Hurricane Ridge: Alpine Tundra Above the Rainforest

Seventeen miles from Port Angeles, the road climbs from sea level to five thousand two hundred forty-two feet in less than an hour. The forest transitions: Douglas fir giving way to subalpine fir giving way, near the top, to open meadow and exposed rock. At the Hurricane Ridge parking lot, the Olympic Mountains spread in a panorama that includes peaks still carrying glaciers that have been retreating since the early twentieth century.

This is alpine tundra, not a biome most visitors to a coastal rainforest expect to encounter. The same mountain range that deposits twelve to fourteen feet of rain annually on the Hoh River valley, sixty miles to the west, creates a drier alpine zone here where wildflowers bloom in a compressed summer between June and September and black-tailed deer graze openly in the parking lot without much concern for onlookers.

The geological and climatic machinery that makes all of this possible is straightforward: the Olympic Mountains intercept Pacific weather systems. West-facing slopes are among the wettest in the contiguous United States. The east side sits in a pronounced rain shadow. The elevation creates a third zone, cold, windswept, and sunlit in summer, where the ecology resembles northern Canada rather than western Washington.

Looking west from the Ridge on a clear day, you cannot see the Hoh. The distance and the mountains hide it. But you can see the cloud mass that typically sits over the western slopes, the visible sign of the moisture that feeds the rainforest below. The same clouds that build the silence of the Hall of Mosses start their journey here, intercepted by these peaks, then released.