PAT NEAL: Save our campgrounds

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 8, 2026

THESE ARE THE mornings we’ve waited for all winter. When the Olympic Mountains stand up so tall in the clear blue sky, they almost seem like they are about to fall over. But they don’t.

Then again, maybe we should look a little closer at our mountains when we have a clear view and we might notice something.

The white heads of the mountains are looking a little bald these days.

There’s a lot of rocks showing that should be covered with the winter’s snow, but they are not.

That’s a bad sign.

This winter’s snowfall was far from being enough to keep the water running all summer, and that can only mean one thing, a bad fire season.

Far be it from me, as our nation’s only wilderness gossip columnist, to use this valuable print space to spread fear, innuendo and rumor in a country already saturated with Armageddon conspiracy theorists — but anything they can do, I can do better.

The fact is, all of the Olympic Peninsula has burned at one time or another from Hood Canal to Cape Flattery and south to Lake Quinault.

All it takes is an east wind and a spark to get the conflagration going.

Historically, that spark has been lit by humans. In the old days, Native Americans used fire to maintain the prairies that attracted game animals and grew camas, berries and herbs.

Homesteaders came and burned the woods just to create farmland, as trees were seen as an impediment to agriculture.

The pioneers were known to set fires as a form of amusement.

James Swan mentions a stump fire started as part of a Fourth of July celebration on Shoalwater Bay that burned until the fall rains put it out. But that was in 1855, before the land was settled into farms and villages.

The 1951 Forks Fire was a whole different story, burning from near Lake Crescent to Forks in a few hours.

It was only a lucky change in the wind direction that kept Forks from being incinerated.

Even with all the technological advantages we have achieved since then with helicopters, water bombers and fire retardants, last summer’s Skokomish fire raged all summer until the fall rains put it out. That was then, this is now.

We have another dry summer coming on.

You may be wondering what that’s got to do with the subject of this story, saving our campgrounds, so I’ll tell you.

Campgrounds prevent forest fires, and here’s how. When the tourists cruise the campgrounds and find all the spaces full, they are liable to go looking up a logging road to find a place to camp.

You can see where they camped from the innumerable campfire rings.

Many of our tourist campers have no idea our country is flammable. They will build a fire in a patch of dry grass without a second thought, then leave in the morning without putting it out.

Now the state is talking about closing campgrounds on the Lyre River, the Sol Duc at Bear Creek and the Hoh Oxbow. This will inevitably put a lot of campers in the woods, building fires where they shouldn’t.

It is hardly fair to spend all the money promoting the Olympic Peninsula as a tourist paradise and then shut down the campgrounds when the tourists get here.

When darkness falls, tourists are going to camp somewhere, and it is much better for them to stay where the Department of Natural Resources people can keep an eye on them. Keep our campgrounds open.

We’ll thank ourselves later if we do the right thing now.

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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.

He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.