Olympic Hot Springs

Author's Comments

The road washed out years ago and was never repaired, and that is the whole reason this place still feels like what it is. You walk in. Five miles each way, sometimes more depending on where you have to leave the car, and the distance is the filter. By the time you reach the pools you have earned the steam rising through the cedars, and the people who are already there have earned it too, which changes the feeling of arriving. The springs themselves are modest. A handful of soaking pools tucked into the moss along Boulder Creek, some warmer than others, the rock around them slick and dark and old. I have been here in early October when the alders were turning and the steam caught the late morning light coming sideways through the canopy. That is the photograph if you want one. But honestly I find this is a place that resists the camera a little, and I have come to think that is part of what it offers. The frame never quite holds what the body feels in the water with cold forest air on your face. Bring everything you need and carry everything out. There are no facilities, no rangers checking on you, no signs telling you what to do. The Elwha valley around you is in the middle of one of the great rewilding stories on the continent, the dams gone now, the river finding its old shape again. Sit in the water long enough and you can almost hear it happening. This is a place to go slowly, photograph sparingly, and leave smaller than you arrived.

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