Land of Ghosts

Forks, Washington
47.860755, -123.934395
Reading Time: 1 min 20 sec

Going through older work, giving a fresh look to a backpacking trip to Olympic National Park, photographed and written way back when. The Pacific Northwest is wild and remote, a perfect place to hunt ghosts.

Olympic National Park will let you think you are alone as you walk silently through the lush rainforest, but this land is full of ghosts that haunt the trails day and night. They hide in the thick fog and rain, buzzing your tent at night to give you the strangest dreams but yet you sleep soundly. Like dreams and memories, the specters silently drift by like a light fog as you climb higher into their mountains, appearing as skeletons of long-dead trees or hard to make out shapes in the night.

If you shut off your headlamp there is no moonlight to detail the trail ahead of you, triple canopy and heavy cloud cover are to blame, but you will not care. The rainforest has a darkness that hides more secrets than one trip or a lifetime can reveal. There are mushrooms so small you must get down on your knees to inspect them and trees so tall that you almost fall over to glimpse their top branches. Centuries-old cedars, big around as Volkswagens, outnumber other hikers a thousand to three.

Everything is wet.

Water will first soak your boots, then your feet by the second day. By the end of the third, you struggle to keep your sleeping bag dry, a frivolous act. There will be no complaints as a bottle of Wild Turkey is passed after dinner on the fourth day. You will wake early on the fifth day to see the first hints of the sun for the first time in almost a week. The sun is warm and works hard to burn off the early morning blue fog hanging silently over the Hoh River.

On the last day on this land, you will never forget the moment you were finally paying enough attention to notice the ghosts.