Northwest Peninsula Sets Olympic Record for Rainfall

The gauge at Lake Quinault Lodge measures rain in feet, not inches.

Makes sense. Those hardy enough to live in this western half of the Olympic Peninsula, the rainiest corner of the Lower 48, are misted, showered and pelted by nearly 140 inches of rain per year.

That’s nearly 12 feet, the deep end of a swimming pool.

Compare that to “rainy” Seattle, 75 miles east of here, where the big-city dwellers famously complain about a measly 35 inches a year.

Seattle’s “mist is our sunny days over here,” said Jerry King, 55, who like his mother and grandmother before him tallies rainfall for the National Weather Service in Forks, the region’s largest town, population about 3,500.

“It’s just windy and rainy and it’s nonstop,” said Lacey Long, a Forks High School junior. “You can’t go outside. There are puddles everywhere. The ditches are all full.”

From early fall to late spring it rains. And rains. It plinks down on the mobile homes and hunkered ramblers on the Lake Quinault loop road. It rattles the cedar shingles of the lodge and blows sideways into the evergreens towering on all sides.

Last year a record 182 inches fell at Quinault.

Rubber boots or even angler’s hip waders are standard outdoor gear.

“You make sure you buy a nice coat with a hood on it,” said Cherie Ralston, 45, a member of the Quinault Tribe who works at Quinault Pride Seafoods.

“You can’t use umbrellas, because usually you get the wind with the rain,” she added. “They’ll blow inside out every time.”

It’s all a matter of perspective, however.

Molly Stallard, 21, says that when she goes to less rainy places it’s “really weird.”

“Real rain is when you can see it bouncing off the ground.”

Then there are those who actually like it.

“When we’re getting a storm and the lights go out and the trees are blowing, we go for a walk along the river,” said Dana Betts, 35, who lives with her husband near the fog-shrouded banks of Lake Quinault.

Why so much rain? Because moisture-laden air from the Pacific Ocean smacks up against the Olympic Mountains, curls back and drops its load, explained Mark Albright, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington.

The result is rain forest--dense evergreen jungle on all sides, featuring monster trees such as a 1,000-year-old spruce that’s 191 feet tall. Moss mats the floor below a profusion of ferns and low shrubs. New trees sprout from fallen logs.

“We love it,” said Beatriz Millington, a community college biology instructor from Fall River Mills, Calif. She was poking among the flora hoping to glimpse the elusive banana slug--another forest denizen nourished to surreal size by the ecosystem.

“They are so big, they look like bananas. They really do,” she said.

The rain causes problems aplenty. It disrupts school and carries away bridges, and Lake Quinault itself can rise as much as 18 feet in a day.

Living by the lake, Betts has a closer view than she might like of rain-fed erosion.

A creek that drains into the Quinault River is creeping closer to her home. She said her husband tried to move the house out of harm’s way, but it got wedged between a stand of protected old growth forest on one side and water on the other.

However, she’s philosophical about it.

“It’s just nature taking its course,” she said. “We bought a motor home for when the time comes.”