I promised to tell you about the hard to get Hoh Rain Forest, so here we go. (You've seen it already, actually.) The famed "Hall of Mosses" is mostly bigleaf maples fuzzy and contorted like Sesame Street characters, but mosses and lichen are all over everything. Sublimely weird, is it beautiful or grotesque?
I guess we don't have that many opportunities to get so well acquainted with the varieties of mosses. There are definitely some I find more fetching than others - lacelike is a plus - but together they form a world of their own deep and rich enough that some tree branches sprout roots to tap into them!
The Hoh Rain Forest is another ancient grove, the ferns and yellow light making it feel positively primeval. One wouldn't be that surprised to come on a dinosaur. I was happy to make do with a little moss-eating squirrel (very cute), but the work some of these trees made of the nurse logs which gave them succor - all that remains are tangles of the new generation's roots - looked pretty gory!
Coming to Hoh at the end of my whirlwind visit, I noted douglas firs, sitka spruces and hemlocks, three of the four characteristic trees of these forests... but where were the western red cedars, the northwestern trees I'd read the most about?
Luckily there were two places promising big cedars on my way back to Tacoma. The first, far into a logging area, claims to be the "world's largest western red cedar" (178' high, though clearly once much taller). Greyish like torqued basalt pillars, its two trunks still supported some branches of green.
But what I've been noticing about cedars was true of this one, too. There were also other trees growing on and in it, especially hemlocks and alders. The big old cedars at right and below, from the second site, show this particularly dramatically. The generous thuja plicata can support a whole world!
Indeed, the western red cedar is apparently known as the "tree of life" to many First Nations of the Pacific Northwest, such as the Kwakwaka’ wakw, but more for its myriad gifts to human culture, and the responsibilities which humans in turn bear for it. (I wonder about the translation, too; one Latin name for these trees is arborvitae!) In any case, I was glad to have a chance to spend a little more time with them.
That's it for my Olympic tree odyssey, though I know I've only scratched the surface. A final stop in the National Park, at a place just called "Beach 1," turned out to be full of Seussian spruce burls, reminding me how much more there's to discover. I'll be back! 
