The drive to the half-mile Doerner Fir Trail is what has put me off visiting in the past. It’s in the middle of a hiking desert, up miles of winding forest roads on BLM territory in the Coast Range north of Highway 42 between Winston and Coos Bay. However, the journey was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, with the road surfaces paved except for the last 4 ½ miles. When you leave the Coos Bay Wagon Road, a sign tells you the roads are “not maintained in winter.” Indeed, I was lucky to arrive after a spate of winter cleanup, as there were numerous areas where fallen trees had been cleared and one spot where a slide had been cleaned up. The only vehicle I saw was a logging truck. The last unpaved section of the route, where there’s the only sign you’ll see about the Doerner Fir, was still strewn with minor debris and got a little confusing as there were several newly graveled, unsigned logging roads spinning off in the last mile and half. At the trailhead are a vault toilet and a picnic table.
The trail itself has not been maintained since the winter storms, so there were a few trees to climb over and a particularly dense tangle down near the first creek. Several big trees along the way grab your attention. Others, perhaps once taller than the Doerner Fir, lie on their sides and nurse future generations of hemlocks, which are filling the understory. You first see the Doerner Fir across a ravine, and it looks neither spectacular nor particularly taller than some of its neighbors. One has to admire the discernment of those who discovered it and decided it was worth measuring. The trail crosses a small creek and ends up right at the tree, which you can easily touch across a split-rail fence. The plaque that had been placed here has disappeared.
The Doerner Fir, originally known as the Brummit Fir after the nearby creek, was renamed for Ray Doerner, a Douglas County commissioner and BLM employee. The tree was first measured in 1989. Looking up at the canopy, a lot of what you see is the tall thin cedar, perhaps 200 feet tall, that is growing right next to it. The top thirty feet or so of the fir is dead. Although the tree should continue grow in girth for decades, it may not get much taller and when the dead part snaps off, the record will go to another Douglas-fir.
Other Douglas-firs were taller than this one, and there are many still standing that are wider in diameter (the Doerner Fir is 11 ½ feet) and more massive in volume. A fir logged in Washington state in 1897 was said to be 465 feet tall, 80 feet taller than the tallest measured redwood! A more reliable measurement exists of the Mineral Tree, 393 feet in height and thus taller than Hyperion, the current champion redwood. A section of the Mineral Tree, which fell in a windstorm, can be seen at the Wind River Arboretum in Washington. Some discussion revolves around the premise that Douglas-firs were actually the tallest trees that ever lived.
