The Quinault Rain Forest is better than the Hoh
Trip Start
Jul 10, 2009
1
9
10
Trip End
Jul 19, 2009
Amanda Park, Washington, United States
Saturday, July 18, 2009
The owner, Roz, was happy to tell us her story. She and her husband bought the building the café is in for some dirt cheap price so it is totally paid off. They live in the back, rent office space to the Post Office, run the Internet Café and restaurant and the Visitors Center (for which they only get about $3600/year, but that's better than nothing, plus it brings in customers) and they still find it tough going. She relies on the tourists for most of her revenue. During the tourist season, June and July, she takes in fifteen times what she earns for the rest of the year combined.
That gives you an indication of how bleak the economic situation is there, and as far as we could tell, it’s the same all along the west coast of Washington.
Amanda Park’s most interesting feature is perhaps the Mercantile. This is a General Store and it has everything. Home repair supplies, clothing, groceries, books, DVD rental, snacks, and on and on. There’s not a single level spot anywhere in the place. I was constantly feeling like I was about to tip over!
The day’s agenda was to visit the Quinault Rain Forest. The Quinault rocks. Don’t even bother going to Hoh. You can see everything Hoh had at Quinault, plus they have many more hiking trails. We walked pretty much all day, covering a total of seven and a half miles. And that was on a fraction of the trails. Even better—they weren’t crowded.
I’m not even going to try to describe the forest in words. It’s wonderful and you should go see it for yourself.
At one point on the walk, we had a near miss with a bear. As we started up one trail, a woman warned us about a small black bear further up. I immediately took the lens cap off the camera and took point because I wanted to be the first one to see the bear. Otherwise Julie would see it first (she walks much faster than Valinda or I do) and scare it off. Up we went, with me carefully checking around every bend for a bear. We never saw it, though. But I figure it was really close by, so I’m counting it!
We had dinner at a restaurant called the Salmon House. The food was excellent, and we actually got it quite quickly. Probably because we were the first ones there.
After dinner, we drove about ten miles down the river to hike the trail to Irely Lake. It was marked as a 1.1 mile trail of moderate difficulty.
They have a funny idea of what constitutes "moderate." I’d hate to go on one of the difficult trails. This had lots of ups and downs, and sometimes the path consisted of tree roots with foot-sized gaps between them. It was stunningly gorgeous, and absolutely empty of other humans.
We’d arrived around six pm, which meant there should have been about three more hours of light. But the forest was so dark already that I felt like I was wearing sunglasses. After realizing this wasn’t going to be a quick one mile jaunt, I started worrying a little bit about what would happen if the sun set while we were in there. With no light source, we’d have to just sit on our butts and wait for morning because you’d just kill yourself stumbling around in there in the pitch blackness of night. Julie and I decided we should walk fast on the way in, and meander on the way back when we had a sense of how much light really was left to us. Valinda is a die-hard meanderer, though, and the pace was kind of hard on her. That isn’t to say I was doing so great either. Julie was always way ahead of me, sometimes out of sight, and I was always way ahead of Valinda. Julie and I would each periodically stop and wait until we could see the person behind us. I didn’t usually mind those stops since I was panting from exertion and sweating like mad from the workout plus the humidity.
At one point we came across an area filled with tiny toads, each hardly bigger than my thumbnail. They were everywhere on the paths, and it was difficult not to step on them because they looked just like the tiny pine cones littering the trail, until they moved. In some spots there were so many of them the ground just seethed with their tiny black and brown bodies scurrying to get away from us. Julie came back for me around then. She was afraid I would refuse to walk any further lest I kill a toad. I did my very best not to squish any, but there were so many of them, I’m sure I killed a few. It made me mad at them, for putting me in that position.
Finally, we came to a steep hill going down and Valinda said she was going to wait at the top. Julie and I negotiated the path, sometimes having to sit on a root to get down to the next “step” of the path. It turned out the lake was right there. But we didn’t go all the way down because there didn’t appear to be any shoreline, just marsh.
We’d come to this lake because I’d read a brochure that said there were lots of waterfowl and amphibians there. We’d seen the amphibians, but the lake looked devoid of any animal life. There were huge, white cedar tree skeletons poking up from the water’s depths, giving it an eerie feel. I wondered if any trees had fallen across the path behind us.
There was still plenty of light on the way back. In fact, it seemed like there was more than when we went in. This was our time to meander, and we did, but not in a casual way, oohing and ahing over the sights. We were all so exhausted, we just wanted to get back to our room and go to sleep. By the last quarter mile, Valinda and I were practically stumbling back to the car. Julie, as usual, seemed indefatigable.
That walk was my favorite part of the entire trip.
