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.)
I've mostly seen those insulators along trails leading up to high points where lookouts were built, and heard they were for telegraph communication. The guy in the tower saw a fire, right, but they didn't have radios up there back then, which would've required a substantial power source they also didn't have, so a single wire (like you've seen whenever a wire still passes through one of these insulators) strung up on trees with insulators served to carry telegraph communication via a power source down where the wires came together, at a Ranger Station. The Forest Service's legacy of 100 years of fire suppression is what they are relics of, then. The same fire suppression that led to the mess we're in today of dense forests, ladder fuels, and almost unstoppable "mega fires." I would bet the wire that went through that Quinault River insulator ultimately went all the way up to a lookout tower somewhere. The Forest Service didn't bother putting those up for tourists in chalets. And yes, that would have been a while before T.R. declared the core of the Olympics to be a National Monument, followed by F.D.R. getting the bill through Congress to make it a National Park and thus finally out of the hand of the Forest Service and into the National Park Service.
Well, interesting story! I was thinking that you would produce a dozen fresh (edible) doughnuts to dunk in the coffee you made! Hah. But I was reminded of the insulators we found as kids on grandparents land back in the 1960s. I actually haven't done much hiking since then, and now at 74 have lost the strength it would take too get anywhere on foot, so I enjoy your journeys from my armchair, so to speak. Thanks!
David, this is a very enjoyable piece. I like the stories it brought forth, which are just the sort that might have been imagined but deeper and more significant in the experience and telling. You just don’t know where some little quirk of experience will lead you! Maybe to a big part of the rest of your life!
If that insulator had been on that tree trunk for 97 years, the growth of the tree would have long since subsumed it by now. When were phone wires last used by fire spotters?
I was a backcountry ranger in the Olympics from 1969-1975. We had an emergency telephone line all the way to Glacier Meadows back then. One of my jobs was to maintain all 16.5 miles of it--something I was not very good at. For four summers, I was at Olympus Guard Station where the phone box was on my front porch. Most every evening, for the last three of those years, I'd ring down to the trailhead after dinner and talk to Bud Hanify, my boss. He had a phone on his kitchen wall. We'd recount the day's events: wildlife spotted; the number of hikers, their destinations, and anything memorable or significant; branch into more general observations about humanity; and mostly laugh and laugh. It was great therapy for both of us.
I remember one life the phone saved, that of a camper down at Happy Four shelter who'd cut himself badly with an axe and might have bled out otherwise. Bill Lester, our Area ranger, ran 5.4 miles up the trail in the middle of the night, staunched the flow, and saved the day.
The insulators suspended a single, galvanized wire up where they wouldn't interfere with a hiker. horseman, or the antlers of a bull elk. Any contact with the ground, branches, or moss tended to diminish signal strength. Each spring, we'd have to repair any breaks in the line, rehang it where it had torn an insulator free, and remove any branches or trees in contact. Of course, in addition to entire trees giving up the ghost, stuff was always falling out of the canopy requiring us to track down and address the problem.
Since I was so lame on the workings of these phones, Headquarters sent someone out to help in those years. Jim Cornell was the perfect man for the job which was a good summer break from selling car parts in Port Angeles. One cold wet foggy afternoon at Glacier Meadows--it was snowing just above, when we'd just about got everything working, a woman appeared out of the mists in soaking wet rain gear.
She'd been up on the Blue Glacier trying to honeymoon with her husband a Glaciologist from Cal Tech and his crew of grad students who were equally intellectually advanced and emotionally retarded. That hadn't gone well despite Ann's best efforts at cooking, cleaning,and keeping the home fires burning. Feeling un appreciated, she'd essentially decided it was time to go home to mother in Pasadena, and the groom had escorted her off the glacier to the moraine and the end of the trail.
I don't think I'd ever seen anyone look so unhappy. Were those tears, just drowned rat evidence, or both? Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Cornell and I urged her to make herself at home at Olympus Guard Station and assured her we'd be in eventually if we didn't miss the high Hoh bridge in the darkness and fall into the swirling glacial water 190' below. When she succumbed to our lobbying, I gave her the keys to the padlock on the door, and off she went.
When we arrived long after dark, Ann had the wood stove going. Her hung rain gear was steaming away. We soon had it up to warp speed. By morning, the puddles on the floor from all the wet gear had evaporated and the storm had passed on.
After charging her batteries back in town, she made one more attempt at being the dutiful bride at the CalTech camp on the Blue Glacier, an assemblage of small beyond Spartan canvas tents with none of the conveniences, before throwing in the towel for the summer.
Over the years, she and her husband befriended me and housed me for lengthy stays between my forays into the Alaskan wilds. On my last major outing in 1979, a solo xc ski trip between White Pass and Atlin, BC, in 1979, they called the Mounties when I was overdue. Four days later, when weather permitted, the RCMP launched their Twin Otter, and found me two hours later closing on an occupied homestead with a radio, but still 30 miles from town, potentially saving my life.
So there's two more lives that that phone line may have helped save. Will, the husband, has been gone five years now. His wasn't the smoothest exit and likely contributed to Ann's current situation in a memory care facility in Anchorage. Counting the hours and twiddling thumbs that saved many a life at her dining room table in Fairbanks. Dear reader, please send good thoughts to my friend in her final forlorn days. She would gladly do the same for you if she could.
Yes, every trail in Olympic Park that led to a backcountry station, lookout, or climber's hut, probably had a similar phone line strung along it. Most of that weird has been coiled up and hauled to the landfill years ago. Ditto the insulators. But even without a triple shot of espresso, observant hikers can sill spot the occasional brown or white insulator in one of the ancient trees or a coil of wire half covered in duff or thrown behind a log by someone to burdened or lazy to add it to their load.
This was wonderful to read! I so appreciate your telling us about your life and those of your friends. To think we have gone from a single wire hung high in the trees going up high mountain slopes and needing constant maintenance, to this thing we call Wi-Fi in just our lifetimes is still hard to take-in. Kind thoughts to you and your friend Ann.
Good thoughts. All I can tell you is, for my grandfather Hanify, who went to work for Olympic National Park in 1938, and for my father, Bud Hanify, who worked on some of those phone lines in 1940 and 1941, providing opportunities for ordinary people to access the wilderness was the goal. As Mike Macy noted below, safety was high priority at a time when there would be no radio or helicopter access. We used that field phone at the Hoh Ranger Station in the 70s to monitor problems, sometimes heading upriver before any sort of rescue operation could be organized, so the phone lines were critical. Lots of pre-Park history in those hills, as you observe, but communications come into focus when someone is injured or lost.
I've mostly seen those insulators along trails leading up to high points where lookouts were built, and heard they were for telegraph communication. The guy in the tower saw a fire, right, but they didn't have radios up there back then, which would've required a substantial power source they also didn't have, so a single wire (like you've seen whenever a wire still passes through one of these insulators) strung up on trees with insulators served to carry telegraph communication via a power source down where the wires came together, at a Ranger Station. The Forest Service's legacy of 100 years of fire suppression is what they are relics of, then. The same fire suppression that led to the mess we're in today of dense forests, ladder fuels, and almost unstoppable "mega fires." I would bet the wire that went through that Quinault River insulator ultimately went all the way up to a lookout tower somewhere. The Forest Service didn't bother putting those up for tourists in chalets. And yes, that would have been a while before T.R. declared the core of the Olympics to be a National Monument, followed by F.D.R. getting the bill through Congress to make it a National Park and thus finally out of the hand of the Forest Service and into the National Park Service.
Phil, Thanks for your thoughts, which make sense in regard to telegraphs and the fire lookouts and the relics of fire suppression. David
here's a very cool doc about how the strung telePHONE wires! So apparently by the time the lookout towers were built the rangers were actually able to talk over the wire, not just tap! https://foresthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ChapterI.pdf
Well, interesting story! I was thinking that you would produce a dozen fresh (edible) doughnuts to dunk in the coffee you made! Hah. But I was reminded of the insulators we found as kids on grandparents land back in the 1960s. I actually haven't done much hiking since then, and now at 74 have lost the strength it would take too get anywhere on foot, so I enjoy your journeys from my armchair, so to speak. Thanks!
Enjoyed your thought-provoking post and all of the wonderful comments very much!
David, this is a very enjoyable piece. I like the stories it brought forth, which are just the sort that might have been imagined but deeper and more significant in the experience and telling. You just don’t know where some little quirk of experience will lead you! Maybe to a big part of the rest of your life!
Have you read Robert Moor's book, On Trails? I think you'd enjoy it. It's excellent.
Yes, some of it, at least.
If that insulator had been on that tree trunk for 97 years, the growth of the tree would have long since subsumed it by now. When were phone wires last used by fire spotters?
Good point. I hadn't really thought of that. No clue on the details unfortunately.
I was a backcountry ranger in the Olympics from 1969-1975. We had an emergency telephone line all the way to Glacier Meadows back then. One of my jobs was to maintain all 16.5 miles of it--something I was not very good at. For four summers, I was at Olympus Guard Station where the phone box was on my front porch. Most every evening, for the last three of those years, I'd ring down to the trailhead after dinner and talk to Bud Hanify, my boss. He had a phone on his kitchen wall. We'd recount the day's events: wildlife spotted; the number of hikers, their destinations, and anything memorable or significant; branch into more general observations about humanity; and mostly laugh and laugh. It was great therapy for both of us.
I remember one life the phone saved, that of a camper down at Happy Four shelter who'd cut himself badly with an axe and might have bled out otherwise. Bill Lester, our Area ranger, ran 5.4 miles up the trail in the middle of the night, staunched the flow, and saved the day.
The insulators suspended a single, galvanized wire up where they wouldn't interfere with a hiker. horseman, or the antlers of a bull elk. Any contact with the ground, branches, or moss tended to diminish signal strength. Each spring, we'd have to repair any breaks in the line, rehang it where it had torn an insulator free, and remove any branches or trees in contact. Of course, in addition to entire trees giving up the ghost, stuff was always falling out of the canopy requiring us to track down and address the problem.
Since I was so lame on the workings of these phones, Headquarters sent someone out to help in those years. Jim Cornell was the perfect man for the job which was a good summer break from selling car parts in Port Angeles. One cold wet foggy afternoon at Glacier Meadows--it was snowing just above, when we'd just about got everything working, a woman appeared out of the mists in soaking wet rain gear.
She'd been up on the Blue Glacier trying to honeymoon with her husband a Glaciologist from Cal Tech and his crew of grad students who were equally intellectually advanced and emotionally retarded. That hadn't gone well despite Ann's best efforts at cooking, cleaning,and keeping the home fires burning. Feeling un appreciated, she'd essentially decided it was time to go home to mother in Pasadena, and the groom had escorted her off the glacier to the moraine and the end of the trail.
I don't think I'd ever seen anyone look so unhappy. Were those tears, just drowned rat evidence, or both? Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Cornell and I urged her to make herself at home at Olympus Guard Station and assured her we'd be in eventually if we didn't miss the high Hoh bridge in the darkness and fall into the swirling glacial water 190' below. When she succumbed to our lobbying, I gave her the keys to the padlock on the door, and off she went.
When we arrived long after dark, Ann had the wood stove going. Her hung rain gear was steaming away. We soon had it up to warp speed. By morning, the puddles on the floor from all the wet gear had evaporated and the storm had passed on.
After charging her batteries back in town, she made one more attempt at being the dutiful bride at the CalTech camp on the Blue Glacier, an assemblage of small beyond Spartan canvas tents with none of the conveniences, before throwing in the towel for the summer.
Over the years, she and her husband befriended me and housed me for lengthy stays between my forays into the Alaskan wilds. On my last major outing in 1979, a solo xc ski trip between White Pass and Atlin, BC, in 1979, they called the Mounties when I was overdue. Four days later, when weather permitted, the RCMP launched their Twin Otter, and found me two hours later closing on an occupied homestead with a radio, but still 30 miles from town, potentially saving my life.
So there's two more lives that that phone line may have helped save. Will, the husband, has been gone five years now. His wasn't the smoothest exit and likely contributed to Ann's current situation in a memory care facility in Anchorage. Counting the hours and twiddling thumbs that saved many a life at her dining room table in Fairbanks. Dear reader, please send good thoughts to my friend in her final forlorn days. She would gladly do the same for you if she could.
Yes, every trail in Olympic Park that led to a backcountry station, lookout, or climber's hut, probably had a similar phone line strung along it. Most of that weird has been coiled up and hauled to the landfill years ago. Ditto the insulators. But even without a triple shot of espresso, observant hikers can sill spot the occasional brown or white insulator in one of the ancient trees or a coil of wire half covered in duff or thrown behind a log by someone to burdened or lazy to add it to their load.
Wow, amazing stories. Thanks for sharing!!
This was wonderful to read! I so appreciate your telling us about your life and those of your friends. To think we have gone from a single wire hung high in the trees going up high mountain slopes and needing constant maintenance, to this thing we call Wi-Fi in just our lifetimes is still hard to take-in. Kind thoughts to you and your friend Ann.
Good thoughts. All I can tell you is, for my grandfather Hanify, who went to work for Olympic National Park in 1938, and for my father, Bud Hanify, who worked on some of those phone lines in 1940 and 1941, providing opportunities for ordinary people to access the wilderness was the goal. As Mike Macy noted below, safety was high priority at a time when there would be no radio or helicopter access. We used that field phone at the Hoh Ranger Station in the 70s to monitor problems, sometimes heading upriver before any sort of rescue operation could be organized, so the phone lines were critical. Lots of pre-Park history in those hills, as you observe, but communications come into focus when someone is injured or lost.
Thanks for sharing your stories. I bet your father and grandfather had some fascinating stories about their time in the Olympics. wow.