Hoh Rain Forest

The Upper Hoh Road runs some eighteen miles up the valley from US-101, and by the end of it the forest is something else: Sitka spruce and western hemlock two hundred feet tall, bigleaf maples hung so thickly with club moss and licorice fern that the branches disappear. Twelve to fourteen feet of rain fall here in an average year, among the wettest places in the lower forty-eight.

A tree that falls on this floor becomes a nursery. Seedlings that cannot get a start in the moss take root on the rotting log, and when the log is gone the trees stand on their roots in a straight line, a colonnade that marks where it lay. The Hall of Mosses, a loop of less than a mile from the visitor center, walks through the best of it, and the Spruce Nature Trail follows the river.

The herds that graze the valley floor are Roosevelt elk, the largest elk in North America, and their browsing helps keep the forest open underneath. They are the reason the park began. On March 2, 1909, two days before he left office, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Mount Olympus National Monument, largely to protect the elk, and those lands became the heart of Olympic National Park in 1938. From the visitor center the Hoh River Trail runs seventeen miles up the valley toward the glaciers of Mount Olympus. Downstream, where the river meets the ocean, is the small reservation of the Hoh Tribe, whose name the river carries.