That Tree

I don’t use Reddit much, but I just had a fun experience on the r/trailrunning subreddit. Sometimes folks share photos from their run. Yesterday, someone posted a few photos from a local trail of theirs they had explored. The first photo featured a tree that I immediately felt looked familiar. I’d seen a very similar tree and had taken a very similar photo a few years back during a random long run while visiting my parents in Vancouver, Washington. I had to find out if it was the same tree.

I remembered posting that photo to Instagram, so I tried to track it down by going through my old IG screenshots (I “archived” my account before deleting it by screenshotting every photo and the comments—it took a while). I wasn’t finding it quickly, so I went to Strava to search in my activity log. I tracked the activity down, which then gave me the date: October 3, 2014. I was then able to find the screenshot of that IG post more easily, and sure enough, there was the tree in all its glory. It was a magnificent tree and I really liked the photo I took and edited of it. (I still do.)

I also tracked down the tree on Google Maps and then linked to it in a comment to the original poster asking if it was the right one. Their tree looked slightly different than the one in my photo, the gate seemed to only have one bar where mine had two, and the trees in the background seemed a little different as well. Maybe it was just a coincidence that the tree and surrounding landscape looked so similar.

Would the original poster get back to me? Would it be the same tree after all?

They did get back to me! And here’s the exchange (I should’ve color coded our comments, but it’s pretty obvious which is our dialogue):

And, of course, I have to include my photo for comparison (below). You can see that back in 2014 there wasn’t the big gap in the branches, the gate looks slightly different, and the background seems slightly different as well. But otherwise, it’s (now I can say) definitely the same tree and view! So cool. What a fun little experience.