The late, great tree, Kiidk'yaas.

In 1997, Canadian forest engineer Grant Hadwin was unemployed but not unindustrious. That was bed news for a unique tree in British Columbia dubbed “Kiidk’yaas,” the only Golden Spruce in the world. In some sort of misguided political protest against the logging industry, Hadwin stealthily felled the tree and shocked a nation. The almost-mythical Hadwin, a seemingly indestructible man who was known for taking swims outdoors when temperatures reached 35 below, was the subject of John Baillant‘s excellent 2002 New Yorker article, “The Golden Bough.” An excerpt:

“Hadwin was well known for outdoing his co-workers. Paul Bernier, a longtime colleague and close friend of his, told me, ‘He was in the best condition of any man I’ve ever seen.’ Bernier was with Hadwin when he outwitted a pair of charging grizzly bears by dodging across a stream and feinting upwind, where they couldn’t smell him. In addition to consuming prodigious quantities of chewing tobacco, Hadwin was known for buying vodka by the case and going on spectacular binges that, even in freezing weather, would leave him unconscious in the back of his vintage Studebaker pickup or passed out in a snow-filled ditch, dressed only in slacks and shirtsleeves. There was a local joke: ‘Look, that snowbank is moving. Must be Grant.’

Early photographs of Hadwin show a fine-boned, handsome man, slightly less than six feet tall and built like a distance runner. People who knew him during his Gold Bridge days likened his lean, sharp-eyed appearance and remote manner to Clint Eastwood’s. Quiet and courteous though Hadwin usually was, he possessed an almost tangible intensity, a piercing, in-your-face conviction that some found alarming. ‘He always had to be the best, had to be first,’ his Aunt Barbara recalled. ‘It always had to be Grant’s way. There was never any room for compromise.'”