Backcountry Coffee n' Donuts

One of the simpler pleasures of my life is coming across something that I think others may have overlooked, such as fossils in a building, a Red-Tailed Hawk along Interstate 5, or a sign of previous human presence. (I am sure others also notice these things but I like to think I am special. Oh well.) This experience happened the other day in Olympic National Park. I was hiking with a group of friends along the North Fork of the Quinault River. It’s a mostly flat trail, at least the section we hiked, the lower 4.5 miles or so to a creek crossing that we decided was too challenging for what we hoped to accomplish that day, which was simply getting out and enjoying the forest and our friends. (Plus it gave me an excuse to surprise our java-addicted pals by making a cup of coffee in the backcountry.)

About half way up the trail, I observed a white ceramic donut insulator about 15 feet up in tree. It looked a bit forlorn, all alone amid the lichen and moss. It was about two inches wide and an inch and a half high, with a wire wrapped around the center groove. The wire is what held the insulator to the tree. I saw three more insulators on the trail. One had wires, thinner than the attachment wire, extending out about 5 or 6 feet in opposite directions.

Donut insulator. I know, it’s a stunning picture!

I have seen similar insulators many times in the backcountry, though generally just a few on any one hike, up high in trees. They are always near a trail, which of course raises the eternal question about which came first. I suspect that in many cases it’s a tie: someone put in a path in order to put up the insulators and later the path evolved into a trail.

These insulators probably date from 1927 when the Olympic Chalet Company got a permit to build a chalet on the Low Divide, 16 miles up trail from the North Fork trailhead, followed a couple of years later by what was known as Nine Mile Shelter or Halfway House, about a tenth of a mile from where we stopped. I suspect that workers placed the insulators to provide electricity or telephone connections to the chalets but I haven’t been able to find additional information.

Whenever I see objects such as this, I think about the ambition and drive of those who placed them. It couldn’t have been easy to string the wire and build the chalets, particularly in the rugged and extraordinarily wet landscape of the Olympics. Did they see themselves as taming the wilderness, as creating an opportunity for others to reach a challenging location, as entrepreneurs opening up new territory? And, to think that they were doing this back when just getting to the trailhead (for both the builders and hikers) was far, far more challenging than now. Not only did the builders have to have ambition, they had to be optimists, part of the “Build it and they will come” school of thinking.

Commercial concerns such as the North Fork Quinault lodges are not the sole legacy of ambitious seekers of their fortunes in the mountains that benefit modern hikers. Probably foremost were the uncountable numbers of miners who searched for gold in them thar hills. They opened up transportation and communication corridors and were often the first non-Natives to attempt many of the routes that ultimately became trails throughout the Cascades though their blind pursuit of gold did not necessarily result in practical pathways. Many a miner’s path “only needs to be tilted up a little more to attain the perpendicular,” wrote Seattle P-I reporter L.K. Hodges in 1897. “Some people use strong language under such circumstances but that is because they have not learned the virtue of patience.” If only the miners had learned the art of the switchback. Well known and obvious miner routes include the trails to Gothic Basin, Bedal Basin, Mount Pugh, Windy Pass and Slate Peak around Harts Pass, and High Pass on Mt. Baker.

Roads and trails are often overlooked as a signature of previous use; the thousands of miles of such routes threading the mountains seem almost natural, as if they have always been there. In a few cases, the trails we walk probably have been there practically forever, including some converted to human use from animal use, and thus are basically a natural feature of the place. Plus, I suspect that few hikers (and I include myself) spend much time off trail (except when above treeline) because of the dense understory. But every trail in the mountains owes its existence to people, even if we tend to forget that fundamental fact.

As a natural historian, I find a trail such as the one I hiked in the Olympics, with its history of lodges and electrical wiring, as well as logging, endlessly fascinating. Clearly, this is a storied landscape, not only of the people who came before with their dreams, ambitions, and interests but of the ecosystem itself, which has recovered (not completely but still beautifully) from what we did. Seeing signs such as the donut insulator reminds me of those stories and gives me hope for the resilience of the forest.