Sol Duc: Sparkling Water, Three Thousand Years
Near Forks, Washington
The name Sol Duc comes from the Quileute language. It means, approximately, sparkling water. The Quileute and Klallam peoples used these hot springs for thousands of years before the first commercial developer arrived in nineteen twelve to build a resort on the site.
The springs reach temperatures between one hundred and one hundred four degrees Fahrenheit. They are not volcanic in origin; the heat comes from geothermal gradient, water percolating through rock that sits close enough to the earth's interior to return warm. The mineral content is mild compared to many famous hot springs, but the temperature is consistent year-round and the setting, in a valley of old-growth Douglas fir and Sitka spruce inside Olympic National Park, makes the soak memorable.
The resort built in nineteen twelve burned down in nineteen sixteen. It was rebuilt. The current facility is the third version on more or less the same footprint. That cycle of development and destruction at a site people have been drawn to for millennia suggests something about the nature of the springs themselves: they outlast their enclosures.
A mile from the resort, the Sol Duc River drops off a basalt ledge in four separate chutes, each falling forty or fifty feet into a narrow canyon. The trail from the resort to the falls is eight-tenths of a mile on mostly flat ground. Most people staying at the resort do not walk it. The falls are quieter than the springs, and in the right light, particularly in the morning, the canyon fills with mist the way the old descriptions of the land must have described it before anyone wrote anything down.
