Olympic National Park, Washington

by Gunnar O. Fagerlund

A visit to the rain forest offers a surprisingly enjoyable experience. Although it is possible to drive through some sections, this provides only a view of the trees. A forest is more than a stand of trees—it includes animal life, smaller plants, and micro-organisms, such as bacteria. All these serve the forest and in turn, their well-being depends upon the forest. They form the forest community.

Splendid examples of rain forest may be seen in the Hoh, Queets, and Quinault Valleys, but the Hoh Valley is the most accessible. A paved road runs 19 miles up the Hoh from U.S. 101, ending 7 miles inside the park boundary where a National Park Service campground has been developed. The Hoh River Trail starts just beyond the nearby visitor center. It extends 18 miles to Glacier Meadow, close to Blue Glacier on Mount Olympus. Approximately 12 miles of it is in rain forest along the valley bottom. Only a small fraction of this distance need be traveled, however, to see the forest.

Unexpectedly, one finds this forest beautifully luminous. It is filled with soft, green light that drops down where it can find room between the towering spruces and hemlocks. In the lower levels of the forest it filters through the translucent leaves of the vine maple and bounces from one green surface to another. Nature, in an exuberant mood, has lavishly decorated this forest with mosses and clubmosses. Moss carpets, with patterns of Oregon oxalis and beadruby, cover the forest floor. The same material upholsters fallen trees and the trunks of those standing. Mosses ascend to the very tops of some of the tallest trees. Arched trunks of vine maple are cushioned with them. Curtains of clubmosses hang from the same archways, separating one green forest room from another.

MOSS AND BEADRUBY PATTERN ON THE FLOOR OF THE RAIN FOREST.

The forest cycle from seed germination to death of giant trees and their return to soil may be seen here in the course of a short stroll. This is a cycle endlessly repeated. No part of it is disturbed by man. Trees felled either by uprooting or by breaking of the trunk are scattered everywhere in various degrees of decay. Rain-forest trees have shallow but widespreading roots. To obtain nourishment, there is no need for deep roots where water is available in dependable abundance. But shallow roots in saturated soil do not always anchor trees firmly enough against storm winds.

Though dead and prostrate, the fallen trees still have an important function in the forest. They are soon accepted into the forest-floor community and become covered with lichens and mosses. Various fungi and bacteria attack them from within. They become nurseries for spruce and hemlock, whose seedlings prefer rotting wood. The most vigorous seedlings outgrow all others and send their roots down the flanks of the rotting log and into the ground. Such old nurse logs, if big enough, will last until the trees they foster grow to large size. Colonnades of huge trees may thus be seen straddling old moldering logs. Seeds may even take root upon a broken stump 12 feet or more above the ground. The roots reach the soil after creeping down the full length of the stump. The result, when the stump rots and crumbles away, is a tree standing on stilts. Thus the forest is regenerated. New life compensates death. There is neither increase nor decrease in total amount. What is dead eventually returns to soil and feeds the living. This is brought about through the work of saprophytes—plants without chlorophyll, the substance which gives plants their green color. They must obtain their food already made and are content to take it dead. Many of these are mushrooms and other fungi with colorful and beautifully shaped fruiting bodies. No better description of their function in the forest can be found than that written by Donald Culross Peattie.

THE SHELF FUNGUS IS ONE OF THE NUMEROUS ATTRACTIVE FUNGI.

Breaking up the debris of what was living, releasing the precious materials in it, these fungi, and certain bacteria, retrieve the vital elements from what would otherwise be a permanent and cumulative and ultimately disastrous loss. They are part of what we call decay, but they are as much a part of life. They turn over its wheels....