Pat Neal

PAT NEAL: A historic canoe journey

LISTENING TO PEOPLE complain about the weather on the Olympic Peninsula is evidence we’ve evolved into a nation of wimps. To hear the horrors of… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Co-managed to extinction

IT WAS ANOTHER tough week in the news. The WDFW, aka the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, or “We Destroy Fishing in Washington” depending… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Come for the view, stay for the plastic

PAT NEAL: Come for the view, stay for the plastic

IT WAS DAYLIGHT in the swamp. Something had gone terribly wrong. There was an ominous silence with no reassuring splatter of rain drops hitting the… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Come for the view, stay for the plastic

PAT NEAL: Discovery Pass decision

IT WAS ANOTHER tough week in the news. Blizzards, floods and wind hit so hard this wilderness gossip columnist got a case of the carpal… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: The Hoh rocks

PAT NEAL: The Hoh rocks

IT’S BEEN ANOTHER tough week in the news. The Upper Hoh Road washed out again. This popular entrance to Olympic National Park welcomes over 80,000… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: The Hoh rocks

PAT NEAL: A decade of disaster

BY NOW WE are all fed up with know-it-all newspaper columnists telling us what the most important events of the last 10 years were. Anything… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: The royal visit

IT’S BEEN ANOTHER tough week in the news with the recurring snowmaggedon, the heartbreaking Seahawks playoff loss to the Packers and the month long shutdown… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Rainforest expedition

PAT NEAL: Rainforest expedition

IT WAS A dark and stormy night. Inside the cabin, the wood stove glowed red with venison stew simmering, fresh baked biscuits and a whistling… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Rainforest expedition

PAT NEAL: Happy New Year

THANK YOU FOR reading this. Sometimes I think if you didn’t read this, no one would. Writing our nation’s only weekly wilderness gossip column is… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Merry Christmas anyway

THIS HAS BEEN a controversial Christmas season in the controversial year where everything is offensive if you think about it long and hard enough and… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Yes, Virginia, there is a steelhead

(WITH APOLOGIES TO Francis Pharcellus Church, editor of the New York Sun, Dec. 21, 1897.) I am 8 years old. My family and I have… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Flu season shots help

THIS IS A morning that can make you feel like a spawned-out salmon headed downstream tail first. Now, I am not going to waste valuable… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: The holiday marathon

IT WAS ANOTHER tough week in the news made even tougher by the long Thanksgiving weekend. For one thing, people are questioning the history, ethics… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: A Dirty Thirties Thanksgiving

THIS IS A story of an Olympic Peninsula family celebrating Thanksgiving in the olden days. It was back in the Depression, the Dirty Thirties. Pa… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Our disappearing ferns

IT ALL STARTED with an attempt to share in nature’s bounty and celebrate the harvest of wild foods. It was a bad idea that just… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Bring back the spawners

IT WAS AN early morning on the river. I was launching a boat in the dark. This is all part of a fishing guide’s client-hazing… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Getting along in the country

AN AWFUL LOT of city folks are moving to the country these days and they want to know how to get along with the country… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: A legend of the lost

THIS HAS BEEN a banner year for lost and injured hikers. As of Labor Day, 71 people were rescued or recovered from Olympic National Park.… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Pirates, patriots and plunderers

A LADY SAILED into Port Angeles last week. The replica seemed out of time and out of place with an aura of history when the… Continue reading

PAT NEAL: Stop, drop, cover and hold on

IT’S BEEN ANOTHER tough week in the news. Government officials, geological prognosticators and conspiracy theorists have banded together for Washington state’s Great ShakeOut. This is… Continue reading