Forests of Rain

The Hoh Rain Forest is what I thought all of the Olympic National Park was like.  Instead, it is a unique area of this large park.  Being on the western side of the Olympic mountains, it is not in the mountain rain shadow.  It gets the full amount of Pacific moisture, and that's a lot.

Having lived in Juneau, Alaska I thought I knew all about areas with high precipitation.  Well, the Hoh Rain Forest area gets over twice the annual precipitation comparatively.  This comes in at just under 12 ft annually.  Juneau is considered a northern rain forest, whereas the Hoh is considered a temperate rain forest.  The result seems to be much larger trees, even more ferns, moss, and broad leaf plants at Hoh. 

One of things we learned that we thought interesting is that baby spruce, firs, and hemlock have a hard time getting a start on the choked forest floor.  Where they seem to get a foothold is on the top of decaying giant older trees that have been blown over in winter storms.  As their roots extend to the ground they begin to take off.  This process creates trees that are growing in a row for up to three hundred feet, the length of the old fallen tree.  These rows of trees are called colonnades.  I tried to get some pictures of various stages of this process.  Also, tried to take some other representative photos as well.  A beautiful,  if not a little creepy, area for sure.

From our camp, as we traveled to the Hoh Rain Forest area of the park, we passed by beautiful Lake Crescent, and a little town called Forks.  Forks is known as the setting for the popular Twilight saga, a series of five romance fantasy books/films that have something to do with vampires.  The town has totally capitalized on this, with tours, special Twilight rooms at the local motel, and even a subway sandwich named the Twilight.  I have not read any of these, or know much at all about them, but it seems to be popular here.  By the way, we were told the films were not filmed here, but the books were set here.  I guess that was enough.