Forest repair set for spring

Published 3:50 pm Monday, March 2, 2026

PORT ANGELES — Work to repair damage from a 2021 atmospheric river in Olympic National Forest is set to begin this spring.

Olympic National Forest supervisor Kelly Lawrence presented an update on the forest to the Clallam County commissioners during their work session on Monday.

“So after the atmospheric river in 2021, we’ve been working with Western Federal Lands on the emergency relief for federally owned road repair of many washouts, and that work is scheduled to begin this spring,” Lawrence said.

A contract meeting next week will settle the specifics of the work and the timeline for it, but the project represents $3.4 million in investments after that weather event.

The forest will begin annual maintenance of the roads this month, and about $200,000 in work will take place in Clallam County, Lawrence said.

The next few years will see about $4.7 million in investment from the Forest Service and other sources coming together in the county, she said.

“There’s been some great funding received from the state, from the Recreation Conservation office, to be able to do trail improvements and also serving to help us fund our staff on the ground and provide education and enforcement out on the trails and at the trailheads and in the campgrounds,” Lawrence said.

Another project the forest service will start this spring is the relocation of the Hoh Rainforest Campground out of the floodplain.

The Forest Service will be working with the Quileute Tribe and host an open house this spring to provide more information and to gather feedback about the new campground.

The Forest Service also is working on a revision of the Northwest Forest Plan, which will consider fire and fire resiliency.

On that topic, commissioners heard from Olympic National Park fire operations specialist Ty Crowe, who went over the fire outlook for the Pacific Northwest wildfire season.

“The plan is to hope for more rain and snow,” Crowe said. “It’s been a really pretty mild winter. That doesn’t always indicate fire occurrence; we still need ignitions and whatnot.”

The current status is that 23 percent of the state is under drought while 47 percent is abnormally dry. Snowpack is below average and there is early season dryness. The fuel profile has heavy loading in unmanaged forests and increased ladder fuels due to fire exclusion.

“We’re not historically dry, but we’re dry, so it could definitely be an interesting summer,” Crowe said.

Hiring is starting to fill crews by June 1. There’s a highly skilled crew of about 10 firefighters based in Port Angeles.

The number of crew members who are brought in from other districts will depend on how hot and dry the area becomes and what problems occur.

“We’ll force multiply our staffing here to be here for the hot and dry part of the season,” Crowe said.

Crowe added they’ve been pretty blessed in the last five or 10 years with hiring for the fire season.

“Our tricky thing is finding them housing,” he said. “But generally we have some housing at the park or on the forest side. We have Forest Service housing that we’ll put folks in.”

Maintaining roads in the park and forest is important not just provide access but for fire prevention or fire response, too.

“Some of our planned fuels projects for the future is to just improve access and keep maintaining, especially here where everything is so thick and big and steep that a fire goes through a road, it can destroy it pretty quick,” Crowe said. “So if we can do the thinning and keep it open before the fire goes through there, then we can still have access and get through.”

During an update about Olympic National Park, Superintendent Sula Jacobs said the department has received hundreds of comments about the rebuild of the Hurricane Ridge Lodge.

“We’re still reading through a lot of them and we’re still working with the architectural firm for the design,” Jacobs said. “They focused on a lot of the areas you would expect.”

A risk analysis is being performed on Olympic Hot Springs Road, Jacobs told the commissioners when they asked about the progress being made on its repair.

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Reporter Emily Hanson can be reached at emily.hanson@peninsuladailynews.com.