Vandal Fells ‘Golden Spruce’ Sacred To Tribe Loggers, Indians Put Aside Differences To Salvage Rare Tree Attacked By Misfit

For Haida Indians on British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands, the tree known as the “Golden Spruce” was a sacred symbol of their continuity as a people. According to legend, it would stand until the last generation of the tribe.

For the white inhabitants of Port Clements, the 300-year-old conifer rising near the settlement was simply a wonder of nature - and mainstay of the local tourist economy - towering 164 feet, its trunk more than 6 feet thick at the base.

But the magic of the soaring Sitka was in its unsprucelike hue: A rare genetic anomaly caused it to produce needles that shimmered golden in the sun. Visitors came from around the world to marvel.

Then, last week, a misfit with a grudge against “university professionals” and “genetic freaks of nature” felled the forest giant with a chain saw, boasting of his midnight work in a flurry of faxes that led to his arrest.

Inhabitants of the remote string of islands are still reeling from the loss, none more so than the Haida.

“It is like the death of a revered elder,” said Guukjaaw, a tribal leader who uses just one name. “We feel the absence like the absence of a beloved friend - a painful emptiness to be filled with tears.”

Ceremonies mourning the tree will be held Saturday. But the Golden Spruce may rise again.

Its roots and base are still living, and scientists and foresters are attempting to graft branches from the tree onto the base, in hopes that at least one graft will take hold and yield a growing Sitka.

The greatest question is whether the graft will carry the precise genetic code that gave the spruce its rare color. Grafting procedures are fairly straightforward, but past attempts have failed to produce a spruce with golden needles.

The destruction of the beloved spruce has made odd allies of the Haida and the big logging company MacMillan Bloedal, which has clearcut much of the islands and for years has been embroiled in rancorous disputes with Indians over timber rights.

The company’s foresters have retrieved hundreds of branch tips from the fallen tree - which stood in virgin forest on MacMillan Bloedal property - and are splicing them to nursery spruces so that some of the tree’s genetic material will survive even if the more ambitious attempt to graft to the original trunk does not succeed.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have arrested a 48-year-old transient named Grant Hadwin and charged him with malicious mischief, which could result in six months’ imprisonment and a $2,000 fine. The case is scheduled to be heard in court on April 22 - Earth Day.

The faxes, which were traced to Hadwin, described the tree as a “freak … pet plant.”

The author boasted of swimming across the frigid Yakoun River with a chain saw on his back to butcher the tree as a way “of expressing my rage and hatred toward university professionals and their supporters whose ideas, ethics, denials, part truths, attitudes, etc., appear to be responsible for most of the abominations toward amateur life.”

Haida legend holds that the Golden Spruce contains the spirit of a boy named Kiidkayyaas, who fled the village of Juskatla, near present-day Port Clements, after the Creator sent a deadly snowstorm to punish its people.

His grandfather admonished him not to look back, but Kiidkayyaas did, and for this his feet turned into roots and he became the Golden Tree.