Road Trip to Olympic National Park (Part 2): The Hoh Rain Forest
June 17, 2013
“the leaping greenly spirits of trees . . .”
— e e cummings
Tall trees of the Hoh Rain Forest
Our second Olympic National Park destination was the Hoh Rain Forest. This temperate rain forest gets 12 to 14 feet of rain each year, but we were lucky to be visiting on a sunny day. We began seeing moss-draped trees on the road leading into the heart of the rain forest. Instead of fifty shades of gray, we were seeing fifty shades of green.
Fisherman in the Hoh River
The road into the Hoh valley
Green, green stream
Hall of Mosses trail
Tall trees on a rare blue-sky day
Living giants
New growth on fallen log
Light through a lacey green curtain
Nurse log (fallen tree nourishing new trees)
Rings of a fallen giant
Ground cover
Noah peeking around the trunk of a giant
These ferns reminded me of sea horses
Ferns with Holga-ish effect
190-foot fallen Sitka spruce
Moss-Hung Trees
by Gertrude Gilmore, 1936
Moss-hung trees
Like the mantilla of a beautiful lady’s ghost
Bearing elusive fragrance of a faint perfume
Soft, caressing;
Shaped
Like the wings of huge, inert gray moths, —
Weird and uncertain branches veining them
Gossamer, intangible;
And reshaped
Like fairy cobwebs interlacing mesh upon mesh
With lights of foolish insects caught within them
Restive, darting
With shadows —
Like half reluctant thoughts lately modified
In a world of fantastical shapes and causes,
Mystical, fleeting.
Mossy branches of a maple tree
Moss-laden maple
Rosemary's Blog 
June 17, 2013 at 1:21 pm
Fabulous images
June 20, 2013 at 7:37 am
It’s definitely a fabulous place, and there are no bad views.
June 18, 2013 at 4:22 am
OH myyyyyyyy, the angel/fairy in the tree!
June 19, 2013 at 5:53 pm
Reblogged this on anthonyvenable110.
June 19, 2013 at 8:20 pm
Well, lookie here. That fallen Sitka spruce is the very sort that contributed wood for the mast for the boat I’ve sailed most. You can see the mast in this set of photos. Gosh, I did love that boat.
The Hoh rain forest gets about the same amount of rain as the Liberian rain forest (which gets roughly 140″ a year). The big difference is that Liberia is divided into a wet season and a dry season, so there aren’t the mosses, etc. that you show here. By the time our dry season was over, everything was covered with laterite dust. In fact, one of the most well-known books about Liberia is titled “Red Dust on the Green Leaves”.
June 20, 2013 at 7:33 am
Lovely boat. I bet there are lots of lessons boat dwellers could shard with those of us on land. Have you ever written about that?