Hoh Hoh Hoh, to the rain forest we go!

I have lived most of my life in the Pacific Northwest. Mountains and trees are in my blood, you could say. When was young, I saw pictures of the temperate rain forests preserved on the west side of Olympic National Park, and knew that I had to go there someday to pay homage to these unique trees.
Well, I finally made it there, after 30 years of waiting. Trees are patient, though, and didn't mind.
I went with my wife and baby daughter, accompanying a friend who was visiting a relative in a work camp in the area.
I had been to Port Angeles before (to take the ferry over to beautiful Victoria, the capital of the Canada's British Columbia), but never beyond. Soon after leaving the city limits, highway 101 plunges into the mountains, heading west. The large tracts of lowland forests were some of the first resources used by the white man in the region, and many are more tree farms than forests. Constant reminders of logging are all around--old stumps, new stumps, signs telling when the region was first cut, when planted, and when the next cut will be. We ate lunch in one of these forests, marvelling at the tangled forest floor and the huge stumps.
These forests once used to be part of the long string of coastal rain forests stretching from California up to Alaska. I love the redwood country, where my father grew up, and this reminded me a lot of that part of the world.
As we ate, I learned how to identify a Sitka Spruce (they don't grow where I am from), and we ate a few nearby salmon berries as we slapped some mosquitoes (standing water is everywhere in these forests--be warned!).
And then we headed up the road to the Hoh rain forest, perhaps the most famous of the three that are features in the park: Hoh, Quinalt, and Queets. (In reality, all of the western facing river valleys in the Olympics are rain forests, including the Bogachiels.) The Hoh is the most easily accessible, though, and is likely the most crowded. The road sometimes runs by the Hoh river. We could see old logging, and new logging, and old plantings, right up to the park's edge, where suddenly the stumps disappear.
The parking lot has an information center (closes at 4 pm, don't forget!), and three trails: a very short paved trail, and two longer loop trails. The parking lot is also the main trailhead for access up the Hoh valley to Mount Olympus itself, a long and demanding multi-day hike/climb.
But we were only here to spend a short time with the trees, and so we did.
The trees were magnificent--huge and lovely. I have never seen trees to rival the redwoods before, yet here they were. (The difference is that down in coastal redwood country, *all* the trees are huge, and some are more huge.) The light was soft and green, and though we had driven through sunlight at the valley head, it was suddenly raining hard--only to stop raining after 15 minutes. The clouds stayed, though--I would like to come back in the sunlight, although it is very hard to find a dry day in this part of the world.
And yet as I looked at the trees, I realized that most people think this rain forest is found only here, or that parking lot, or that one. It used to be one long, unbroken chain, and here we see the last untouched bit.
I have never seen the full extent--it was gone long before I was born, and it is endangered even now further north in Canada and Alaska, where it is still a wild forest and not a park at the end of a paved road. But what I have seen will be preserved for my daughter to see when she is older, and for her future children as well. That, at least, is a good thing.

Looking at maps of the Pacific Northwest, my eyes keep wandering out to the Queen Charlotte Islands, to the Haida Gwai'i. It's a long ways away, but surely I can get there, too...