IT WAS DAYLIGHT in the swamp. The drumming of rain on the roof announced another damp and dreary day in the darkest part of winter.
Someone once said, if you don’t like the weather around here, wait five minutes and it will change. We’ll complain about that, too. Here on the Olympic Peninsula, complaining about the weather is a way of life.
Give up on that and we’d have very little to talk about.
Life goes on. There’s only one thing to do. Get up and empty the rain gauge. Which I’ve been doing so often it gave me the carpal tunnel thing.
In the gloom and fog, I heard a sound like a rusty hinge. It was the call of the little green tree frog announcing that if spring wasn’t on the way, it wasn’t that far away either.
There was observed a large banana slug climbing up the wall and soiling the side of the house, causing me to give up plans for gardening and just go back to bed.
I’m not complaining about the weather.
History helps us realize the only thing worse than constant rain is endless snow. The farther back you go into history, the nastier our weather seems to have been.
Even more remarkable is the fact that our forefathers and mothers suffered these natural disasters without the modern conveniences and social support provided by electricity, gasoline and telephones.
1916 was remembered as the year of “The Big Snow.” It started snowing in January and kept on falling until there was up to 6 feet in Port Angeles.
Twenty feet of snow was reported at the Olympic Hot Springs, which would have been a great place to ride out the storm.
There was no recorded depth at Hurricane Ridge because there was probably nobody up there but trappers and varmint hunters, and if they bothered to measure snow, they didn’t mention it.
Just a few years earlier, we had the hard winter of 1893.
That’s what the old-timers called “the winter of the blue snow.”
Snow started falling in Port Angeles on Jan. 27 and fell every day through Feb. 7, until 75 inches was measured on the ground. The temperature fell to 1 degree below zero.
On New Year’s Day 1890, the Press Expedition reported that it snowed 3½ feet on the upper Elwha River. By Jan. 4, the snow was 4 feet deep.
Later, the Expedition’s journal related less precise measurements. They mentioned the snow being waist deep, then neck deep before they just gave up measuring the snow altogether.
Just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, it started raining — making progress upriver even more difficult. Imagine slogging through the snow with 100 pounds of bacon and beans on your back and 40 pounds of wet snow sticking to your snowshoes. Then sleeping under a “half-blanket” next to a roaring fire under the stars.
Sorry I missed it.
That was the year the Queets River completely froze over after six weeks of frigid weather that started in February and ran through March.
There was 6 feet of snow reported at Lake Quinault.
This winter has brought us a soggy train of windswept rain.
At least it isn’t snowing.
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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.
