SEASIDE – The remains of Clatsop County’s nationally famous Sitka spruce tree will be preserved as a “nurse log” to potentially spawn future Sitka giants. An estimated 100,000 visitors saw the centuries-old tree each year at Klootchy Creek County park southeast of Seaside, off U.S. Highway 26.

On Dec. 2-3, hurricane-force winds snapped the tree about 80 feet above ground, along an old lightning scar. The top portion shattered as it hit the ground.

Aware of the tree’s significance, county officials will let the trunk stand and the pieces lie on the ground to rot and provide nutrients for new trees and other plants, parks supervisor Steve Meshke said. He asked souvenir-seekers to refrain from cutting up or taking the larger sections on the ground, which are legally county property.

Known as the Klootchy Creek Giant or the Seaside Spruce, the tree shared honors as the largest of its species in the United States with another one in Washington’s Olympic National Park. Estimated to be 500 to 750 years old, it was the oldest tree in Oregon, possibly the oldest living thing in the state and the first designated Oregon Heritage Tree.

The tree germinated from a seed on the forest floor around the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, had grown to its mature height of 206 feet when Christopher Columbus uncovered a world new to Europeans and reached its mature girth of nearly 17 feet in diameter 200 years before explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark camped at Fort Clatsop.

The tree’s demise was expected, Meshke said. It was rotted inside and was further weakened when a storm in December 2006 ripped open a scar left by a lightning strike in the 1950s. The tree ultimately split along the scar.

After the December 2006 storm, experts from the county, the Oregon Department of Forestry and the Oregon Heritage Tree Committee determined the tree was too weakened by time and nature, but that public interest and its unique history merited letting the tree stand and letting nature take its course. The county erected a fence a safe distance from the tree and installed interpretative materials telling the story of the dying tree. The fence has now been removed to permit closer public access to the tree.

The Oregon Heritage Tree Committee will meet noon Jan. 25 in Wilsonville to discuss the fate of the tree’s Heritage designation.