Deep in the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park in a Very Hot Summer

I am a mountain person. I'm a desert person. I like being in places where I can see vast distances, where I can navigate by prominent landmarks. I'm often spooked by dense forest environments where I can see only a few yards through the gloom and can't navigate well. I'm talking about map and compass orienteering, but I think a thick forest could disrupt GPS signals too. And what happens if the batteries go dead?

Just the same, when it came to choosing a vacation destination this summer, we headed to the northwest, and ultimately found ourselves camping in the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park in Washington. In a summer of record-breaking heat, it was nice to find a cool and shady place. It was blissful.

The park was born out of controversy. The Olympic Peninsula is a mountainous landscape that captures vast amounts of precipitation from Pacific storms and the western side of the peninsula is especially lush with a temperate rainforest that was a magnet for timber interests. The huge trees were being harvested at a furious rate, and as the loggers worked their way farther into the interior, people became concerned about the wholesale destruction of the unique environment. Grover Cleveland established an Olympic Forest Reserve in 1897, and Theodore Roosevelt upgraded the status to a national monument in 1909. Congress acted in 1938 to designate the forest as a Olympic National Park. There is always a conflict between those who wish to make short-term profits versus those who recognize the need to preserve intact ecosystems with more intangible values such as clean air and water, wildlife diversity, education, recreation, and national pride.

We were lucky in our timing. We traveled in the middle of July instead of August. I was watching reports this week of a dense blanket of smoke from hundreds of fires in British Columbia covering the Pacific Northwest. And of course we haven't been spared here in California. We've had another horrific year of gigantic wildfires that have affected hundreds of thousands of acres, and we had weeks of smoky conditions related to the Ferguson Fire, the Donnell Fire, and dozens of others. There have also been firestorms of political controversy swirling about these fires.

Biologic and climate systems are complex, of course, but there are also some fundamental clear truths: the climate is getting warmer, and wildfires are getting worse. We are living the changes that were predicted thirty or more years ago by climate scientists, and the time we have for confronting the problems associated with warming is limited.

Unfortunately we also live in a time when politicians are in charge who deny climate change despite the overwhelming evidence that proves it is happening. The president says that climate change is not a factor in forest fires, that this is a "management situation", and that we need to "beautifully" remove fallen trees. Secretary of the Interior Zinke says we "have been held hostage by these environmental terrorist groups...that have refused to allow harvest of timber". These statements are highly misleading at best and display ignorance of the science.

Forests have been mismanaged. For more than a century a misunderstanding of how fire interacts with a forest environment has meant that fire suppression at all costs was the method of choice. This has indeed allowed overgrowth of young trees and a buildup of fuel on the forest floors. It is a problem though that has been exacerbated by the effects of drought and warming temperatures.

There are good ways of dealing with forests on public lands, and there are poor choices that allow a few to profit to the detriment of the rest of us. Clearing out fuel is needed given the new environmental regime that we now live in, but the best approaches will involve prescribed fires that burn out the undergrowth and allow mature trees to thrive, along with other more innovative approaches. Timber companies will say they can clear out the forests, but they invariably favor the big mature trees (that can better survive wildfires), or clear-cut the slopes and replant a single species of tree. This is tree-farming, not forest management. There are big changes coming in our beautiful forests, and a lot of them are not good. The last thing we need to be doing is letting a few people profit, leaving the forests in worse shape than they are now. Denying climate change is simply a pretext to allow a few people to profit from a resource that belongs to all of us.

That wasn't on my mind last month, though. I was instead reveling in the coolness and quiet of the trail we were following. It was late in the afternoon and we had the forest to ourselves (aside from a few deer and a smattering of birds...and a gross slug). It was a blessing to experience the living example of a great idea: to preserve parts of the primeval landscapes of our country for the good of all.

Vagabonding on Dangerous Ground: Into the Rainforest, Seeing Something Strange...Rain

So, after a Dismal day of Disappointment, the vagabonders hit the road, going north onto the Olympic Peninsula. It was my first time on the west side of the peninsula, and my first foray into the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park. Strangely enough, it was raining the day we arrived, strange because it was the first day of rain in something like two months. And the forest felt like it. It has been a very bad year, drought-wise. The Hoh River at our campsite was a lot smaller than I expected, even for summertime. The lack of water and warm temperatures bode ill for the coming migrations of the salmon and coastal cutthroat trout.

Olympic National Park is one of the most diverse parks in the United States. It encompasses alpine glaciers and high rocky peaks, what is probably the greatest expanse of old-growth temperate rainforest left in the states, and mile after mile of rocky Pacific coastline. And all of this is due to tectonic activity along the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

As the Juan de Fuca plate is pushed beneath the North American continent, the sediments on the ocean floor were essentially scraped off the crust and accreted to the western edge of the continent. One earthquake at a time, a few inches or feet at a time, the mountains were pushed upwards, eventually reaching elevations of nearly 8,000 feet. The wall of sediment and rock forms a barrier to the landward movement of Pacific storms, forcing the air upwards and causing it to precipitate on the western slopes. Precipitation is a weak word for what happens; in an average year, 12.5 feet (380 cm) of rain may fall on these mountains.

The forests are lush and filled with huge Sitka Spruce, Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock, Western Red Cedar and Broad-leaf Maple trees. The forests are layered, with something photosynthesizing at every level, from the algae in the creeks, flowers and grasses on the forest floor, to the shrubs, and the mosses that hang from practically every branch. Something is there to collect almost every photon of sunlight that penetrates the seemingly ever-present clouds.

It's been a dry year, at least by some metrics. There was a lot of rain at times during the winter, but because the storms were warm, there was almost no snow, not even 10% of normal in places. The height of the runoff was in February, not the normal late spring or early summer. There were no snowbanks to nourish the rivers through the summer and fall, when rain is usually at the lowest ebb. It has set up a most unusual situation in the rainforests this year: the threat of wildfire.

Fires have been burning all summer throughout the Pacific Northwest. We were lucky in our timing in that we missed the worst of the smoke plumes that obscured the mountains. The fires aren't just in the drier inland areas; the rainforest is burning too. Two canyons south of the Hoh River, on the Queets River, the Paradise Fire has burned about 2,400 acres (almost 4 square miles). That's small by California standards (the Rim Fire last year burned 257,000 acres, or about 400 square miles), but the fire is the largest since the park was established. And it's still going today, after three months. It probably won't be extinguished until the autumn rains come.

In the meantime, we were enjoying the light drizzle and the greenery that persisted despite the dry conditions. We strolled along the Hall of Mosses Trail, which follows a river terrace above the Hoh River. Terraces result when a river starts to cut into its own sediments following regional uplift (such as is happening in the Olympics on a constant basis). Since the river no longer floods across the surface, the ecosystem remains stable on a long-term basis, and the trees are able to grow to immense size.

One section of the trail just floored me. It was a little detour into a grove of Big Leaf Maple Trees. I might as well have stumbled into the Forest of Fangorn, with Ents standing all around us. Thick mats of moss hung from the branches, and the leaves were practically invisible in the canopy above.

The trees were huge...

 And the limbs looked like giant arms reaching out for us.

When in a forest like this, one must never forget to look up.

And also keep an eye out for the wildlife. There is a struggle taking place in the branches of the rainforest. From times long forgotten, the Northern Spotted Owl thrived in these woods. Humans arrived and started to cut down the old-growth forests, and the owl population went into a steep decline. Eventually it was declared an endangered species, and logging was restricted in many areas (there were other factors involved, but the owl took most of the blame for the economic disruptions).

Meanwhile in the eastern part of the continent, a related species was widening its range. The Barred Owl was able to take advantage of a warming climate and expanding second growth forests across the northern states and Canada to move west, and it arrived in Olympic National Park in 1985. It is a bigger species than the Spotted Owl, and able to survive on a wider variety of prey. It's been displacing the Spotted Owls over most of their range. They reached Muir Woods in California in 2002. Mrs. Geotripper spotted one along the trail and we got quite a few pictures, many of which are posted on my bird blog here. Despite its checkered history as an invasive species, it's a beautiful bird.

The storm was breaking the next morning as we rounded the north side of the Olympic Peninsula. We set out for Lake Crescent. More later...

Geotripper Hallucinates in the Rainforest: Where are the rocks?

Archaeologists and geologists have it kind of tough in the rainforests. The people who lived here in past millennia utilized wood and bone most of the time in the making of their tools and habitations, and neither of those materials lasts for long in the wet acidic soils of a rainforest. Archaeologists don't have a lot of raw materials to work with. Likewise for the geologist, moisture and acid attack most rocks, turning them to clay in short order. The clay and soil coat the slopes, and the luxuriant plant growth hides almost all useful rock exposures. Actively eroding stream valleys and roadcuts are sometimes the only raw information a geologist has for mapping, and a lot of extrapolation must take place. No wonder I am more of a desert rat. I'm fundamentally lazy!

So I found myself hallucinating if you will during my travels in the past week through the rainforests of Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. And no, I avoided the mushrooms! I started seeing rocks in the forest, but most people call this stuff wood. For instance, the natural arch above, in the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park.

And this "limestone" cavern along the same trail? It had multiple passages and was big enough to crawl through, after all. It's gotta be a cave.

Rivers erode rock, right? So how about this ridge across Bull Creek in Humboldt Redwoods State Park in the above photo? Upturned metamorphic rock, surely? It was softer than most rocks for some reason.

And isn't this a fold in metamorphic rock, along the Hoh Rainforest Hall of Mosses Trail? Surely this stuff isn't all wood?

At the end of my musings, I realized I was acting just a bit like a kid again. This kind of place would have been endlessly fascinating to me as a child. I know this because once in a great while, the child re-emerges and imagines all kinds of strange things. Crawling under tree trunks isn't quite as easy as it once was, though.

I'll get back to some real geology before long! There are actually rocks to be seen out here, and some of them are truly spectacular. Mrs. Geotripper and I have been having a great time doing something we haven't done in a number of years, just vagabonding from one place to another without a plan, other than a vague goal of seeing some parts of British Columbia that we missed on our field trip last year because of bad weather. I'm happy to say we've been mostly successful.

Gigantic Slugs in the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park

Ohmigod, ohmigod! Gigantic parasitic slugs feeding on elk! Ewww! Okay, not really. It's actually a slug, probably, maybe a Banana Slug crawling across an interpretive sign at the beginning of the Hall of Mosses Trail in the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park. I'm on the road in the Pacific Northwest, and stopped into this wettest of places to have a look around. It was my first visit to the to this side of Olympic National Park. It's a fascinating place.

I couldn't help but start with slugs. I don't see them all that often back home in California. The slugs are related of course to snails, but don't produce shells because the soils in their extremely wet native habitat are too acidic. Instead of shells, they may utilize chemical defenses, i.e. they taste bad.

I actually saw far more of these Black Slugs (they happen to be called just that, Black Slug). Besides looking vaguely evil, they actually are evil in a sense. They are an invasive species from Northern Europe, and often out-compete  the Banana Slug in this environment. I don't know what can be done about them. In Sweden, they were ground up to make a lubricant. Can you imagine a more disgusting job, grinding up slugs?

Anyway, if all this has grossed you out, here is a cute furry forest creature that I saw along the trail. Enjoy!