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PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

In 1989, Bill Hoke mailed a postcard to Bob Wood asking for directions for a proposed hike in the Olympic Mountains. Back came the first of dozens of multi-page letters from Bob detailing hikes, making suggestions for routes and, over the years, forging a friendship. When Bob began revisions for the third edition of Olympic Mountains Trail Guide, and it became apparent that health challenges would keep him from trail checking, he enlisted the assistance of “four Bills” and Bill Hoke felt honored to be among those helping.

The third edition was published in 2000 and Bob died in 2003. By 2006, first efforts were initiated to begin work on the fourth edition, but it was clear that updating and checking every trail, and adding new ones—much less keeping track of dam removals, road closures, and new road numbering—would take a team effort. The Peninsula Wilderness Club and Doug Savage came to the rescue and, by 2016, trail checking began in earnest.

When Doug Savage moved to the Olympic Peninsula, he took his first sortie into the Olympic Mountains as a totally unprepared novice. Those novice hikes would lead to many more. It wasn’t too long before Doug stumbled by accident across the Peninsula Wilderness Club, a social organization that promotes safe and fun backpacking and mountaineering on the Olympic Peninsula. They quickly taught him the necessity of researching his excursions and introduced him to the second edition of the Olympic Mountains Trail Guide. Many of the old-timers back then referred to it as “the Bible of Olympic Trails,” or just OMTG. The book proved invaluable to planning all kinds of trips, from day hikes to trans-Olympic crossings. Doug has spent the last thirty-plus years of his life hiking and climbing in the Olympics, with OMTG always his go-to reference for planning. When Bill Hoke and Mountaineers Books asked the Peninsula Wilderness Club to assist in the editing of the fourth addition, Doug joined with enthusiasm. And when the club asked him to lead the editing efforts in the edition, Doug said he felt almost unworthy.

A lot has changed since Bob Wood first conceived OMTG: trails have been built or lost, roads closed or added, and floods, fires and erosion have changed the landscape. Where sixty years ago a hiker crossed a fresh clear-cut, there now stands a maturing forest. Changing Bob’s text almost felt blasphemous. With that in mind we approached the fourth edition with the attitude that we would try hard not to change the original text. Bill Hoke’s interest in the revised edition was, first and foremost, to preserve Bob’s voice, and the new team agreed we would be cautious in making any changes and would, in every case, do everything possible to see that it remained Bob’s book. Only if a third edition trail description was inaccurate would we alter it to be relevant. For this fourth edition, maps were updated, driving directions verified, and road numbers checked. New trails, twenty-nine in total, have been added. As best we could we tried to follow in Bob’s style. We have a great trust to keep.

—Bill Hoke and Doug Savage

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

Like its predecessors in 1984 and 1991, this third edition of Olympic Mountains Trail Guide is intended to serve not only as a field guide to hiking the trails of the Olympic Mountains but also as a reference work to consult at home. Although written primarily for hikers and backpackers who are not well acquainted with the Olympics and are therefore seeking ideas about where and when to go, the book can be used by persons familiar with the region and also by armchair adventurers who desire to explore the country the easy way—by reading about it when lounging beside the fireplace on a cold winter evening. I have attempted to describe the roads and trails in helpful language; I have also endeavored to answer the questions invariably expressed by hikers or backpackers: Why go there? Why hike a particular trail?

Essentially, the book has been distilled from my intimate acquaintance with the Olympics during the last half-century. I do not know how many miles I have walked in these mountains, but they number in the thousands. I went on my first hike in 1948, and a year later made my initial backpacking trip. Since then I have hiked, backpacked, and climbed in the Olympics every year, during all seasons, and in all kinds of weather. I have often repeated trips a number of times because I find that hiking familiar trails is much like wearing a comfortable pair of old shoes.

I have also walked many miles—often alone, but usually with companions—beyond the trails, traveling cross-country through forested valleys and canyons, along windswept ridges, and across pathless meadows. I have stood upon the summits of many of the higher peaks a number of times. During the period 1954–85, I participated in twenty-seven climbers’ expeditions to Mount Olympus, during which I ascended West Peak, its highest pinnacle, sixteen times. On several of these climbs I camped overnight on the summit of Five Fingers Peak (West Peak’s slightly lower companion), and as far as I am concerned this experience was the ne plus ultra of my Olympic adventures.

Only in this way, I felt, could I really get to know the Olympics, and when writing about them capture the essence and feel of the country. I have attempted to include all the trails, both in the national park and the national forest, but I am not so naïve as to contend that I have described every footpath created by humans. Not long after the first edition appeared, a young man who prided himself on his knowledge of the high Olympics wailed in heartbroken dismay: “Why, you don’t even have the PJ Lake Trail in your book!” If I have overlooked others, I have not been made aware of them, and they would necessarily have to be either seldom-used way paths or perhaps fragments of long-abandoned trails that have vanished. Nearly all trails of consequence have been included in this book.

I have not, of course, walked every trail during all four seasons of the year; the descriptions therefore depict the country traversed as I observed it during particular seasons in certain years. But conditions vary from year to year, and from one season to another. Hikers are thus likely to note change, because it is inevitable and constant. Few things, if any, are truly permanent. Man-made features such as bridges, paths, and shelters can be destroyed virtually overnight by a fierce storm or more slowly by the insidious processes of erosion. The reader should therefore keep in mind that the text of this book reflects the conditions as they appeared when the writer or his trail checkers were personally on the scene observing the country. But to adopt an old phrase, the bridge that is here today may be gone tomorrow, and visitors to the wilderness should come prepared for change.

During the half-century that has swept by since I began seeking the solitude of the Olympics, considerable change has occurred in other aspects of the wilderness experience. In the good old days fifty years ago, regulations were few, gasoline inexpensive, and backcountry permits, although required, were seldom checked by the rangers. One could camp just about anywhere he or she wished, and fires could be built in any established campsite. One could also drink the water straight from the mountain streams without fear that it might be polluted and cause illness.

Some time along about the mid-1970s, the size of overnight parties going into the Olympics was limited, both by the National Park Service and the US Forest Service, to a dozen persons. Fires were forbidden in most subalpine areas, and a reservation system was adopted for popular areas in an attempt to give everyone an equal opportunity to enjoy this wilderness. The ban on fires was instituted chiefly to save the picturesque “ghost forests” left by natural fires—forests that were becoming increasingly depleted because campers chopped them down for firewood.

When I wrote what became the first edition of Olympic Mountains Trail Guide, I included detailed descriptions of several trails or parts of trails that had been abandoned by the National Park Service and the Forest Service and were no longer maintained. I included them not only to preserve their historical value but also with the hope that putting them in the guidebook would encourage the government agencies involved to reopen these once-excellent trails. Unfortunately, it did not—perhaps not because of disinterest by the agencies but due to limited funds budgeted for trail maintenance and restoration. Be that as it may, abandoning these trails and not showing them on current maps (and letting nature return them to the wild) makes the areas traversed by such trails essentially inaccessible—and thus presents a good argument for deleting these lands from either the national park or the Forest Service’s wilderness areas and again making them available to logging or other commercial activities. If they cannot be visited due to the absence of reasonably maintained trails, why retain these lands in a national park or wilderness area?

By describing all the trails in the Olympic Mountains, it is my hope this guidebook will help disperse visitors and lessen the natural tendency for hikers to congregate on the well-known, popular routes. Many trails that are obscure and seldom used have just as much to offer as do those that are tramped regularly.

It is also my hope that this book will help preserve the Olympic wilderness for hikers and backpackers—not just for the present generation but for future ones as well. I once heard a government official say, with regard to older people who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, or thought they couldn’t hike or backpack anymore: “These people come to us and tell us they are glad we are building logging roads into the backcountry because the roads make it possible for them to visit again the places they hiked to when they were young.” He made the statement to bolster his argument for road building into the remote corners of the wilderness, but of course he was placing a premium on one generation, with little regard for the young men and women of the future. So, too, were the former hikers who expressed their thanks to him for building the roads.

The Olympic Mountains are not as wild today as they were during the pioneer years of settlement in the Pacific Northwest or, for that matter, as they were fifty years ago. Nevertheless, they constitute one of the finest primitive regions remaining in the United States. Most of the area enclosed within the Olympic National Park, plus part of the adjoining national forest, can be accurately defined as wilderness. Thus, when hikers shoulder their packs and start up the trail, the magic of the wild closes around them, invoking its spell of magnetic enchantment.

—Robert L. Wood, 2000