Location Taken: Olympic National Park, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008
Ever since I first heard of them, I wanted to visit the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. I mean, it’s a forest where it rains a whole freaking lot (which I love) and isn’t in lands where the temperatures are always in Sharayah-melting zones (unlike the classic tropical rainforests)!
So the very first time I headed to the west coast, I made sure that a stop to one of the rainier sections of Washington was on our itinerary. So as part of our tour of Olympic National Park, we stopped at the Hoh Rainforest, nestled in just the right part of the Olympic Mountains. It gets 12-14 feet of rain a year, so it definitely qualifies as a rainforest!
And it was just as I imagined: moss covered trees, moss covered paths, moss covered telephone booths, happily flowing rivers and streams, large wildlife just wandering around eating moss, the sun shining brightly overhead…
Yeah, it wasn’t raining.
It was summer, after all. That’s the dry season in the region And it had been a drier than normal spring too. So all the moss was that yellow-green they get when they’re conserving moisture while waiting for the rains to come, which isn’t anywhere near as pretty as the vibrant greens they have otherwise.
In fact, for that whole ten-day vacation in an area famed for its rain, we got only one tiny sprinkle that barely got the ground wet. It was oddly disappointing.
I’ve been back in the Seattle area since then, including during the rainy season, and the weather was quite pleasantly wet then. But I haven’t made it back to the Hoh yet. At some point I shall have to go out there and see the place in all its wet, dripping glory.
