The rainy season's a nice time to visit Hoh Rain Forest

When I asked Manitou Lodge proprietor (and molecular biologist) Ed Murphy how people entertain themselves during the rainy season out on Washington's westernmost edge, he dropped his American accent and lowered his voice an octave. Out tumbled a soft, Scottish burr that sounded eerily authentic. "One time I dressed up like Mel Gibson in 'Braveheart,' down to the face paint," he intoned. "My Robbie Burns recital brought down the house in Forks."

I, and a lot of others, make a sport of rainy-season whining in drippy Seattle. However, we have nothing on our wetter cousins on the Olympic Peninsula's upper west coast. We average about 35 inches of rain a year, while they got 30 this January alone. We limp along with wine bars and the Indoor Sun Shoppe. They survive on the Hang-Up Tavern and Scottish poetry. I had only visited a couple of times, and always in summer, with the rest of the tourists. This time, I decided to tromp out for a couple of days in the off-season. Instead of heading south to beat the rain, I'd go west and join it. With Forks, Clallam County — at about 4,000 residents, the area's hub — as my home base, I'd experience the real "West End," as the Chamber of Commerce had taken to calling it. It is a place of storm-tousled beaches; dense, damp forest; and tiny, tight-knit communities.

As it turned out, my recent visit coincided with a cold, dry spell. The loaner foul-weather gear at the Miller Tree Inn in Forks, my first night's lodging, filled the closet. Local residents assured me this wasn't the normal state of things.

"It can rain for days on end," said Mike Gurling, Forks resident and a resource educator for the National Parks Service, who was leading me on a walk in the Hoh Rain Forest one morning. "And by the end of each day, it will have rained 3 to 4 inches."

I was a little disappointed to miss the fun.

But I was a weather dilettante — as a writer, I could do my job under just about any conditions. Out here, people don't just think of the weather as entertainment, or an inconvenience. Rain can decide your paycheck. For fishermen like Robert Kratzer, owner of Angler's Guide Service, this year's heavy precipitation was a serious problem — it had thrown off a month of business. Storms flooded the beautiful, short-run rivers like the Calawah and the Hoh, which entice anglers here from as far away as New York, clouding the waters with mud and debris.

Kratzer had waited out the deluge tying tackle and shuttling his kids to school, but with the clouds blown past, business was up. As he sat in the Miller Tree's genteel dining room in his ball cap and mud-streaked rubber boots, he insisted that the rain came down fast, but moved on just as quickly.

"There's more rain here, but there's more sun, too," he said, comparing his town to mine. Sometimes, that might be true. Storms don't get trapped on the west side of the Olympics in the same way they do in the Seattle area, which is caught between two mountain ranges.

Either way, how could he be so optimistic about the very thing that had spoiled business? "Rain is what raises our rivers up," he said. "It's what brings fish into our river system. It's why the rivers here are so good."

If I'd come to fish, I was in luck. If I'd come to wander, tourist-style, I'd need to look harder. There isn't much to "do" in town for a visitor, if "doing" means the usual tourist activities. There's no fish-throwing at the market, and the tallest monument might be the reproduction fire lookout at the Timber Museum.

Clothes shopping will only excite you if you're filling out your wardrobe of Carhartts. There are a couple of small art galleries, so stock up on hand-turned wood bowls at the West Wind, and then breathe deeply. Breathing is a great activity in Forks, which experts say has the best air quality of nearly anywhere in the country.

Meat-and-potatoes people

Eating is a different matter. When I arrived in town in late afternoon and asked about dinner options, two Chinese restaurants and a Mexican taco stand were the only recommended choices. I had good meals during my stay, but in a town named Forks, I thought there might be more of an emphasis on food.

At the Forks Timber Museum, I learned that the area's culinary heritage was defined less by recipes than calories — an estimated 8,000 of them a day for every man in a turn-of-the-century logging camp. Was there a local cuisine, I asked museum manager Sherrill Fouts? "Meat and potatoes," she replied. Both of her grandmothers had been cooks in logging camps.

Fouts explained that although there were people in town working to encourage tourism, many longtime residents were resistant to such efforts. The attitude, she said, is that people can come if they want, but the town shouldn't have to change to accommodate them. "You're working with people who have been quite independent for a long time and made a point of it," she said. "People get their backs up."

To weather the rains of winter and spring here, she told me, takes a certain character. Not one that requires amusement in the form of boutiques or fancy dinners. "You have to be a person who doesn't need to be amused by outside things. People here do things."

As I approached the exit, she pointed across the street to an expanse of open grass, where at least 70 Roosevelt elk were browsing grass; it was the biggest group of large mammals I'd ever seen in one place. Also, she said, "You've gotta think that's fun."

Lonely growing season

I did think watching elk was fun. Even better was seeing them in the Hoh Rain Forest, a sightseeing bonanza. Forty minutes from Forks, past the Hard Rain Cáfe and well into the moss-cluttered trees, Gurling slowed his van so we could look at two speckled brown grouse hunkered in roadside grass.

A minute later, we rolled to a stop, and I rolled down my window to see elk calmly munching only a few feet from the car. Tender young grasses and ferns grow up here, said Gurling, because the park mows these areas to increase visibility for motorists. Winter light filtered down from the increasingly dense canopy onto the brown-black fur of the enormous animals. They stood in silence; it was like looking at a painting.

The visitor-center parking lot, full most of the summer, held a pair of lonesome cars. About 250,000 people visit this park each year, but most are here in summer. On a damp, late-winter day, the trails in one of the only temperate rain forests on Earth might be visited by fewer than two dozen people.

Bill Rohde, a district ranger, told me he loves the off-season here. "Storms make winter interesting," he said. He's stood outside and watched trees fall in the direction of the building. "It sounded like freight trains moving."

In the forest, bears and perennial plants don't get Seasonal Affective Disorder; they simply go dormant. For the rest of the species, rains are a boon. Trees cathedral up, out and in any other direction they can take. Some of them can grow 3 to 4 feet a year. Most have trunks so swaddled in moss and lichens that it's hard to tell the skin of a Western hemlock from that of the Douglas fir or Sitka spruce.

Skeins of moss dangle from the outstretched arms of big-leaf maple. The stepping stones across a seasonal creek are capped with moss, and the forest floor is so dense with growth, from ferns and oxalis (a clover-like plant which dies back in winter, but fills in every gap in spring) to moss and shrubby understory, that it's tough for a new tree to find room.

Seedlings that land on decaying logs are in luck — they sink their roots, and suck up moisture and nutrients. Colonnades of trees, growing in straight rows, were once seedlings sprouting side by side along the same enormous log. Under many of these trees the original log base has rotted away, leaving them with the appearance of standing on stilts.

Gurling tucked his fingers into the crumbling end of a rotting cedar log and pulled out a soft, porous chunk of red wood. He squeezed it, and here came the rain: pink water that trickled down his wrist.

A tick-tick-tick of tree needles landing on the forest floor reminded me that normally it would sound like rain here, too. And it would again in a couple of days. By the end of February, the green tips of salmonberry leaves hint at winter's decline, and in March their bright fuchsia flowers herald spring, but the rain keeps coming, although in smaller quantities in the months approaching summer — an average of 14 inches in March, and 10 in April, until the relative drought of July, with only 3 inches.

A solitary coast

That night I stayed at the Manitou Lodge just outside Forks, a big cedar structure whose cozy sitting room was stocked with teas and coffee, a fireside couch, and an abundance of books and magazines. I was the only guest. I added sleeping to my list of area activities; that night, in the silence, I sank into the hardest snooze I'd had in a year.

The next morning, another dazzling day, I visited Rialto Beach, a few miles down the road. It had been a couple of years since I'd seen one of the world's wildest and most dramatic beaches. Mine was one of two cars in the lot.

After clambering over driftwood piles, I found myself gasping — here were the immense jutting sea stacks of Cake Rock and Hole-in-the-Wall. There was forest all the way to the edge of the driftwood. Thousands of logs were washed up on the rocks, and a few had root wads as wide and tall as a city garage.

I couldn't see the other person, or people, who were out there somewhere. In tourist terms, it was like stopping by the Louvre and finding it empty.

All I was missing was rain.

Maria Dolan is a freelance writer based in burgeoning Ballard. Outdoors, she loves camping, hiking, kayaking and birdwatching. Indoors, she's a neighborhood booster who loves the Tractor Tavern, Oaxaca tacos and Velouria T-shirts. She is co-author of "Nature in the City: Seattle" and author of "Outside Magazine's Urban Adventure: Seattle."