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Deep in the night on August 4, 2018, a trio of timber cutters bushwhacked into a steep valley thick with brush, wearing headlamps and carrying a chainsaw, gas can, and a slew of felling tools. Their target, a trifurcated, mossy bigleaf maple, towered above Jefferson Creek, which gurgled down the narrow ravine floor that drains the Olympic National Forest’s Elk Lake. Justin Wilke, the band’s captain, had discovered the massive tree the day before and dubbed her “Bertha.”

Wilke had established three dispersed campsites in the Elk Lake vicinity, some 20 miles from the nearest town of Hoodsport, Washington, over the previous weeks. By day he scouted for the most prime bigleaf maples. He had illegally felled at least three in the area since April, but he considered Bertha the mother tree.

A carpenter by trade, Wilke, then 36, dabbled in odd jobs in construction, as a mechanic, on fishing boats, and in canneries, but like many across the peninsula’s scattered hamlets, he’d been a logger since his hands were sure enough to wield a chainsaw. A tattoo the length of his left arm read “West Coast Loggers,” his tribute to a heritage that began with his grandfather.

Honest work had grown scarce. Wilke and his girlfriend were camping on a friend’s property just outside the national forest to trim expenses and lived on his earnings from cutting illegal firewood and selling poached maple. The situation wasn’t tenable. He was hungry, and he needed a windfall.

Closing in on Bertha in the darkness alongside Wilke were Shawn “Thor” Williams and Lucas Chapman. Thor had just sprung from a stint in prison two weeks earlier. A 47-year-old union framer, Thor had also dabbled as an MMA fighter and debt collector and carried a litany of past convictions ranging from assault and burglary to unlawful imprisonment. He hoped the job would deliver him back to his daughter and sometimes-girlfriend in California. Chapman, 35, was Wilke’s gopher, hired primarily to watch the campsites during the operation. The three were high on methamphetamines.