole area will be protected soon in a Provincial Park- protecting the much larger area around here would create a World Heritage-worthy Park or Biosphere Reserve!  This is one of the most remarkable of several places to enter into this other world.
     In one direction is a forest place along the San Juan River.  The protected area is small, and yet vast- once you are in it, this small area surrounds you.  You can stop and rest, look around, hike, and explore in a forest world beyond our own.  Immense, otherworldly mossy Bigleaf Maples are all around.  Huge Trees beyond belief are to be descovered.  At the heart of it you will find the San Juan Spruce- a twelve-foot-wide, at least 200 foot tall Sitka Spruce whose trunk barely tapers, drenched in moss, as it streches to the sky.  The trunk quickly splits into a smaller 'branch' trunk wider than most very big Trees and a what... ten-foot-wide? perhaps? main Trunk which just keeps reaching for the sky, seemingly never getting narrower.  Otherworldly mossy Maples of immense size are nearby.  This is just one small area.
     Further down a wild, unpaved 4x4 road- from what I hear, locals will gladly take you there for a little money- is a larger, though still small, protected area.  In the direction of the winds, following Red Creek, it's about a kilometer long.  Maybe you've heard of the Red Creek Fir.  There are hiking trails, and one leads to her.  Along the way, in incredible moss-drenched Forest, are three Western Red Cedars of near-Redwood size and great beauty.  The Forest is as amazing as the Trees.  These are the Three Sisters Cedars.  When you reach the Red Creek Fir...  well, she's beyond belief.  Like a Coast Redwood, but otherworldly in a way only a Douglas Fir can be.  Shaggy Forest all around.  She's a full fourteen feet across and towers some 242 feet into the air to a broken top.  Trees of her size often have broken tops.  The biggest Sequoias and Douglas Firs usually do.  She is some seven feet wide 144 feet in the air- wide enough to hide a small flying car!
     Closer to town, to the North rather than the East, is Avatar Grove.  Enter the deep Forest like you would never believe.  Every stretch of Old Growth Forest has its own character, even in the photos that take me there, and Avatar Grove certainly does.  The movie Avatar might pale in comparison.
                    Big Trees are all around- Trees like no other.  Douglas Fir, Sitka Spruce... but mostly Arborvitae- that is, Western Red Cedar.  Both graceful and bizarre, the queen of this unique region is the Avatar Tree, or Canada's Gnarliest Tree.  Tapering gracefully from a huge base to a fairly straight, still hugely wide upper Trunk, all feminine curves, with huge, gorgeous, truly Gnarly Burls- round knots of wood out of which new branches could grow if she blew down above them.  Huge Burls, larger than a Grizzly Bear, the largest some twelve feet across!
     Who knows what other wonders are here?  And beautiful beaches with still other stretches of Forest nearby, and sometimes Whales in the water!  For more, search Port Renfrew, Avatar Grove, San Juan Spruce and Red Creek Fir, and for more on these Old Growth Temperate Rainforests, including places to visit, view or download my book for free as a .txt file on my main website- it's Big Trees, Epic Life- Life in the Temperate Rainforest, and my main page is sites.google.com/site/davidannfreestories, or just google 'davidannfreestories', all one word.  Spread my stories to whoever you want to, or post them on a website- I wish I had an easier way to give you my stories... but it's all for free on my main website!  And don't forget to search and image-search Temperate Rainforest... there's a lot out there!
                              David S. Annderson