Ninety-four years ago this was a dense tangle of little jack pines. As the decades passed, the fires that levelled the forests around them somehow by-passed their hollow. The pines competed with each other until only a very few of the luckiest and fittest survived. The survivors in front of you are relative giants in the world of jack pines.
First nations people parboiled the male flower clusters to remove the excess resin and ate them as nutritous vegetable and spring tonic. But later settlers viewed the tree as an omen of misfortune, probably because their crops failed on the poor soils where the pines where able to survive.