Hoh Rainforest
Interesting facts
- In some years up to 12 feet of precipitation falls here, enough to make it one of the wettest places in the contiguous United States.
- Despite all that rain, its climate is technically classed as warm-summer Mediterranean, because most precipitation falls in winter and summers are comparatively dry.
- The largest Sitka spruces and western hemlocks here measure more than 23 feet in diameter.
- When a nurse log finally rots away, the trees that grew on it are left in a straight line on stilt-like roots, a formation called a colonnade.
- A single bigleaf maple can carry more than 25 kilograms of clubmoss, licorice fern and other plants living on its branches.
- The Hoh River runs about 50 miles from the glaciers of Mount Olympus to the Pacific, dropping some 7,000 feet along the way.
- The river's name may come from a Quileute word for fast-moving or snow water, though other explanations exist.
- Between 400 and 500 Roosevelt elk live in the Hoh valley, part of a park population of 3,000 to 4,000.
- The valley is the ancestral home of the Hoh people, and much of the similar forest outside the park boundary was logged within the last century.
- This kind of rainforest once ran along the Pacific coast from southeastern Alaska to central California; the Hoh is among its finest surviving stretches.
Why it is worth it
The Hoh Rainforest on the western side of the Olympic Peninsula is one of the few places in the temperate world where a forest looks the way the word "primeval" suggests. Rain arrives off the Pacific in quantities that are hard to picture — around 140 inches a year on average, among the highest totals anywhere in the continental United States — and the whole valley of the Hoh River has turned that water into biomass. Sitka spruce and western hemlock dominate, some of them over 300 feet tall, with western red cedar, Douglas-fir and bigleaf maple among them. What stops people in their tracks, though, is not the height of the trees but what grows on them.
Every branch of the old bigleaf maples is wrapped in moss that hangs in long green curtains, ferns sprout from the crooks of limbs, and lichens drape the lower canopy, so that the light reaching the floor is filtered and green even at midday. On the ground, fallen giants become "nurse logs": seedlings take root along their length, so that lines of young trees grow out of the remains of the old ones, and the forest visibly renews itself on its own dead. The floor is a thick mat of sword fern and moss, and the silence is noticeable; a spot deep in the valley was marked in 2005 as "One Square Inch of Silence", a project to protect natural quiet from human noise.
The valley belongs to Olympic National Park and covers about 24 square miles of low-elevation forest along the river, between roughly 400 and 2,500 feet above sea level. Roosevelt elk graze in the meadows and along the gravel bars and black-tailed deer, black bears and banana slugs are all at home here.
Two short loops from the visitor centre show the forest at its most concentrated: the Hall of Mosses (0.8 mile), where the moss-hung maples are densest, and the Spruce Nature Trail (1.2 miles), which reaches the river. The Hoh River Trail continues 18.5 miles up the valley for those with more time. Grey, drizzly days suit the place best: the colours are deepest when everything is wet.
Getting there
The rainforest lies at the end of the Upper Hoh Road, which leaves US Highway 101; the drive from Forks takes under an hour, and from Port Angeles (about 47 km in a straight line, much further by road) around two hours. Port Angeles has a small airport, William R. Fairchild International (CLM). Victoria International Airport (YYJ) in Canada is about 95 km away across the Strait of Juan de Fuca; the Coho car ferry links Victoria and Port Angeles in about 90 minutes. A campground with year-round sites lies in the old-growth forest beside the river. A car is essential.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Hoh Rainforest is one of the largest temperate rainforests in the United States, located on the Olympic Peninsula in western Washington state. It encompasses 24 square miles (62 km2) of low elevation forest along the Hoh River, ranging from 394 to 2,493 feet. The rainforest receives an average of 140 inches (360 cm) of annual precipitation—among the rainiest places in the United States. The Hoh River valley was formed thousands of years ago by glaciers and is the ancestral home of the Hoh people.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
47.86144, -123.92466per Wikidata