Forks: The Town at the Edge of the Rainforest
Near Forks, Washington
Forks sits at a crossroads of rivers and weather in the northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula, where three rivers, the Sol Duc, the Bogachiel, and the Calawah, converge to form the Quillayute River a short distance to the west. The town takes its name from that convergence, the forks of the rivers. It is surrounded by one of the most extraordinary environments on the continent.
The Olympic Peninsula receives more rainfall than almost anywhere else in the contiguous United States. Forks itself averages somewhere between one hundred ten and one hundred thirty inches of rain per year, a total that places it among the wettest cities in the lower forty-eight states. That rainfall, carried inland from the Pacific by prevailing winds and squeezed from the clouds as they rise over the mountains, sustains something rare: a temperate rainforest. The forests around Forks are not the tropical rainforests of equatorial regions. They are the quiet, green, deeply layered forests of the northern Pacific coast, where centuries-old Sitka spruce and western red cedar and Douglas fir grow so large that the base of a single tree can be wider than a road, and where every surface, from rock to branch to fallen log, is covered with multiple kinds of moss.
To the east, the Olympic Mountains rise dramatically, holding glaciers that have persisted through the warming of the twentieth century. To the west, the Pacific Ocean is a short drive, and the coast that meets it is one of the wildest stretches of shoreline in the country, protected as part of Olympic National Park.
The town itself is small, a few thousand people on a flat prairie at the western edge of the mountains. But the country around it is enormous. The Hoh Rain Forest, one of the best-preserved temperate rainforests in the world, begins just south of town. The Sol Duc Valley, with its hot springs and legendary salmon runs, opens to the northeast. This is a place where the human town is genuinely small relative to the land around it.
