Hoh Rainforest: Twelve Feet of Rain and the Silence of Moss

The Olympic Mountains intercept every weather system that moves in from the Pacific, wringing moisture out of the air the way a hand wrings out a wet cloth. By the time those clouds reach the eastern side of the range, they are nearly empty. The rain shadow to the northeast receives less than seventeen inches of annual precipitation. On the western slopes, above the Hoh River valley, the same weather systems deposit between twelve and fourteen feet of rain per year.

The result is one of the most unusual ecosystems in North America, the temperate rainforest, and the Hoh is its most intact example in the contiguous United States.

Walking into the Hall of Mosses trail, an eight-tenths-of-a-mile loop through old-growth bigleaf maple, is an experience that resists description and rewards slow attention. The maples carry so much hanging club moss and licorice fern that their limbs look like the arms of enormous, shaggy animals. Sitka spruce here reach thirty feet in circumference and live for several hundred years, long enough to watch the surrounding forest rearrange itself around them. The understory is layered, ferns giving way to oxalis giving way to the root mounds of fallen giants, which become nurse logs, which become new trees, a cycle that operates on a timescale a human can observe only in segments.

Acoustic ecologists have measured sound levels in the Hoh and classified portions of it among the quietest places in the contiguous United States. What you hear, if you stop moving and wait, is the sound the forest makes when no human machinery is within range: water on leaves, a branch settling, your own breathing.

The Hoh people have lived in this corridor for thousands of years. The Hoh Indian Reservation sits at the river mouth, a few miles west of where you are standing, surrounded on three sides by the park that came later.