Olympic Peninsula

03 Apr, 2006
Posted at 23.55 PDT

This past weekend I visited Washington’s Olympic Peninsula with six other friends, and had a great time. If you ever have the chance to see it, grab it. The peninsula is kinda like natural wonders all over the country in that it always seems the natives never consider going to see it, and miss out on the most amazing things.

Geographically, the Olympic peninsula has always seemed strange to me. It’s not a peninsula like Florida, or Baja California—relatively long and skinny, but instead is rather wide, and covered in mountains. And the mountains themselves, though not particularly tall, are pretty cool in that they don’t form a chain, but cover most the peninsula, making it look nothing so much like a giant rumpled blanket. They’ve always fascinated me, in large part because the majority of the land they cover is more or less inaccessible. No roads go through the interior, they all skirt the coast barring a few that snake inland a little ways to provide access to places like the Hoh rain forest. It makes the interior of the peninsula seem mysterious and distant, one of those semi-magic places that are somewhat removed from the real world. I can only imagine the sense of isolation you must get if you do take one of the trails inland.

Like most of Western Washington, the peninsula is wet, wet, wet. The Olympics and the Cascade Mountains provide a rather effective barrier to the wet westerly winds coming in off the Pacific, and lots of rain gets dumped there. (But Seattle actually sees less annually than back home in Central Florida. Here though it drizzles—incessantly during the winter which I can attest can be most dispiriting your first winter or three. Eventually you either get used to it or kill yourself, which I suppose accounts for the astoundingly mellow nature of those who’ve lived here a while).

Saturday morning early we headed out in two cars, going South to Tacoma to get across Puget Sound, then North up the peninsula, around its top and back down the coast a bit. Along the way we passed Crescent Lake, ten miles long, a mile wide, and 660 feet deep—a hundred feet lower than sea level. It’s cold, clear, and if you catch it in sunshine, a beautiful deep blue. Sitka spruce, Douglas firs, and other “cathedral trees” line the nearly the whole route, and blanket almost the entire peninsula. This place is a tree-hugger’s dreamland.

I was in heaven.

It’s hard to express how I feel about the trees out here without sounding like some half-loony mystic new age freak. They are a large part of the reason I moved out here, honestly. Oh, it wasn’t because I felt some goofy spiritual connection or anything like that, but rather their sheer beauty, though I guess a profound appreciation of that beauty could be considered spiritual in a way. My first visits to the Pacific Northwest happened back in ‘89 and ‘90, and I spent that time hiking the trails along a stretch of the North Oregon coast, near a tiny, tiny, town called Wheeler. My memories of those hikes through the forests there strongly colored my interests when the chance came to move to Seattle. I haven’t regretted it the least. There’s a reason these woods get called “cathedral forests,” and you don’t have to have a particularly active imagination to figure it out. They’re usually quiet, the trees reach up to three hundred feet (thirty stories, people. Tall), and the undergrowth is generally limited by the shade to lush ferns. Moss is everywhere, and in the wetter areas, covers every surface of trees, hanging from limbs in sheets of green. The woods feel old. And old they are. Coastal rain forests have existed for at least 2 million years. Just about nowhere else on the planet can you find that sort of ecological stability.

Older feeling still was the Hoh rain forest, which we stopped by on Sunday. It’s an area in the Olympic National Forest that has some unique features. The Hoh valley is relatively long and glacier-carved from previous ice ages, u-shaped from the grinding ice that ran through it, and faces almost due West. The Olympic mountains surrounding it trap the westerlies that blow in off the Pacific, forcing them to dump 12-14 feet of rain every year on average. It sounds like a lot, and it is. That’s ten times the amount Seattle gets in a year, a city with a deserved reputation for wetness. The upshot of all this rain is that the peninsula is home to one of the very few temperate rain forests on the planet, and one of the oldest and most diverse biological ecosystems in existence. Some of the species in the rain forests go back 70 million years. In other words, some of the critters around here knew dinosaurs. Or to put it another way, have been around 14 times longer than human beings. You feel the age of this place in your bones.

It’s hard to imagine what global warming will do to rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, but I can’t expect it’ll be good. All the evidence points to us being on the cusp of some truly nasty and major environmental changes over coming decades, evidence that continues mounting despite our country’s current administration’s efforts to silence the voices of their own scientists on the subject. I can only hope that through some miracle of luck these ancient forests manage to survive.

 

 

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