Travels in Cascadia: Threading the Needle on Hurricane Ridge

Leading a field studies trip is a stress-filled enterprise. There are the big things to worry about: auto accidents, injuries, conflicts with law enforcement, lost reservations, and those sorts of things. But those thankfully don't happen much. But weather does happen, and field studies trips tend to be tightly scripted affairs with not much room for weather-related complications. Yet they happen, especially on trips in the Pacific Northwest. We've had trips where we had just the one chance to see Mt. St. Helens, and it was completely fogged in. There was the one chance to see the Sea to Sky Highway in British Columbia, and it was raining the entire way. We've missed a lot.

This year was going to be different. We worked some flexibility into the schedule, spending two nights each at most of our localities, giving us the chance to postpone a particular plan for a day to allow the weather to clear up. But on our second day out, I was worried. Ever since the longest ten-day forecast, a storm was brewing out in the Pacific Ocean, one that was arriving in waves over several days. We had given ourselves two days on the Olympic Peninsula, and rain was falling on Hurricane Ridge the first day, so we elected to go to Neah Bay and Cape Flattery instead. But that left us just one more chance to have a clear view at Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. The sunrise (above) was not promising. According to the forecast, we would have a brief window of maybe three or four hours before the storm closed in, but we drove through light showers on the road up to the ridge.

My concern grew as we continued up the road, rising from sea level to over 5,000 feet. The far ridges would appear for a moment and then become obscured, and I didn't know until we reached the top ridge if we would actually see anything...

… but we did! And no matter how many times I've been on Hurricane Ridge, nothing quite prepares me for the view from the end of the paved road. It is simply astonishing. As we emerged from the vehicles I felt the stress falling away, like dropping a particularly heavy load from my shoulders. We gathered the group and said a few words about the geology. We would save the longer presentations for later in the day down the hill. With an impending storm, I didn't want our students to miss any of the dramatic scenery. And it is dramatic.

The Olympic Mountains rise from sea level to nearly 8,000 feet and are extremely rugged. They capture prodigious amounts of rain and snow on the western flanks, so much so that temperate rainforests coat the western slopes. It was a nightmare for geologists who were trying to unravel the geologic history.

The mountains exist because of subduction. For most of 200 million years a convergent boundary has been active in the region, as the crust of the Pacific Ocean basin has been sinking against the edge of the North American Continent. In some places, like California, the subduction zone has been replaced by a transform boundary (the San Andreas fault). But in Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and part of British Columbia, the subduction zone is still active, still producing earthquakes, and still raising mountains. It's called the Cascadia Subduction Zone (from hence comes the name of this series).

Source: Geological Society of America

In a "normal" subduction zone, there are four parts: the trench, an accretionary wedge, a forearc basin, and a magmatic arc. The trench is the deepest part of the ocean floor where the oceanic crust sinks back into the mantle. The accretionary wedge is a collection of seafloor sediments and crust that has been scraped off the subducting plate and added to the edge of the continent. The forearc basin is a shallow sea that may develop inland of the accretionary wedge (California's Great Valley originated in this fashion). The magmatic arc is a system of volcanoes and intrusive plutons resulting from the melting of rocks in the lower crust and upper mantle above the descending slab (water released from the slab lowers the melting point of the rock, leading to the formation of the molten rock).

Looking at the thickly forested slopes below Hurricane Ridge, I cannot envy the geologists who originally mapped the Olympic Mountains. Simply finding an exposure of rock must have been challenging at times. What these geologists did was to take the rare rock exposures and extrapolate them into a semi-coherent map that reveals the structure of the Olympic Mountains. They did the equivalent of taking a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, putting them in the right location relative to the others, and then drawing in the remainder of the puzzle from scratch. I've been way too spoiled by the naked rock exposures of places like Death Valley and the Mojave Desert!

The geologic map reveals the basic structure of the Olympics. A "horseshoe" of basalt and sedimentary rocks (the Peripheral Rocks, or Crescent Formation) partially surrounds the "Core Rocks", an assemblage of lightly metamorphosed sandstone and shale layers. The Core Rocks are characteristic of the types of deposits that form from underwater landslides ("turbidity currents") within the trench and accretionary wedge of a subduction zone. The fact that these rocks are now thousands of feet above sea level is the interesting conundrum. Accretionary wedges are generally below sea level, or exist as small islands. They can be pushed higher. For instance, the rocks of the Cascadia accretionary wedge are exposed in the Coast Ranges of  Washington, Oregon and California, but nowhere are the exposures as spectacular as the Olympic Mountains.

Convergent boundaries can be exceedingly complex places. Bits and pieces of continents and island arcs may randomly arrive at the subduction zone, mucking up the subduction process the way too many sheets of paper at once can muck up a paper-shredder. In the case of the Olympics, there was a mass of land north (Vancouver Island) and an accreted terrane to the south (the North Cascades), and a bend in the subduction zone itself. In essence, too much material was being stuffed into the subduction zone, so the excess material went the only way it could, which was up. The mountains have been rising for around 15 million years. They would be higher, but the incredible amount of precipitation tears the mountains down at a roughly equivalent rate.

Pillow basalt from the subducted oceanic crust is exposed along the Hurricane Ridge Road and along trails near the viewpoint. When we went down the road later on, we found that a small rockfall had dumped some of the pillows onto our highway. So, as it turned out, we managed to miss having rocks fall on our vans, i.e., one of the hazards I mentioned at the start of the post!

We could easily observe the glaciers that scour the upper reaches of the mountains. Glaciers technically shouldn't exist here. Although we were at a high enough latitude, the nearby Pacific Ocean moderates the climate, keeping things warmer than they would otherwise be (the Olympics are at the same latitude as Great Falls, Montana, or St. Paul, Minnesota). But temperature isn't the only factor in glacier development. The sheer amount of snowfall in combination with temperatures that are just cold enough allows glaciers to exist at these unusually low elevations.

We had a good introduction to the basic features of alpine glaciation as we gazed across the valley to Mt. Olympus. There were horns, aretes, and cirques as well. Glaciers were going to be a big part of the story of British Columbia, and Hurricane Ridge provided a spectacular setting for the first discussion of how they worked.

It was nearly noon and the storm clouds were building. We were rained on as we descended back down to the lowlands. It was time to prepare for the ferry ride across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island.