Kalaloch Tree of Life
— the tree the tide keeps trying to take.
Not only on a wall.
“A Sitka spruce on the bluff above Kalaloch Creek. The roots cross open air where the bank used to be, over a cave dug out by storm and tide where the creek meets the Pacific. The tree keeps growing. The locals call it the Tree of Life. The Pacific is a short walk through driftwood behind it, the lodge a few minutes' walk south. Worth the walk on a low grey afternoon, when the cave goes dark and the canopy stays green.
Kalaloch Tree of Life, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The tree stands on a small bluff above Kalaloch Creek on the Pacific edge of Olympic National Park, about 35 miles south of Forks, Washington. The site is a short walk north from the Kalaloch Lodge on US Route 101, between the lodge and the campground. Olympic National Park covers about 922,650 acres of the peninsula, holding rainforest, alpine country, and 73 miles of wild coast. The tree is on the coastal strip. Park rangers ask visitors not to climb on the roots; the bank under it is unstable and the tree's survival is not guaranteed. The Quinault Indian Nation's reservation begins a few miles south.
Two waters meet here. Kalaloch Creek runs down to the Pacific through a small cut in the bluff, and the high tide pushes back into the same notch. Over decades the combination has hollowed out a cave under the spruce's root mass. The roots now span the opening like ribs. Annual rainfall on the Olympic coastal strip averages about 100 inches, most of it between October and April, and the Pacific here works through a tidal range of roughly nine feet. Storms in the winter take more bank each year. The tree keeps living because Sitka spruce roots will graft and feed each other where they touch.
The Olympic coast holds its own weather. Fog comes off the Pacific in long slow banks and stays for hours; the temperature stays close to the water temperature most of the year, in the high forties and low fifties Fahrenheit. The spruce canopy is grey-green with epiphytic moss and lichen because the air is wet enough to feed plants on bark. Salt comes in on the wind. The smell on the bluff is sea wrack, cedar resin, and the cold mineral note of the creek. Best visited in the hour before low tide, in any month except midsummer when the lot is full.