And there is likely one closer than you think.

I almost miss the inconspicuous brown sign on the side of the North Cascades Highway, which passes through Washington state’s famous mountain range, and nearly drive right past Rockport State Park. When I pull into the lot on a clear spring Saturday, only two other cars are here.

But as I meet the first of the park’s colossal Douglas firs, their hulking, wrinkled trunks alive like enormous elephants, I realize that the only fleeting, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it apparition in this ancient forest is me. Here, among 670 preserved acres, all the organisms collaborate in harmony as they’ve done for countless generations. Saplings sprout from fallen logs, slugs meander across dying leaves, and spongy moss covers the earth, muffling my footsteps.

The dense canopy above me—western red cedars, western hemlocks, and those firs, some more than 400 years old and as tall as 250 feet—protects this enchanted world from overexposure to wind, rain, and sun. As I feel my surroundings heave with untold layers of life, death, and regeneration, I catch a whiff of sweet and earthy humus, that damp smell of deteriorating twigs, leaves, and other plant matter on the loamy floor.

I’ve traveled about 100 miles north of Seattle, where I relocated after leaving New York City last year, to visit one of the state’s last remaining old-growth forests. It’s set about 50 miles inland, in the shadow of 5,400-foot-high Sauk Mountain. I’m looking for a peace of mind that I’ve come to rely upon during the pandemic. On almost-daily walks in the woods around Seattle, which has an impressive 28% canopy cover, I’ve found respite from the uncertainty of the past year.

My strolls in the city led me to fantasize about longer trips to commune with trees. The Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park, with its dreamscape of moss-covered Sitka spruces and big-leaf maples, was only a four-hour drive away. And in an old Seattle Times article, I stumbled upon Rockport, an undisturbed sylvan kingdom of centuries-old trees, harboring bald eagles, ospreys, four kinds of woodpeckers, and two species of owls. A visceral urge compelled me to jump in my car to go luxuriate in the living history beneath these enduring stands.

The mental benefits of being surrounded by trees are well documented, particularly in Japan. There the practice is called shinrin yoku, or forest bathing; the term was coined in the 1980s when the country’s urban populations were experiencing the negative pressures of burnout in a booming economy. Decades later, shinrin yoku is still promoted by the government—and even prescribed by doctors—as a way to mitigate the effects of stress. Research from organizations including the U.S. National Institutes of Health has also shown that trees release antibacterial and antifungal phytoncides into the air, possibly boosting the immune system.

For me there is a magic to being in Washington’s wooded areas and particularly its old-growth forests, which have become endangered because of aggressive logging along the West Coast. They’re like primeval portals into another age, reaffirming our infinitesimal place in the world.

The phrase “old-growth forest” was coined by ecologists in the ’70s, though the habitats can also be called “primary” or “virgin” forests. Generally the terms are used to describe woodlands that have been undisturbed for more than a century, resulting in a complex ecosystem that’s far more biodiverse than younger second-growth forests. But that minimum age varies with climate, species makeup, fire cycles, and other factors. (The ecological cycle of forests in the West generally includes a periodic clearing by naturally occurring wildfires. But with unprecedented fires in the western U.S. in recent years, more than half the acres burned annually can be attributed to climate change and human influence.)

“Old-growth forests are teeming with biodiversity,” says Shyla Raghav, Conservation International’s leading climate change expert. “In many ways they are irreplaceable.”

They can be vast expanses such as the 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest in Alaska, or they can be smaller stands like Rockport State Park, which is about the size of Monaco. Off the southern coast of Japan’s Kyushu, Yakushima Island’s rainforest is filled with moss-covered sugi (Japanese cedar), many of which are more than 1,000 years old. In Australia’s Daintree Rainforest, which at 180 million years is the world’s oldest tropical forest, a vine- and waterfall-filled landscape is home to plant species such as the flowering idiot fruit, with its unassuming white petals concealing toxic seeds capable of killing a cow. Its earliest fossil records date back 120 million years—twice as old as the Tyrannosaurus rex.

North America has the world’s largest contiguous temperate rainforests, which start in Alaska and reach all the way down to Northern California. Scientists who study the region have found that while their massive elder Douglas firs, cedars, and giant redwoods become less efficient at processing carbon as they age, they can still store more of it per acre than the Amazon rainforest. That’s because their growth accelerates with time, translating into more leaves and trunk mass that absorb carbon and prevent erosion of the soil, itself another crucial vehicle for carbon storage.

Yet many of these places are threatened rather than protected. They’ve been cleared down to 5% of their original volume since pre-European settlement; in the eastern U.S., that number is 1%. Since 1900, forests older than 140 years have declined in size by 30% because of such factors as deforestation and climate change, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Science. In Europe the preservation of Poland and Belarus’s 548-square-mile Bialowieza Forest, where the world’s largest population of European bison lives, is a rare success; across the continent, most ancient forests have been wiped out, a startling reality that’s given rise to the nascent rewilding movement.

Alaska’s Tongass, the largest national forest in the U.S. and home to such indigenous groups as the Haida people, captures 8% of the total carbon stored in American woodlands. Last year, though, the Trump administration reversed a protection to open up more than 9 million acres to road construction and timber harvesting. Democratic lawmakers, along with conservation groups Alaska Wilderness League and Sierra Club, are working to reverse that move and protect carbon-dense forests such as Tongass as part of America’s long-term climate strategy. Raghav, of Conservation International, is similarly advocating for financial incentives to support these areas’ guardians—largely, local and indigenous communities.

None of these places has typically been a tourism hot spot, but the desire for outdoor adventure in the past year has stoked a new awareness about them. During the pandemic, custom outfitter Black Tomato reports rising interest in forest trips and has been getting more inquiries about places such as Nimmo Bay in British Columbia’s primeval Great Bear Rainforest.

Cari Gray, founder of U.S.-based adventure outfitter Gray & Co., says people generally want to spend more time in nature. Despite U.S. national parks experiencing a 28% drop in visitation because of Covid-related closures in 2020, 15 parks still set visitor records. Interest in old-growth forests, Gray says, “will only grow once people become more aware of them and realize how rare they are.”

Raising awareness is central to the mission of Joan Maloof, a professor emeritus at Salisbury University in Maryland who in 2012 founded the Old-Growth Forest Network, not only to protect existing and potential old-growth forests in the U.S. but also to make them accessible to all. Her nonprofit group aims to identify, protect, and promote at least one forest in most of the U.S.’s 3,000-plus counties. To date it has designated 118 of them in 111 counties, often within easy reach of an urban community, including the 50-acre, oak-filled Thain Family Forest in the Bronx’s New York Botanical Garden.

“Because most trees live much, much longer than humans, saving forests is a multigenerational effort,” Maloof says, adding that the only way to foster a generation of stewards is to “make it easy for young people to visit forests and build a relationship with them.”

Her point resonates with me. Even as a lifelong nature lover who’s traveled everywhere from the savannas of East Africa to the jungles of the Peruvian Amazon, I was still learning how to fully appreciate the singular old-growth forests in my own backyard.

Maloof says there’s usually a good story behind every preserved patch of trees, so I’ve begun looking them up. I’ve discovered that a timber company sold what’s now known as Rockport to Washington state in 1935 for a dollar and that the state parks system acquired it in 1961. In South Whidbey State Forest, a 381-acre area on Puget Sound’s largest island, residents wrapped themselves around a 500-year-old western red cedar in the ’70s to save it from being logged.

On a sunny spring morning, I go on a hike through Seattle’s 300-acre Seward Park, a rare example of an old-growth forest sitting right in the center of a major city. It was sold by private owners to Seattle in 1911 as part of an urban landscape plan laid out by the Olmsted brothers, whose father masterminded New York’s Central Park. Today, Seward offers a glimpse at what Puget Sound looked like not even 200 years ago, when the Coast Salish people were the area’s primary residents before the arrival of White settlers.

As I ponder this among the towering stands, I’m startled by what I think is nearby urban construction noise. But then I discover the culprit above me. A crimson-headed pileated woodpecker, which dwells exclusively in large, old trees, is at work on a hollowed-out trunk, the noise from its long beak ricocheting like the din of a jackhammer. The only evidence of the modern world here is me, and I’ll be gone in the blink of an eye.