OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK — Russ Dalton ran his fingers over a century-old wall inside Humes Ranch, a log cabin 2½ miles from the nearest road inside the Elwha Valley.
“I’ve inspected every log in the cabin and they all have a little story to tell,” says Dalton, a National Park Service historic preservation specialist.
It was Thursday, 100 years to the day that brothers Grant and Will Humes, pioneers of the Olympic Peninsula, officially moved into their one-room wooden shack.
Less than two years earlier, another set of brothers flew into history with the world’s first sustained controlled flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
The Wright brothers might be more well-known, but the Humeses were certainly just as zealous.
“This was the day they carried the stove up,” Dalton said Thursday, speaking of a similar afternoon precisely a century earlier.
“To me that constitutes the first day on the job of living in the place.”
A job indeed.
Will lived in the cabin for 10 years while Grant remained almost until his death 30 years later, forever plowing his name in the Olympic landscape.
“He lived a 19th century life well into the 20th century . . . horseback, kerosene lamps, water out of the creek,” Dalton said.
Park’s oldest building
Humes Ranch is the oldest standing structure inside Olympic National Park and was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
It outdates the park by at least 33 years and was completed eight years before the first Elwha River dam was constructed.
Its place high above the eastern banks of the Elwha River, beyond the Whiskey Bend trailhead, make it an easy day hike and a popular destination.
To approach the cabin from the surrounding meadow is to place a muddy boot in a puddle of history.
“I guess I’d put it this way,” said Dalton, a Port Angeles native whose first backpacking trip as a child was to the cabin.
“You can walk into a little clearing where somebody lived and it’s a little bit of a stretch to imagine HOW they lived.
“But if you can walk up to the old porch and look out, you can have a much greater sense of what it was like.”