Mt. Skokomish wilderness

The Hamma Hama River with the Mt. Skokomish
wilderness in the distance.

After a few years living in the Pacific Northwest, I finally made it up to the Olympic peninsula in Washington state for a short vacation with the family earlier this month. Olympic National Park is the main attraction on the peninsula, but there are several wilderness areas immediately adjacent to the park. We had several days of outdoor adventures in Washington that I will highlight in the next couple of posts.

Our first night on the peninsula we camped at the Hamma Hamma campsite in the Olympic National Forest on the SE side of the mountain range. The Hamma Hamma River tumbles out of Mt. Skokomish wilderness to flow into Hood Canal. I woke up about 5:30 AM to the sound of all sorts of singing birds competing with the sound of water rushing down the river. After breakfast and packing up camp, we continued up the valley to the end of the road at the Mildred Lakes trailhead. We hiked several miles into the wilderness on a steep trail that was only poorly marked in several sections. Most of the trail navigated through dense coniferous forest. Because the kids were with me and we had no real navigation guides, we turned back when following the trail became pretty difficult. Unfortunately, I think the point at which we turned back was only a short distance from the intended destination so we missed the lakes this time around.

Adiantum aleuticum.

Along the trail, there were all sorts of coastal temperate forest species present, virtually all of them familiar to me from my explorations in Oregon. Trees included douglas fir, western hemlock, cedars, vine maples and alder. Other plant species I recognized included:
- sword fern (Polystichum) and bracken fern (Pteridium)
- deer fern (Blechnum spicant)
- five finger fern (Adiantum aleuticum)
- wild ginger (Asarum caudatum)
- thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus)
- salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis)
- red columbine (Aquilegia formosa)
- cow’s parsnip (Heracleum maximum)
- false Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum)
- salal (Gaultheria shallon)
- Castilleja, Trillium, and Clintonia uniflora
- bunchberry (Cornus unalaschkensis)



Wild ginger (Asarum caudatum). Note the single purple flower
below the leaves. The flowers aren't always very obvious
from a hiker's vantage point, so be sure to look under the leaves!

One of the most ecologically-interesting phenomena I encountered was a huge clearing in the forest that appeared after perhaps a mile and a half into the trail. The clearing was several hundred meters in width and ran down the hillside, with an abrupt border of erect conifers. Clearly, this disturbance was a historic avalanche of some sort, perhaps caused by snow or a rock slide. The clearing was full of old woody debris from trees that were victims to the incident and vegetated by shrubby and herbaceous plants such as Heracleum maximum and small trees. Given the degree of re-vegetation at the time of my visit, I guess that the landslide could have occurred some 5-15 years ago.



Avalanche site, with intact coniferous forest to the left.

The role of sudden large-scale disturbances on ecosystem structure is a fascinating topic in ecology. Examples of these types of disturbances include hurricanes in coral reef ecosystems and avalanches or volcanic eruptions in montane forests. Their temporal nature is fascinating – the exact timing and location of these impacts are unpredictable, but the fact that they are bound to happen sooner or later is rather predictable. Large-scale, low frequency disturbances introduce an interesting historic component to why any particular ecosystem is structured the way it is at any given point in time. Once such a disturbance occurs, it resets the successional clock in an ecosystem. An avalanche in a forest may wipe out dominant late-successional tree species and thereby initiate a sequence of colonization that starts with pioneering species that successfully colonize the disturbed habitat.

Such disturbances are also difficult to study in real-time, because they occur on ecological time scales that are long relative to our own lifetimes. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, volcanic eruptions or massive subduction earthquakes may occur only once every few decades or centuries, but they have dramatic impacts on ecosystems. How cool it would be to have something like a time-lapse movie to view hundreds of years of ecological history at any given place!

Willamette wildernesses

I visited two new Oregon wilderness areas this month, both situated on the western slopes of the Cascades. The sites were similar in terrain and flora, but conditions were markedly different. My visit to Menagerie on 8 October was at the tail end of a 3 month span of almost completely dry weather. Just a few days later the rain returned to the northwest. By 20 October at Opal Creek I was hiking in rain and hail.

Menagerie

The Menagerie wilderness lies just north of US route 20 in the Willamette National Forest. The trail from Trout Creek and US20 to Rooster Rock is almost a continuous ascent, terminating with a bit of switchback at the top. The Rooster Rock peak approaches 3600’ elevation, not terribly high, but it is about the highest point within decent radius. Two of the three peaks of Sisters were visible to the ESE and there was snow still present there. The lower part of this trail was vegetated by (apparently unlogged) Douglas fir forest with many big leaf maples and an understory of sword ferns, salal, other maples and Oregon grape. Western hemlock appeared to become more common as I gained elevation, as did rhododendrons. Towards the summit of Rooster Rock madrones appeared (impressively tall examples of this species) and the understory vegetation became less dense. In the fairly rocky soil at the top of this hill there were manzanita, and sloping to the north, cedars. Nothing seems to be in bloom, but some leaves are changing colors – yellow rhododendron leaves and red splashes of Oregon grape and poison oak and maples.

Vine maple, Acer circinatum.

Rhododendron.



A stately madrone.

Opal Creek

Much of the vegetation here is like the Menagerie – Douglas fir, western hemlock, lots of salal, maples – and at higher elevation, manzanita, rhododendrons and deer grass. Many of the trees on the south face of the mountain are shorter and in high densities, though there is no obvious sign of logging here. Maybe this is evidence of an intense fire some decades ago. I started my hike late in the day so I was not able to make it quite to the top of the Henline Mountain trail. The impressive gorge of the Little N Santiam River runs east to west and would be in plain view if the gray cloud had not overtaken in the later afternoon. I reached the “snowline” on my hike, though there was only a relatively light dusting on the trees and exposed rocks.

(Clouds creeping up the valley. Movie from just outside the wilderness.)

 

New snow.