We Drove Across Canada to See a Tree
Two guys, one rented Prius, three weeks, and roughly 5,000 kilometres, all to go look at a tree.
That's the short version. Here's the long one.
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Unfinished business
I came back from Winnipeg in love with this country, and a little annoyed with myself. That trip had been a blast, but we'd bailed halfway, sold the truck, and flown home. There was a whole other half of Canada I still hadn't seen, and it was eating at me.
Around the same time, a buddy of mine who minored in film showed me an Instagram reel about a tree called Big Lonely Doug.
The story goes like this. In the winter of 2011, a logger named Dennis Cronin was surveying a patch of old-growth forest near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island, marking it for clear-cutting. He came across a Douglas fir the height of a twenty-storey building, one of the biggest trees in the country. For whatever reason, instead of marking it to be cut, he tied a ribbon around its base that read "Leave Tree."
When the fallers came through, they took everything. Every cedar, every hemlock, every other fir. Everything except Doug.
Today he stands alone in the middle of a clear-cut, the second-largest Douglas fir in Canada. He's a symbol of everything we've lost, and a little bit of hope that some of it can still be saved.
I watched the reel and said, "Do you want to go see it?"
He looked at me like I was joking. I wasn't. I'd just come back from one road trip, and I wanted another. My buddy is exactly as spontaneous as I am, so he said, "Fuck it. Let's do it." Then he took it up a notch: he'd always wanted to make his first short film. Why not make it about this? Two friends driving across Canada to see a tree.
The plan was set. Now we just had to figure out how the fuck to do it.
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Lessons from the last trip
I'd done the shitty-old-truck thing already, and I didn't need to do it again. This time I wanted cruise control, headlights that actually worked, and a car that didn't drink gas. So I rented a Toyota Prius, which, for a film about deforestation and a lonely tree, felt pretty fitting.
We gave ourselves almost three weeks. Where the Winnipeg trip had been a sprint, this one would be slow on purpose. We'd stop wherever looked interesting, talk to whoever would talk to us, and film all of it, with Doug as the climax.
We left late at night, which turned out to be a theme. We got to Sudbury and every motel in town was booked, so instead of wandering around, we kept driving to Sault Ste. Marie and crashed there.
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Ontario, the long way
On the first trip, Northern Ontario had been something to survive at night. This time we actually saw it.
We stopped for everything. We filmed the paper mills, the Wawa Goose, and every roadside attraction and weird little landmark we could find. We learned that Ontario is full of stunning beaches I had no idea existed, and we pulled over to swim in the lake more times than I can count. We hit local bars and talked to strangers, and my buddy kept rolling the whole time.
We stayed in Thunder Bay again, somewhere much nicer this time. No corn nuts on the dashboard.
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The prairies, again
In Winnipeg, we caught another Blue Bombers game and I got to see my buddy on the team again. It felt like visiting an old friend of a city, which is funny, since I'd only been there once.
It was also where I realized my phone service was dog shit. I was working the entire trip, taking calls from the road, and I kept losing signal for hours at a stretch across the prairies. So I bought a Starlink. For the rest of the trip, our little Prius had satellite internet: work calls from the middle of Saskatchewan, routes and hotels booked on the fly. It felt ridiculous and worked perfectly.
Regina got about two hours of our time: a walk around downtown and some Korean food. We'd heard Saskatoon was better for meeting people, so we pushed on. That's where the film really came alive. We spent the night going from bar to bar, talking to strangers in parks and on patios, hearing about lives and perspectives completely different from ours.
And the prairies themselves hit even harder the second time. Manitoba was flat. Saskatchewan was flat on another level. The whole sky sits on top of you.
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Into the mountains
Calgary was way bigger than I expected. For some reason I'd pictured a smallish city, but it's massive. We found barbecue there that could genuinely hold its own against what we'd had in Texas, which I never thought I'd say about Alberta.
Then Banff. I don't really have words for Banff. We canoed on Lake Louise, and it was easily the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. The colour of that water doesn't look real, even when you're sitting in it.
Then we drove to Jasper, because we wanted to see what fire actually does. In 2024, a wildfire burned tens of thousands of hectares through Jasper National Park and destroyed about a third of the town. Two years later, the aftermath is still everywhere. Mountainsides that should be green are grey and black, whole forests reduced to bare, burnt spikes. We filmed a lot there, mostly in silence.
It hit even harder a few days later. We looped into BC and headed south through the interior, toward the Okanagan, and this time the fires weren't aftermath. They were happening. We could smell the smoke in the car and see it hanging over the hills. It's one thing to read about wildfire season. It's another to drive through it.
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Doug
We skipped Vancouver entirely and went straight onto the ferry to Victoria, then took the West Coast Road out to Port Renfrew. It's one of the best drives I've ever done, winding along the coast with nothing but trees and ocean.
Getting to Doug is its own adventure. You take old logging roads, and we did it in a Prius, weaving around potholes for as long as that poor car could handle. When the holes got too deep to go any further, we parked and walked the rest.
And then, there he was.
Standing in a field of stumps, completely alone, is this enormous tree. You can't really process the scale until you're at the base looking up. Everything around him is gone, and he just stands there.
We spent hours with him. We got every shot we could think of. We'd each written letters to Doug before the trip, and we read them out loud at his base. It sounds stupid typing it out. It didn't feel stupid standing there.
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The long way home
From there, we drove back to Vancouver, took a detour down to Seattle to see a buddy, came back, spent a few more days in Vancouver, and finally flew home.
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What it taught me
I went into this thinking the hard part would be the driving. It wasn't. The hard part was the filmmaking.
I spent three weeks as a de facto production assistant, and it completely changed how I watch anything on a screen. You have to figure out what shots you need, get enough b-roll to hold a story together, frame things so they mean something, walk up to strangers and get them talking on camera, get the audio clean, and chase the light. Every single beautiful thing we saw had to be captured well, or it was gone forever. It's so much harder than it looks.
But mostly, this trip made me realize how much of my own country I'd never seen, and how much of it is changing. We saw it at its most breathtaking at Lake Louise, and at its most fragile in Jasper and in the smoke over the Okanagan. And at the end of it all, one lonely tree that survived because one guy decided it should.
I still haven't seen all of Canada. But if you ever have the means and the time, go do this drive. It takes forever, and it's worth every kilometre.
We're deep in the edit right now, cutting three weeks of footage down into the story of two friends and a tree. The film is coming soon. Doug deserves a good one.