On the slopes of Mt. Elphinstone, above the Sunshine Coast town of Gibsons, there is a Douglas fir the Shíshálh people call p'élán-ay. It established itself around 1540 CE — roughly a century before European contact reached these shores — and it has been accumulating carbon, structure, and ecological function ever since.
The tree stands 195 centimetres in diameter at breast height. Its top broke off decades ago, truncating what was probably a 70-metre crown at 42 metres. That break transformed it. The shattered apex became a platform for epiphytes, a hunting perch for raptors, a cavity nursery for cavity nesters. The wound that would kill a younger tree made this one more alive.
The Capture
In June 2022, Emergent Layer's field team spent six days on the slopes with a RIEGL VZ-400i terrestrial LiDAR scanner, co-producing the capture with Shíshálh stewards. The result was 2.4 billion georeferenced points — a sub-centimetre record of the tree and the 1,240-acre grove surrounding it. Three months later, Snowline Ecological Research returned to core the tree dendrochronologically, confirming the 1540 CE establishment date and a growth history that spans the Columbian Exchange, the fur trade, and the industrial logging of the Coast.
The grove now exists as a LiDAR point cloud precise enough to measure bark texture and stand structure. The public record is the scan itself: a measured point cloud, methods notes, and calibration context that can be inspected in the browser.
Proposed Park Expansion
Elphinstone Logging Focus / Trails and Research describes the lower slopes of Mt. Elphinstone as a long-running land-use conflict: an existing provincial park and surrounding OGMAs sit inside a much larger working forest landscape where intact stands, recreation trails, water-source protection, and proposed cutblocks overlap. ELF's proposed park expansion is intended to pull key remaining forests into a larger protected area rather than leave them as isolated patches between clearcuts.
The scan location sits inside that context. ELF's public materials identify nearby Wilson Creek Forest as an inter-urban, never-logged forest on the lower slopes of Mt. Elphinstone, directly above the Wilson Creek community area, with old-growth features including tall coastal Douglas-firs. ELF also describes the Wilson Creek forest as the last large intact forest in the Wilson Creek watershed and a key western forest within the proposed Mt. Elphinstone Provincial Park expansion boundary.
The park-expansion argument is not only about old trees. ELF points to watershed stability, recreation, community-interface risk, and cumulative clearcutting on the lower slopes. Their materials note that the Ministry of Forests' Community Interface Zone above Roberts Creek closely matches the proposed expansion area — a sign that the province has already recognized overlapping logging, recreation, environmental, and water-source values in this landscape.
The Campaign
Elphinstone Logging Focus has been advocating for the permanent protection of these forests through the Mt. Elphinstone Provincial Park expansion proposal. That campaign is ongoing. The LiDAR capture is a tool for that campaign — not an art object, not a retrospective. It is a measured record for a fight that has not yet been decided.
The Shíshálh Nation holds the broader territorial relationship with this land. Their stewardship shapes every aspect of how this capture is used, shared, and governed. All data is CC-BY-SA 4.0 — free to download, cite, and use — subject to the Indigenous Data Sovereignty protocols the Nation has established for sites on their territory.
The tree is still standing. The campaign is still active. The archive will outlast both of us.