With the right equipment and a little luck, stealing a tree from a swath of land as remote and vast as the Olympic National Forest should have been easy enough. In the summer of 2018, Justin Wilke, a Washington man in his late-thirties, found what seemed like the perfect candidate for poaching: a big-leaf maple located about a quarter mile from the Elk Lake trailhead on the forest's eastern edge. A small number of big-leaf maples, which grow from British Columbia to southern California, have a distinctive grain that makes them particularly valuable. When these trees are milled and finished, they reveal a watery psychedelic pattern that resembles something between a hologram and a Magic Eye image. Specimens can earn a few thousand dollars each at a lumberyard, from which the wood will eventually find its way to specialty furniture makers and luthiers. Wilke needed the cash, and judging by what he saw when he peeled back the bark, this tree promised spectacular markings.