EVERY YEAR ABOUT this time, people who live in the woods start to get a little nervous.
It’s like the old logger said. This might be a rainforest, but after three days of hot sun, the woods get dry enough to burn.
It’s the moss that catches fire first. Then, before you know it, the rest of the tree catches fire and it’s anyone’s guess how far the fire will spread.
Generally speaking, forest fires are caused by humans since bears and other critters don’t smoke or leave campfires burning.
Like the one in the Hoh Rainforest last week, where someone drove up a logging road to go camping.
They built a fire in a dry patch of grass. Then left it smoldering as they drove off on their vacation, presumably, to start a fire somewhere else.
Fortunately, the state Department of Natural Resources and the Clearwater Corrections fire crews put out the fire after it had spread to about 3 acres.
Forest fires have been burning on the Olympic Peninsula since the forests sprouted after the last ice age.
Native Americans routinely burned prairies to attract game and cultivate camas and other key plants for food and medicine.
These prairies were referred to by Capt. George Vancouver in 1792 as “lawns” reminiscent of his native Dungeness.
In 1846, Charles Wilkes of the American Exploring Expedition described the prairies as “seeming in the utmost order as if man had been ever watchful of its beauty and cultivation.”
That’s because they were cultivated since time immemorial.
Until the arrival of the Europeans, who found the lands readily available for homesteading.
Once the prairies were occupied, the settlers moved inland and began burning stumps to clear land.
Trees were seen as an impediment to cultivation.
They were burned just to get rid of them.
Forest fires were started to celebrate special occasions.
As happened in 1855, when James Swan described a Fourth of July celebration on Shoalwater Bay.
The oystermen filled a hollow cedar stump that was 60 feet around and 20 feet tall with dry spruce limbs and touched it off.
The party agreed they’d never had a “pleasanter Fourth.”
The fire burned until extinguished by the autumn rains.
Other fires were started with a more malicious intent.
As in 1890, where a homesteader in the hills above Sequim tried to burn out a neighbor.
The fire reignited in 1891, creating hurricane force winds pushing the fire from Blue Mountain to the hills above Port Angeles.
Old photographs show bare hills above the town.
The Olympic National Forest was created in 1905.
They built a series of ranger stations, fire lookouts and fire tool sheds connected by trails and phone lines to fight a succession of forest fires that scorched every watershed on the Olympic Peninsula.
With the completion of U.S. Highway 101 between Port Angeles and Forks in 1923, motorists started chucking burning cigarettes out the window.
That’s how the 12,000-acre Sol Duc Burn of 1926 started west of Lake Crescent, burning 11 miles to Bear Creek in five hours — incinerating trees that had been planted in the previous Sol Duc Burn of 1907.
That was nothing compared to the Forks Fire of Sept. 20, 1951, when an east wind pushed the fire 18 miles west in eight hours.
It burned 38,000 acres and almost incinerated Forks before the wind shifted and saved the town.
This scenario was narrowly averted on the Fourth of July in 2023, when fireworks started another fire on the edge of town.
Be careful out there.
The forest you save could be your own.
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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.
