[hinkley]

I think part of the problem here is just lack of age. If fully grown western red cedar falls, it will strike other trees, knocking them down or shearing them off on one side, weakening one of those and potentially setting up a game of dominoes that takes three centuries to play out.

That cedar will lie on the forest floor for decades, hardly decaying (or rather, it would if we stopped meddling). No new cedars will grow in that spot quickly, but hemlock may root on the side of the trunk, fifteen feet off the ground in the moss. Between the precarious perch and hemlock being hemlock, that tree will die in turn, creating a new opening that might contain cedar again.