Each member of the forest community has its own personality and highly specialized way of life, from the slimy banana slug at our feet to the topmost twig lighting for its share of the sun. The chaos, of course, was only in our heads. Not here the cathedral-like symmetry of the Coast redwoods: rather a sense of vast columns standing amid ruins, of fallen shafts and shattered pediments, of cosmos struggling out of chaos. Broad leaves, contrasting with the feathery needles above them, make a horizontal pattern of green platters hungry for light. From lower limbs hang great beards of gray club moss.

Ferns grow at their feet and out of their elbows what looks like a vertical branch turns out to be an independent tree that has taken root in a crotch, high in the air. Trees that, sliced through, could make a diningroom table, rise to the height of a twenty-story building, swollen at the base with massive, mosscovered buttresses. The very scale of this world strikes one with awe. We had been struck by this in the great hardwood stands of the Smokies, and the redwood groves of California, yet never more forcibly than on plunging into the dimly radiant world of the rain forest. On entering the average woodland one has a sense of the landscape closing in whereas when you step into virgin forest it seems almost to open out, with long vistas between widely set columns which disappear into a vague green roof far overhead. The sky was clear and the woods were steaming by the time we were ready to start. Warm, moisture-laden air drifting in from the Pacific quickly rises and cools as it strikes the western slopes of the Olympic range, causing the greatest annual rainfall on the North American continent -over twelve feet in the lowlands, an estimated twenty on certain spots in the interior! This, in turn, has two unique and dramatic effects: snow fields and permanent glaciers at relatively low altitudes and a forest growth that has been appropriately described as a “temperate jungle”- how appropriately, the Bow Paddle and I could not have imagined until we left the comforts of our tent among the strawberries and took the trail.ĭuring the night the loud patter of rain on our cotton roof had faded till the river’s sleady roar again took over. The lush forests are a gift from the sea. The first white men settled here only a hundred-odd years ago, and before that oven the Indians had kept pretty close to the coastal fringe. The lowlands presented early explorers with apparently impenetrable jungle, the highlands with rugged snow-crowned peaks. The coast is treacherous and the harbors few. Why did the Olympic wilderness so long hold its own long enough for this splendid remnant to have survived commercial exploitation, to be saved at last as a national treasure? Partly isolation but even more a matter of geography and climate. Seattle is separated from it by Puget Sound northward lie the Juan de Fuca Strait and Vancouver Island westward lie the Pacific Ocean and, five thousand miles beyond, the islands of Japan. The Olympic Peninsula, at the core of which lies the Park, has been fairly called America’s last frontier. Though this term suggests the tropics, we were actually in the northwestern most corner of the United States our river was glacier-born, fed by melting snows. Behind us, silent and incredibly tall, stood the rain forest.

A few yards from the opening rushed a milky, grayblue river we could hear the eerie groan of rocks grinding together under water. Before us lay the interior of Olympic National Park, a largely roadless area the size of Rhode Island, to be explored this time not by canoe, since the rivers are torrents of ice water, but on foot along the open slopes and shadowed trails.īetween showers we pitched our tent on a carpet of moss, embroidered with wild strawberries. It was raining, but all our best camping trips have started in the rain - even the last one in the Arizona desert, where a drop hadn’t fallen for the previous nine months. “It’s a standing invitation for people to go out and do something healthy and get deep into trouble.”The Bow Paddle (a name well earned in the front end of a canoe) and I had crossed the continent to be on this spot. THE trouble with this country is that it’s a damned paradise,” I read in The Last Wilderness, a recent book about the Olympic Peninsula.

Olympic national park beyond the tent