Day 2

Three Forks Campsite

We awoke to clear skies and sore muscles.  After cooking up some breakfast we broke camp and headed up the river valley. A thought that crossed my mind was how soft the ground felt under my feet.  Living in the city, I am used to walking on hard concrete all day.  It felt so nice and soft to walk on the Earth for a change.  The trek was not easy going.  Prof. Billo had mentioned that the Olympics are some of the most active temperate forests in the world. This means lots of disturbances, particularly in the form of fallen dead trees.  The sheer amount of fallen trees and brush obscuring the trail was nothing short of incredible.  We ducked, weaved, leaped, crawled, scrambled, and finally cursed (well I quietly did anyways.)  The amount of fallen trees was primarily the result of a heavy winter snows and flooding.  These are important disturbances because they provide shade intolerant species, slow growing species such as Western Hemlock the opportunity to grow and increases overall species diversity. 

After passing the major section of fallen trees we entered a section of old growth forests.  The trees were massive and some were hundreds of years old.  The big trees, nurse logs, established high canopy, and snags were all hallmarks of old growth.  Unfortunately, our group sort of blew through this section without much stopping (way to go student environmentalists!)

As we progressed we were slowly climbing and as we gained elevation we entered new vegetation zones.  But we did notice a blurring between zones were trees from lower zones were found in higher zones and trees in the higher zones were pushing upwards.  This is most likely due to climate warming trends, which allow lower elevation species to push upwards.  We went from Hemlock to Silver Fir zones.  We passed several avalanche tracks, which create huge disturbances between forest trees.  The power of these disturbances was visually evident.  It was ironically similar in appearance to a small slice of clear-cut but without the depressing factor because these clearings are natural. 

Recovery from a disturbance

We arrived at Camp Ellis and my back was really sore from all the awkward scrambling but I took Advil and applied Bengay.  It was in pretty bad shape and I felt like an old man but the meds did a decent patch job.   I hoped for the best as far as the future of the trip.  Unfortunately, my back hurt the rest of the trip but I didn’t really care.  It’s a consequence of my former years of competitive rowing and the moving job I’ve had the past three summers.  My now good friend Anren had developed terrible knee problems over the course of the day and I felt bad for him.  It looked very swollen and I couldn’t imagine the pain.  I decided that it was unfair to complain when someone was hurting so much worse.   

Camp Ellis

After dinner Julia led a nice little discussion about the loggers perspective and how and why they are at odds with Olympic Park.  A quote that stuck with me was a claim that “scientists are fickle, they change like the wind.”  The quote was complaining about a change in policy that asked first for loggers to remove snags from rivers but then reversed and asked loggers to place snags back in. Frankly, the logger does have a point.  I think that scientists sometimes do make big implication statements that can seem like absolutes but are in fact incomplete or only theory.  It is very important for scientists to clarify the difference between theory and fact when presenting findings to the public especially if these findings have hard labor involved.  As a mover I can say that many do no appreciate how taxing hard labor.  It is the most aggravating thing in the world to be treated as a nothing more than an under paid modern day slave with little regard for your health or safety.  Therefore, it is understandable that this logger became frustrated from excessive work due to what was possibly still just conjecture.  The logger also contended that the logging community understands forests from generations of work and should be given more credit for their understanding, as well as, more freedom to log with fewer restrictions.  It is one thing to ask for more credit during negotiations but another to ask for fewer restrictions.  The logger understanding is entirely based on industry and is anthropocentric with no real regard for species.  Based on historic and current clear-cut policies I do not trust this statement of sustainable forest understanding even remotely.  From my perspective, there is nothing but desire for more money in this logger’s words not a desire for fair sustainable forestry.  My peers generally felt the same way. 

I read several chapters of Call of the Wild and crashed hoping to dream of dog packs.  It didn’t happen.