BUILDING ROADS ON the Olympic Peninsula has always been a challenge. In the days before roads, people traveled along beaches at low tide when the surf was low enough to not pound you into the driftwood.
Coming to a headland, a trail would be cut up and around the high ground through country that was described by one pioneer trail crew member as “a crosscut saw business side upwards with the devil on one side and hell upon the other.”
The first roads weren’t roads at all. They were more like wide trails that followed the river valleys.
Slashing a trail through the brush and blowdowns was only the beginning. After a rain, a trail turned to mud. A horse would sink up to its belly. There was only one thing to do.
They built what was called a puncheon trail that’s made of wood. Puncheon trails were built with the most abundant building material available at the time, cedar slabs. The Western red cedar is an aromatic wood that is resistant to rot. Cedar trees can be buried in the mud for hundreds of years and be as sound as the day they fell down.
Building a puncheon road was a big job, since it involved cutting and splitting thousands of board feet of lumber from raw logs with hand tools and packing the 8-foot-long boards to make the trail. What would become known as “The Pacific Trail” was started in Forks in the fall of 1890, when Chris Morgenroth and a crew of 14 West End homesteaders built 10 miles of trail south to the Bogachiel River.
In December 1892, they continued south to the Queets River, where a group of families from Tacoma had been induced to homestead.
The country between the Queets and the Bogachiel to this day might best be described as a brush-choked quagmire cut with deep canyons of rain-swollen streams amid impassable sections of fallen timber.
Imagine walking through this country with nothing but a few dead-end elk trails to follow, a compass and only a vague idea of where you’re going. Of course, you would be soaking wet all day with no way to get dry at night.
Jefferson County Engineer Ed Walker and a group of volunteer homesteaders spent 60 days surveying through the rain and wind to locate 60 miles of trail while reduced to a diet of bear meat and spawned-out salmon.
In 1909, the Pacific Trail was completed with connections to Goodman Creek, the Upper Hoh River and Oil City. Meanwhile, a trail had been blasted out of the shear rock cliffs on the south side of Lake Crescent, which connected Port Angeles with Forks. The Olympic Leader announced it was possible to ride a horse from Port Angeles to Grays Harbor.
In 1922, the trail around Lake Crescent was replaced by a road. By 1931, the Olympic Loop Highway (U.S. Highway 101) was completed by roughly following the route of the Pacific Trail.
Ever since then, Highway 101 has been maintained at great expense due to the harsh climate and active geology.
These days, this historic road faces another challenge. The state is replacing culverts in creeks that block fish passage. The trouble is, many of these creeks have no fish to begin with. So, we build million-dollar bridges for imaginary fish. Up on the divide between the Hoh and Bogachiel rivers, they replaced a culvert with a bridge, then put in another culvert just downstream of the bridge.
That’s OK. There are no salmon in the creek anyway. I hope someone is studying the problem.
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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.
