It's raining outside for the first time in twenty-some days. That's unusual for this part of the country. As I look out my office window at the clouds piled up over the Olympic Mountains, I am reminded of a time there - when it was raining for real.....

The Bear

The Olympic Peninsula. The most northwestern land of the continental US. Still isolated by lower 48 standards, even today. Roads surrounded it. US highway 101 encircles it on the East, north and west sides. There is no way across this mountainous region except by walking. Or flying. Light plane pilots tend to avoid flying over the center of the area because of the problem that a forced landing would entail. Having flown often over the Cascades - following one of the highways that provide ground passage - I feel reasonably secure in that an unexpected landing could be effected within a reasonable distance of a highway or at least a logging road, and with some reasonable hope of success. Not so on the Peninsula.

From my earliest arrival in the Northwest I had been drawn to this remote area and had made the car trip around the Peninsula several times. My foot ventures had been extremely short and by way of trails, never more than a mile or two from the road, so I was very unfamiliar with the terrain. I had, however, been working in the woods for six years - in the Cascades of Washington and Oregon - when I arrived for my first taste of life in the Olympic Mountains. My trusty partner Dan had followed me once again on a contract job with the Forest Service, this time to examine stands of timber that ranged in age from about ten years up through old growth. It was in one of these younger stands of ‘reprod’ that we found ourselves this particular day.

Even if I tell you, it’s hard to believe what things are like off the road in the western reaches of the Olympic Peninsula. To say that it rains here is a ridiculous understamement. It rains here most of the time. There are times in the summer when you may get weeks of good weather, but this was not the case the summer that I was here. The result of this moisture and of the relatively mild climate that exists in proximity to the ocean is one of extreme vegetative growth. Let me put it another way; it’s a jungle out there. Move this terrain a few degrees to the south and you’d expect to see toucans and monkeys in the trees. This nearly impassable tangle of growth must be described in more detail to be fully understood.

Anyone who has traveled in the Northwest has seen the dense underbrush alongside whatever road they happened to drive - assuming of course that the traveler ventured off the freeway or away from the strip-mall development. I had spent several years of forestry work negotiating my way through this vine maple and devils club infested areas in search of timber. I’ve seen many a hillside where the vine maple was so dense and tall that I couldn’t quite make out the trees above my head. I’ve battled my way uphill through head high (and higher) huckleberry patches that invariably seem to point downhill while I invariably seem to need to go uphill. In all cases, my determination has prevailed and although I often spent long minutes extracting devils club thorns from my hands (and various other places) I always managed to get to where I was headed. Then I experienced the Olympic Mountains.

I recall stepping into a second growth stand of about ten years of age and walking no more than five feet into the brushy tangle before I came up against a wall. A wall of branches of the cascara tree. The cascara is a hardwood that grows throughout the Northwest, reaching small tree size at best, that provides an herbal laxative extract from the bark. This area was taken over by an aggressive group of these trees that were about five to ten feet tall. It seems that the young cascara tree begins branching about a foot or so off the ground and sends out additional lateral branches at about one foot intervals. This usually presents little problem because the trees are not typically found in more than ones or twos. This stand was decidedly different. This was a cascara plantation. Unable to move forward through the tangle of branches, I moved to one side and attempted to work my way through. Again, I was literally stopped against a wall of interwoven branches. With the base of the trees only a few feet apart, the branches all but wove a fence that started at ground level and extended to head high. I tried again and was stopped. I lay down on my belly and attempted to crawl underneath, believing that the clump was only one or two trees deep and I could break through on the ‘other side’. I was trapped on my belly, crawling under the trees as though I were a soldier in the fields of France crawling under concertina wire trying to get through the enemy lines. I never did make it. I backed out, literally, and made my way back to the truck on the road, not two hundred feet away. There stood Dan. Grinning.

“You couldn’t get through that either, could you?” We never did do that particular item of work, telling the Forest Service that it was inaccessible. I don’t know what they thought. With this explanation in mind, I now return to the tale at hand.

While my current location did not rival the density of the cascara plantation, it was incredibly dense with the typical brush. It additionally offered a lovely plant known as the evergreen blackberry, a species of the tasty fruit bearing bush that was particularly hardy due mostly to its inch thick stems that liked growing horizontal. The fat stems contained appropriately sized thorns that inflicted memorable wounds on the unwary. Due to this, both Dan and I were forced from time to time to revert to the “crawlin’ on my belly like a snake” mode of travel in order to maintain a reasonably straight line of travel as we surveyed the contents of this southeast facing slope. We were doing our usual cross slope travel, following parallel lines about three hundred feet apart when I began smelling a foul odor. Rotting fish. I looked to the bottom of the hill where the clear cut area reached toward the timbered bottom. I saw no river down there, but given the quantify of rain in the area, every ravine, draw and low spot had some sort of water moving through it so I supposed the smell could be related to that. The smell came and went as I continued on my way, walking, climbing over logs, crawling under blackberries, wet from the drizzle, cold, and examining my motives for doing this kind of work.

I continued to wonder about the odor as I moved. It had become stronger and seemed to hang in the air, not fading in and out as before. As I rose from crawling under a downed log, I heard a tremendous crashing and commotion in the brush below me, followed in just moments by a sudden blur of dark and whoosh - past me raced a medium sized bear on a mission to get to the top of the hill in as short a time as possible. The bear passed directly in front of me, about ten feet away, not so much as glancing my direction. I don’t think it even knew I was there. It happened so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that I never began to think of danger or fear or other bear-related emotions. Mostly I was just surprised.

The smell that had been hanging in the air was from the bear. That much was clear as it fled uphill past me, leaving in its wake a sickly, rotting aroma. Whatever that critter had eaten for breakfast did not smell appetizing. I continued on my line of travel as I heard the bear break out of the brush above me, probably onto the road that ran parallel to us, and went on his way. In a few minutes I reached the timber on the opposite end of the clear-cut and broke into relatively clear terrain on the old fire trail that had been cut alongside the clear-cut, providing a holding line for the crew that burned the slash left after the logger departed. I followed this line down the hill to intercept Dan where he and I would continue down to the next line of travel and begin the return trip for our next line of survey. As I neared Dan, standing on a stump, I could see a grin.

“Imagine my surprise,” he bellowed at me as I came into view, “when, crawling on my belly through the brush, I looked up and into the eyes of a bear! Not two feet away from me mind you! There was no way I could get away, I was pinned to the ground. The bear looked at me, I looked at him. I don’t know whose eyes were the biggest.”

“So did he eat you?” I asked.

“He woofed at me and left in such a hurry that he kicked dirt into my face.”

I guess if I encountered Dan crawling on his belly through the wet underbrush of an Olympic Mountain morning, then I, in the manner of the bear, would have run for my life as well.