Hoh Rain Forest
Forks, WA
One of the largest temperate rainforests in the U.S., the Hoh Rain Forest receives over 12 feet of rain annually. Massive Sitka spruce, western red cedar, and bigleaf maple trees are draped in thick curtains of moss and ferns. The Hall of Mosses Trail and Spruce Nature Trail offer accessible loops through the old-growth canopy.
Photography Guide
- Best Time
- morning
- Crowds
- Busy
- Shot Types
- widedetaillandscapeportrait
- Best Seasons
- springsummerfallwinter
Author's Comments
There is a particular green that exists nowhere else I have been. Not the green of an eastern forest in June, not the dense tropical green of somewhere humid and equatorial, but something older and more saturated, a green that has had a thousand years to settle into itself. The Hoh in March, just after a rain, is where I found it. The Hall of Mosses gets the attention and it earns it, but the trail is short and by ten in the morning it is full of people speaking in that hushed tone everyone seems to adopt when they enter a cathedral. Get there before the gate opens if you can. The first hour after sunrise is when the mist still hangs in the bigleaf maples and the moss curtains catch a kind of underlit glow that makes the whole forest feel suspended. A wide lens cannot quite hold it. I have tried. What surprises me every time is how much detail there is once you stop trying to photograph the whole thing. The trunks of the spruces are entire ecosystems. Ferns grow out of moss that grows out of bark that is itself slowly becoming soil. I have spent forty minutes on a single fallen log and come away with frames I still return to. Bring rain gear. Not a windbreaker, real rain gear, because the forest will deliver on its name regardless of what the forecast claimed. And then stay longer than you planned. The light in here does not change the way it does elsewhere. It deepens.
Gallery
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