Hoh Valley drips with mystery
By Diane Urbani de la Paz, Peninsula Daily News
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"People set up beach shanties on the wilderness coastline during the hippie era," said Mike Gurling, who spent 19 years as an Olympic National Park ranger.
Last year he became manager of the Forks Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center, where he encounters another breed of seeker.
"Now people are coming out here for Twilight," Stephenie Meyer's teen romance-horror novel featuring a young vampire undead in Forks.
These days the Visitor Center sends readers on guided "Twilight Tours" of key places portrayed in the book.
"One guy called and said, 'I hear there's a real problem out there with vampires,'" Gurling added.
"When I told him, 'That's fiction,' he said, 'There are werewolves out there, too.'"
Stranger than fiction
Farther into the woods south of Forks, the Hoh River valley promises tales that are stranger — and more wondrous — than fiction, if you ask Jon Preston.
The forest surrounding the Hoh is "like a church, landscaped by God," said Preston, who has spent 16 years working for Olympic National Park.
Much of that time he's been a park ranger with the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center as his base, so Preston has made many treks into the big trees.
The park only maintains a few miles of trail around the South Fork Hoh, he said.
And explorers delve into "this very wild place. I watch rivers . . . The South Fork is different from the main stem of the Hoh. It's an intangible thing, the way it behaves a little differently."
Preston recalled a walk into the woods last February during a dumping-rain storm.
"The trees hold gallons of water in their needles. It was like swimming through these spruces and water," he said.
He saw signs of a cougar, and paused for a while, wondering how close he was to the cat.
Forest primeval
"If you want to experience the forest primeval, this is where you'd come."
Last year, a man appeared in the Hoh Valley with a few thousand pounds of camping gear, Preston added.
After flying from Colorado into Seattle, he had an airport shuttle van bring him and his equipment out to the western reach of Olympic National Park.
"His plan was to come up and spend the winter. He pushed his stuff around with a hand truck. He stayed all winter, and all of a sudden he just vanished."
Long-term camping isn't legal in the park, so the man was told he had to keep moving.
"He had this romantic idea," of remaining in the forest, Preston said. But even the Native Americans wouldn't have lived on the Hoh year round.
"They would have come up by canoe. But it rains too much," to stay through winters.
"We get 144 inches of rain, and 80 percent of that falls between November and April," Preston said.
This place has long nourished folklore, however, about strange creatures who do make the Hoh their permanent home.
"If all the Bigfoots got together and had a conference on where to put their capital city," Preston joked, "the South Fork Hoh would be on their short list."
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
Last modified: July 06. 2008 9:00PM