Western Hazelnut, also called Pacific Hazelnut, is more a shrub than a tree, a multi-stemmed bush up to 12’ tall. Hazelnuts grow best at forest edges and openings but are sometimes found on rocky slopes. Their Autumn nuts are covered by hard shells that are gathered by all native cache-forming animals. When burnt by fire, this shrub resprouts quickly and was a favorite of the Indigenous Peoples who had “killing fields” that they would regularly burn (to grow hazelnuts, crabapples, and berries); this underbrush was food for deer (not otherwise found in forests with 300’ tall trees). Many pioneers began their farming using these burnt-out and semi-cleared meadows bordered within mature forests.  In the Northwest and along the Lewis & Clark Trail, it was not as much a matter of displacing the natives; many meadows were abandoned, some with 100% mortality caused by the new diseases sweeping the West.  When this writer was a boy, he would walk through hazelnut groves now believed to be remnants of a time when the Indigenous Peoples tended them as orchards.  Most are gone now, but crabapple groves do exist.  A shrub and a member of the Betulaceae Family, it grows by Kiosk 13.  Pilchuck Learning Center’s sponsored Western Washington State University SAM Project extinction possibility is slight; unlikely to be extinct as it is found in other areas of North America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corylus_cornuta
http://naeb.brit.org/uses/search/?string=Corylus+cornuta
https://www.plc215.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Kiosk-10.pdf 
https://burkeherbarium.org/imagecollection/taxon.php?Taxon=Corylus%20cornuta

Hazelnut groves were also used by the Indigenous in their hunt for:

Elk
Black-tailed Deer
Black Bear

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