OFTEN WHILE GLIDING along the paved roads of the Olympic Peninsula, you wonder at the difficulty of travel in this land before the age of the automobile.
Before there were roads, there were railroads. Before there were railroads, there were trails.
The Native Americans made the first trails probably following the seasonal migration paths of elk. Elk routinely found the easiest way through the rough country. Lt. Joseph. P. O’Neil, who started building trails into the Olympics in 1882, soon learned the elk trails were the only way through the country even if they were going the wrong way.
Unfortunately, elk trails tend to disappear altogether just when you really need them. That’s when the pioneers would break out the shovels, axes, mattocks, saws and dynamite, and the fun began.
Building trails in the rainforest in the West End of the Peninsula was even tougher than that. After a season of rain, a horse would sink in up to its belly in wet spots on the trail. There was only one thing to do.
They built what was called a puncheon trail made of wood. Puncheon trails were built with the most abundant building material available at the time, Western red cedar. It’s resistant to rot. Cedar logs buried in the mud for a thousand years can be as sound as the day they fell down.
Building a puncheon trail was a big job, since it involved cutting and splitting thousands of board feet of lumber from raw logs and packing the wood 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 settlers built 10 miles of trail south to the Bogachiel. That trail linked up with the trail coming from Lake Crescent and reached south to the Queets River.
In 1909, The Olympic Leader announced it was possible to ride a horse from Port Angeles to Grays Harbor on a wooden trail. With the coming of the automobile, work began on the Olympic Loop Highway, today’s U.S. Highway 101.
In October 1927, a “gasoline shovel,” a Best 30 H.P. tractor and a Fordson tractor, was landed in a barge at the mouth of the Hoh River to begin blasting their way south through the rocks to Ruby Beach.
In August 1931, the Olympic Loop Highway was completed. The fact that we could build this engineering marvel with hand labor and antique machinery during the Great Depression begs the question: Why can’t we maintain our roads with our modern technology now? It’s our duty as a society to maintain the roads our forefathers built.
The South Shore Road up the Quinault River and the Olympic Hot Springs Road up the Elwha remain closed after the rivers took them out.
Fortunately, the Upper Hoh Road has been repaired.
It washed out last December, closing access to the most popular entrance to Olympic National Park, where, last year, 175,000 vehicles ponied up an entrance fee to get in. For a while, it did not look like the road would be opened. Then the community got involved, collecting $27,000 to jump start the state and Jefferson County to plunk down $623,000 to get the road open. Seton Construction got to work and finished the job in a couple of weeks.
This Thursday at noon, there will be a ribbon cutting, opening the road and the Hoh Rainforest with Gov. Bob Ferguson, state Rep. Adam Bernbaum, the Jefferson County commissioners and the Hoh Tribe in attendance, and we’re all invited!
Book signing
On May 10, from noon to 4 p.m., Pat Neal will be signing copies of his latest book at Jerry’s Bait and Tackle located at 2720 E. U.S. Highway 101 in Port Angeles.
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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.
