In the middle of the night, as a particularly beastly winter storm batters the Washington coast, the Tree of Life will finally succumb. The winds will smack its stout branches until it finally collapses in a heap on the sand.

Or it will happen during a king tide, when the Pacific inches up the beach, and the dirt bluff to which the evergreen clings will absorb just enough water to loosen the tenuous grip of its roots. Sagging under the tremendous weight of its century-old trunk, the Tree of Life will flop ungraciously to the ground.

Or maybe the end will come on a bright sunny day, when the added burden of a visitor clambering about its exposed roots simply becomes too much.

Truth is, we don’t know how the Tree of Life will fall, and we don’t know when. It could happen in five years, in 40 years, or tomorrow; perhaps, as you read this, it has already happened. But we do know this: The Tree of Life has led a singularly strange existence.

You won’t find the Tree of Life in a proper guidebook, or a scholarly history of the Olympic Peninsula. You’ll see it on Facebook, on Instagram, or maybe a TikTok video filmed under tree roots that dangle in the air. It sits just 50 yards from a staircase that runs from Olympic National Park’s Kalaloch Campground to the beach, but it doesn’t appear on any national park map or brochure.

On a sunny Friday in early spring, two sisters from northern Illinois eye those roots, weighing the perilous climb over the pileup of driftwood that guards the Tree of Life. A young couple gets close, hanging off the roots like kids on the monkey bars. After retreating to firmer sand, they hunch over a phone to see the photos they captured, and the next group in an informal queue takes a turn to pose. What led them to the spot? From everyone, a shrug and one answer: “The internet.”

They’ve come to see a tree only about 40 feet tall, but that base doesn’t start at the ground. Rather, it hovers over a cavern in the bluff that faces the beach, most of its roots dangling into space. With a shape like a giant bonsai, it has upper limbs that have grown to endure the winds off the ocean, the greenery swept in one direction like a cartoon rendering of a toupee. A stream trickles underneath, a modest burble that has nevertheless swept this cavern into being, while the tree’s remaining anchors grasp either side.

Many comers duck into that grotto, skirting a stagnant pool and crouching under the roof of roots. From here, up close, the tree looks exhausted and awkward. Slumping. It’s from farther back on the beach that the view turns majestic. From a wider vista, the sharp bend seems purposeful, jaunty—like a pinup posing with a hip cocked.

Perhaps because it’s so easy to reach, or maybe because it exudes the symbolic persistence of a motivational “Hang in There!” kitty poster, the Tree of Life has become one of the Olympic Peninsula’s best-known attractions. It’s a natural wonder that might not be natural at all, something delicate that nevertheless represents enormous strength. And, of course, it’s that most compelling of sights: a ticking time bomb.

The Tree of Life was nothing special when it was born, 100 or 150 years ago. It was just a regular Sitka spruce—hardy by definition. In lowland soils thick with other plants, Sitka spruce seeds must be tenacious, often sprouting on decaying nurse logs. This tree survived seedling-hood on the shoreline of the Olympic Peninsula, that primeval chunk of mountains and forest on Washington’s farthest west coast, a stretch battered by the winds off the Pacific.

At Kalaloch, a place named by the Quinault tribe as “a good place to land,” the sand stretches miles in either direction, the horizon punctuated by a single uninhabited island. Just 30 miles inland, temperate rainforests give way to the Olympic peaks topping out at 8,000 feet, but here the greenery marches right up to the shoreline. It’s a place that, by Highway 101 standards, isn’t much on the way to anywhere.

When the seedling first took hold, this whole stretch was home only to Indigenous tribes who lived off the salmon that spawned up the rivers and sometimes hunted the whales that migrated past: the Quinault, the Quileute, and the Hoh, with the Makah up north. Cedar was, if anything, the tree of record here, carved into dugout canoes or stacked into longhouses. But Sitka spruce had its place, too, its bark peeled from roots and woven into baskets so snug they could hold water.

By the time the Tree of Life’s roots took hold, white settlers had reached the coast with an eye toward forests rich in old-growth wood. One man, Charles Becker, saw Kalaloch as ideal for a private resort. Vacationers slowly puttered to the remote stretch of beach, with a break during World War II when the US Army used the collection of seafront cabins Becker built for training. As parcels of land were added to Olympic National Park, the federal government bought the resort in 1978 and renamed it Kalaloch Lodge.

All this time, the Tree of Life grew, shaped by the same natural elements that sculpt the rest of Washington’s wild coast. Back then, it was just another tree. But in the 1960s a culvert was built to redirect water in the campground just a few hundred yards north of the lodge. A minor bit of engineering, just another tweak to the landscape to suit human needs. But that newly directed water made its way to the beach and began to inscribe a tiny canyon—one that moved right under a spruce tree growing on the bluff.

In an effort to stave off erosion, the national park built vertical structures along the bluffs under the lodge and campground. This form of construction actually tends to increase erosion where the barriers end—in this case, right at the tree, according to Janet Coles, vegetation branch chief of the Olympic National Park. “This poor tree has been taking it from both sides,” she says.

Park staff can’t put a finger on when the tree began to look quite so uncanny, when enough clay and dirt underneath it had washed away to reveal its tentacles. But whenever it was, the name itself, the Tree of Life, came later, an internet moniker that stuck.

At some point visitors to the park, popping into the seasonal Kalaloch Ranger Station or the Kalaloch Lodge quick-stop store, began to ask for the tree by name. The lodge, the only real amenity on Highway 101 for 30 miles in either direction, looks like no other national park icon. Its wood shingle walls suggest a Cape Cod aesthetic, not the log cabin grandeur of Rainier’s Paradise Inn, or even Lake Quinault Lodge to the south. Squat and homey, it shows the wear of 70 years of salt water and wind. Retirees and road trippers stay in the campground or cabins year-round, lingering at rugged beaches or just pausing between Forks and Ocean Shores.

The tree’s popularity casually puzzles most national park staff. “It’s a funny thing,” says Coles. “It’s somewhat mysterious, but it’s not very glamorous. Maybe the punch line is that it’s not a natural phenomenon.”

They notice the climbing and the hanging, sure. This might be dangerous behavior, but the park is full of nature—none of it designed for safety. “We cannot mitigate risks to all hazards,” says acting deputy superintendent Roy Zipp. There’s a saying in national parks, he says, that they’re “mountains without handrails.” Every day people climb on the rolling driftwood—logs from trees that lived and fell without nicknames or online celebrity—and the park’s most common injuries come from flips, trips, and falls.

Thus far, the tree itself has escaped major harm. Coles estimates that a third of the root system is still gripping the earth on its inland side. The tree has already outlasted some of Becker’s original structures, with Kalaloch Lodge officially closing those cabins closest to the bluff as the earth becomes unstable beneath them. According to a master plan from 2009, the national park’s eventual strategy might move all of Kalaloch’s facilities, from lodge to campground, to the opposite side of Highway 101.

One thing park staff won’t do is try to prop up the tree, shove more earth underneath it, or make the miracle last any longer than it otherwise would. Sitka spruce have remarkable elasticity, says Coles, but “we’ll let what passes for nature take its course.” Personally, she wouldn’t stand beneath it.

Whether it’s a slow, groaning curtsy to the ground or a sudden collapse can’t be predicted, especially given the tree’s singular and artificial situation. A big gale off the Pacific might do it, or a heavy wet snowstorm. “Hopefully not a football team climbing all over it,” says Zipp. Its incongruity is what makes the tree such a powerful symbol; it seems impervious to what passes for nature.

If the Tree of Life has roots flapping in the breeze for all to grasp, the historic, widespread concept of the tree of life is rooted far too deeply in human society to be fully exposed. Trees of life sprouted in the Old Testament and the Gnostic gospels, in the Quran and Chinese mythology. In Polynesia, the tree of life is in some places the breadfruit tree, and in others the coconut; across Africa, the baobab. At Walt Disney World an attraction by that name is 14 stories tall and made of concrete, with thermoplastic leaves.

Most legends tie the titular Tree of Life to crucial sustenance—that breadfruit—or to life spans that dwarf human generations. The Kalaloch Tree of Life produces no fruit, and it won’t live notably long compared to nearby Douglas firs that can endure for a millennium. It’s that continued existence, then—foliage still somehow green even as its roots droop—that makes it a tree of life. It’s like seeing a heart still beat after you’ve yanked the whole circulatory system out of the body.

For all its famous-for-being-famous internet notoriety, and its prosaic drainage-system origins, the tree still has spiritual significance for some. When Alex Wilson, a long-distance hiker who goes by the nickname Feather, traveled to the West Coast, his mother suggested he look up the tree she’d seen on the internet; he was so enthralled he applied for a job at a nearby restaurant to stay close. “Just for that tree,” he says. “I fell in love with it.”

Feather visits regularly, stepping into the cave he likens to a church, nature unfolding around him. No one carves into the frozen tentacles of root, he notes, because the tree demands special respect. He pulls a pendant of polished brown wood, richer and brighter than the mottled deep gray of the live tree’s roots. It’s a piece that fell off, he says, one he polished with charcoal from a campfire.

“I think that the Tree of Life comes and goes naturally throughout the world periodically,” he says, and Kalaloch’s is just one iteration. A reincarnation of sorts, an archetype born again and again. It’s meant to teach us something.

“All life kind of feels like we’re on that tenacious edge,” he says. “And I think a lot of people…they can kind of connect with that tree because it’s on a tenacious edge, too.” Some days he watches sunset from within the tree’s basement cave; one time he met a photographer who set up big, colored lights to illuminate the tree at night. He doesn’t really begrudge the comers that treat it like a jungle gym, even if he’s personally more careful. “I don’t think that tree wants to sit there all alone,” he says. “I would rather it wash away to the ocean sooner and have friends along the way.”

Feather sees the Facebook posts make the rounds on hiking or outdoor groups. “I heard the Tree of Life collapsed,” someone writes, and a flurry of comments follows, anxious posters crestfallen to have missed their chance to see it. Somewhere in the mess of replies, someone will confirm that no, nothing’s really changed.

To misquote Mark Twain, the reports of the Tree of Life’s demise have always been greatly exaggerated. Why lie? For the attention, maybe, or for the troll. Or, reasons Feather, because doing so inspires so many to come visit, realizing only in those moments they may have almost missed it.

Across the Pacific Northwest, a lot of things teeter on the brink of collapse. The Olympics have lost half their glacial square footage since the Tree of Life first survived its seedling years, and studies suggest the ice sheets will be snuffed out forever by 2070. The northern spotted owl now numbers in the mere thousands, while the number of southern resident orcas is vanishingly and precisely small—just 73 left.

And with society’s anxiety, its guilt, its confusion on just what to do about it, comes the very human pull to experience something before it goes. Before it’s too late. If the Tree of Life’s predicament is not a direct product of climate change, it has a front seat to the phenomenon—right along with the rest of us.

Janet Coles notes that the Pacific Northwest will probably feel climate change through increased frequency of big storms, maybe even the big storm that eventually smacks the Tree of Life from its glorious, impossible suspension. Eventually, assuredly, it will be too late. Until then the tree remains in perpetual fall. It was falling 10 years ago, and it will be falling every day until its collapse is complete.

When he hears the tree has fallen for good, Feather says, he’ll drop whatever he’s doing to go see it, even if he’s in the middle of a shift. But he won’t be sad. The Tree of Life will be reborn somewhere else, and the ocean will polish the remains of this one, buffing it into another tipsy log of driftwood on the beach. Its destiny is already known.