Rainforest

 

Olympic National Park is one of the most remote wilderness places anywhere in the US. Exceptionally rainy -on the park’s west side some 12 feet of rainwater falls annually- specific temperature conditions, moss-covered trees, epiphytes plants, towering giant trees and nurses logs, characterize this unique ecosystem. Majestic firs, cedars and hemlocks seem to touch the sky, reaching heights of 200-300 feet. Here in the canopy, flying squirrels and marbled murrelets nest secretively amid abundant mosses and lichens.
From the tops of the trees to the forest floor, mosses, lichens, fungi, and epiphytes (plants growing on other plants) form layers and layers of green. The diversity of life in the rainforest is enormous and it has been said that the Hoh Rainforest has the greatest weight of living matter on earth. The understory of small trees, shrubs, and snags is also dressed in fine, green drapery.

I had the chance to explore some of the world’s best examples of a temperate rainforest, deep in the Bogachiel, Hoh, Queets and Quinault rainforests. The park’s four rainforests are part of a huge Pacific Northwest rainforest that once stretched from Oregon’s southern coast to southeastern Alaska. Because of development, very few temperate rainforests exist along this stretch today and only few pockets in the rest of the world.

In the era of Anthropocena, the natural world tends to be apprehended through the prism of environmental issues and of something that gradually becomes a struggle to protect. And as tropical forests are disapearing at a dramatic rate worldwide and in Europe a real primeval forest is now only a memory, may these images, tributes as they are to the primordial feelings that can only come from a place expressing itself in all its original naturalness, give us some viewpoints from which we may ask ourselves the question about the relationship of our societies with our, and the rest of the world's, true wilderness places.

So please, do take a moment for a visual immersion into the lush, misty, unique fragrant community known as the Olympic Temperate Rainforest.