PORT ANGELES — To see what transition looks like and to feel it under our feet — this is the place.
Walking across the bottom of the ex-Lake Aldwell, we saw the past and a resilient present, while leaving the future to our imaginations.
This was a free outing, called the Elwha Discovery Walk, and guided by Olympic National Park ranger Brittany Wilmot last Saturday.
Four more of the sojourns, which go for about 90 minutes, will be led by rangers this Saturday and Sunday, and finally on Sept. 29 and 30.
“Every time I come back, I feel like I’m in a different place,” Wilmot began.
“And it is a different place, a different ecosystem. It’s changing,” she added, “every day.”
And so ours was a hike unlike any other, and one studded with astonishing sights.
The ranger provides the context, first off:
Early in the 20th century, two dams were built on the Elwha River to provide hydropower to Port Angeles.
The lower Elwha Dam, a 108-foot-high barrier, formed this lake named after entrepreneur Thomas Aldwell, the man behind the dam.
Ninety-nine years later, the Elwha Dam is gone, torn down amid the National Park Service-Bureau of Reclamation’s $325 million restoration effort.
Lake Aldwell has vanished, too, leaving pebbles, gravel and fine sand behind, along with all manner of small creatures.
We walked among them: minuscule flowers, tiny maple trees taking a foothold among the rocks. A white pine butterfly decided to alight on the hand of a young boy walking with us.
Another sign of nature’s vigor are the trees growing up from the tops of old stumps, from slim, beret-like slabs of dirt.
We also beheld monuments from more than a century ago.
Closer to the river, where the lake was very deep, they’re revealed like islands on a plain: Tree stumps, including one the size of a bungalow kitchen.
Wilmot showed us photographs of those pre-dam days: Lower Elwha Klallam tribal members carrying baskets of salmon, white settlers fishing, and then the dams that stopped the fish.
Out by an especially impressive stump, she showed us a picture of loggers with a “misery whip,” the big saw used over an entire day to cut through the huge cedars and firs.
We could see into a past when the trees were enormous, the river flowed free for 70 miles and the salmon grew to 100 pounds.
And we heard how the dams halted it all; how Lake Aldwell, just 5 miles up the Elwha, inundated this wide swath.
Until just last year, people launched their boats, canoes and kayaks from a ramp at the shallow end where we started our walk. They could paddle to the far end where, Wilmot said, the lake was about 60 feet deep.
In preparation for demolition of the Elwha Dam, draining of the lake began in June 2011, and it was “pretty much gone by December,” Wilmot said.
Dam deconstruction began a year ago, and now the lower dam is completely gone while the upper Glines Canyon Dam, once 210 feet high, is expected to be down by March.
Olympic National Park’s Elwha River revegetation project is in the near future now.
The protracted effort, involving two greenhouses at Robin Hill Farm County Park near Sequim and an army of volunteers, will be another huge undertaking.
The Lake Aldwell area is just one piece of land where more than 400,000 plants go in over several years.
Information about joining the volunteer effort is available by emailing Jill_Zarzeczny@nps.gov or 360-565-3047.
The final stop on Wilmot’s walk was the Elwha River itself, where a certain music plays.
“This is the first time in a long time,” she said, “when people have been able to stand here and listen to the sound of a free-flowing river.”
The Elwha slides gently here, like a relaxed green ribbon. It’s the panorama that impresses: the Elwha Valley stretching out to the south toward the Olympic Mountains, with their patches of snow still aglow in the sun.
As a young family — Mom, Dad and their two blond girls — went straight down to the riverbanks to watch the current, Wilmot said a few more words about the Elwha.
“We don’t know if the main stem will stay here,” on its path past the former lake.
“It will do what it wants.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
