HOH RAIN FOREST, Olympic National Park — I heard a sharp slap against the surface of spring-fed Taft Creek before seeing the squirming fish.
The presence of coho salmon fighting their way up a meandering tributary, hurdling fallen logs, overgrown ferns and shrubs is the kind of miracle that never grows old.
The thwack jolted me into another dimension in the wettest forest in the contiguous United States.
The Hoh comes alive when the winds start to howl and low-lying clouds shower the forest like a firehose. About 12 feet of water gets dumped on the Hoh annually. The total is more than the Amazon rainforest, and 9 feet more than Bellingham’s yearly average.
Much of that rain comes in deep and dank December when the salmon run.
“The Hoh during the winter time for me is the closest thing we have left to wilderness,” said Gordon Hempton, a Seattle acoustic ecologist and Emmy Award-winning sound recordist.
I called Hempton, 71, to gain a deeper appreciation of a remnant of the Pacific Northwest rainforest that once stretched from southeastern Alaska to the central coast of California.
In 2005, Hempton placed a red stone 3.2 miles from the Hoh Visitors Center to designate “One-Square Inch of Silence.” The coming year marks the 20th anniversary of a project highlighting one of the country’s quietest locales.
Known as the Sound Tracker, Hempton has devoted his life to preserving silent places that have mostly been excised since the Industrial Revolution.
It’s difficult to believe the Hoh is one of the last enclaves of monastic silence because Hempton’s quiet glade lies eerily close to a paved parking lot.
The rainforest regularly attracts thousands of summer visitors who shuffle through the fragile ecosystem in the post-COVID onslaught triggered by social media photos.
It’s understandable why so many tourists visit even with summer wait times of three hours or more. A few feet from the parking lot lies an extraterrestrial world of conifers and deciduous trees dressed in shamrock-colored moss and lichens, including crowd pleasers like Old Man’s Beard and Witch’s Hair. Visitors go into sensory overdrive gawking at curtains of greenery.
Scott Doggett, my writer friend in Port Townsend, described the hues during an October outing in the Hoh as “lightsaber, lime, chartreuse, crocodile, olive, pickle. Some yellow: butter, honey, Dijon, blonde.”
Such vivid visuals can cloud the sounds of a bustling interactive ecosystem. Rain, though, turns the soundscape into a symphony of thrums, taps, hisses and plinks.
This is where Hempton steps in. He likes to call the planet “a solar-powered jukebox.”
Hempton chases sounds armed with a microphone, recording device and noise-level meter. The co-founder of the nonprofit Quiet Parks International once visited the Hoh monthly to document and locate human-made sounds, too often from aircraft overhead.
He defined a quiet place as one free of noise pollution for 15 minutes between an hour before sunrise and two hours after sunset. Only about a dozen spots in the Lower 48 pass his noiseless standard.
Hempton encourages visitors to hit the mute button and listen to their surroundings.
He has followed the sonic journey of a single raindrop to capture its life-serving cycle from the overstory to the understory.
A tiny droplet travels from branch to branch to the trunk, to the sword ferns, salals and finally the moss before it leaks into the ground. The auditory experience changes with each splatter against the boughs and trunks of Sitka spruce, western hemlocks, bigleaf maples and vine maples.
“Each species of tree and plant makes its own sound in the wind and the rain,” Hempton said. “It’s an amazing experience of tempos and textures.”
A dry summer day in the Hoh sounds nothing like winter, which is why I like to envelope myself in rain-resistant Gore-Tex and clomp through the mud-soaked paths to hear the forest speaking its many tongues.
Something primal instinctively takes over when hiking the Hoh River Trail alone as the only human-made sounds emanate from the drumbeat of footsteps and breathing. The irony did not escape me as a young couple shattered the tranquility with blaring music as I began my trek in one of America’s finest temperate rainforests.
Modern life has made it difficult to unplug the voices in our heads as much as the blitzkrieg of noise bashing our senses.
I sought solitude on the soggy day I visited the Hoh. I also hoped to see the majestic herd of Roosevelt elk that populate the valley.
Fortunately, most tourists strayed along the Hall of Mosses and Spruce Nature trails near their cars, leaving the river trail to me.
Hempton was delighted I hiked the Hoh in winter “at one of its moments of glory.”
He elaborated on what I already knew: “There is so much to look at, so much to hear, so much to feel and — especially this time of year — to smell with all the mushroom activity.”
Hempton has recorded the intoxicating sounds of Amazonian jungles. But he calls the Olympic Peninsula rainforest the best-developed and most magnificent one he has visited.
“The Hoh is one of the world’s tallest forests,” Hempton said of a place where the crowns of a few trees reach 28 stories up. “To my ears, that creates a very special acoustic for listening.”
Hempton, who is losing his hearing, plans to step away from research after four decades. But I could tell in his voice that wild, silent places like the Hoh continued to call to him.
“When you’re in nature — especially in the Hoh — it’s quiet without boundaries, without limiting your experience,” he said.
I thought about what he said while peering at a colonnade of Sitka spruce and hemlock that invited silent contemplation.
A smattering of birds chattered overhead in their various frequencies. The onrushing Hoh River created a low-grade whoosh in the foggy distance.
The symphonic drama had orchestral movements with crescendos and decrescendos. However, I wasn’t reflecting on Beethoven, Mozart or Chopin.
For the first time, I saw the rainforest through my ears.
Elliott Almond's outdoor column appears monthly. Email: elliottalmond4@gmail.com.
