Sierra Club Bulletin 



1st. All night we traveled up Puget Sound and early morning 

 found us breakfasting in Port Angeles, half-way down the 

 Straits of Juan de Fuca. Automobiles, generously furnished 

 by citizens of that historic town, carried us to Elwha Bridge, 

 where the trail began. 



Three days of forest travel merge together in memory like 

 one long day of many delights. From bottomlands where 

 homesteads nestled; through hot, dusty burns whose devasta- 

 tion was partly hidden in rosy masses of epilobium; along 

 ridges white with the mist-like bloom of spiraea ; through deep, 

 silent forests, moss-hung, and carpeted with ferns and delicate 

 flowers ; through sun-dappled groves of alders, and up among 

 higher hills, where far above us rose green strips of park- 

 land, we journeyed. Each camp brought closer the day that 

 dawns early in every outing, when, with strange faces grown 

 familiar and old companionships renewed, the haphazard ac- 

 quaintanceship of fellow travelers becomes the friendly fellow- 

 ship of the open trail. 



The fourth day we started together in line to make three 

 log crossings of the turbulent Elwha. Life-lines were stretched 

 to give confidence to the timid, and strong men were stationed 

 on the banks below, ready to rescue any luckless mountaineer 

 who should slip. No such disaster occurring, however, the 

 company was disbanded at the last crossing and each was free 

 to take his own time into camp. 



The forest was glorious that morning. Amabilis firs, hem- 

 locks (Tsuga heterophyUa) , Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga taxi- 

 folia), western red cedars (Thuja pUcata), and, more rarely, 

 mountain pines (P. monticola), clothed mountain flank and 

 canon floor, their dense canopy of interlacing branches shutting 

 out sun and wind alike. On either side of the trail the ground 

 was hidden by growing things — fern fronds, creeping rasp- 

 berries, dwarf dogwood, starry white clintonia, and linnsea, 

 loveliest of forest blossoms, with glossy leaflets and delicate, 

 faintly flushed twin bells. Mosses and ferns, huckleberries and 

 seedling conifers likewise took possession of each fallen tree, 

 making its death but a rung in the ladder for young lives 

 crowding upward. But in spite of such exuberance of life it 

 seemed a sombre place, where age and decay followed fast upon 



