Olympic National Park

Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: Art of the Park

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:00:00 -0700

PETER MALARKEY Maple Flats 2011 To mark the removal of the Elwha River’s two dams, Malarkey is painting a before-and-after series of oils on linen. This location below Glines Canyon will change dramatically when the river runs free again, at which point Malarkey plans to recapture the scene. It’s part of the B...

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Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: Follow the Ranger

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Andrew Waits

"IF WE GET IN A FIREFIGHT, you take the big gun," instructs Susannah "Sanny" Lustig, Olympic National Park ranger. She’s kidding—thankfully—but there actually is an M16 rifle in the cab of her extended-cab pickup, along with a shotgun and the 9mm sidearm strapped to her waist. It’s a lot of firepower for someone who is sporting what she calls a "Smokey the Bear hat" over her curly two-tone hair. Not to mention that Lustig began her 17-year career knowing no more about firearms than "there are ‘longie’ guns and ‘shortie’ guns."

Today the guns are for shooting bears—nonlethally, that is, hazing them away from humans with beanbags (like riot cops use on protestors) and noisy cracker rounds. Being a national park ranger isn’t all campfires and nature hikes; Lustig is as much a cop, an EMT, and a community ambassador as she is a forest guardian. Based out of Olympic National Park headquarters in Port Angeles, she often patrols the narrow 17-mile road that leads to Hurricane Ridge, the park’s most popular destination. Today she’ll do the loop at least seven times, rarely straying far from the blacktop.

Despite her stint at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Lustig doesn’t need her sidearm (or Taser, or handcuffs, or baton) to exert authority. Midafternoon, she lectures the driver of a silver Mustang that blew past the park’s fee station without paying. Though delivered with a smile, the chat is effective: Later, the tollbooth operator tells us that the Mustang driver apologized no fewer than three times for her transgression. Lustig shrugs: "People don’t take themselves down a one-way road if they want to do criminal activity," she says.

When she isn’t scanning the roadside for bears, Lustig is chatting with tourists in the Hurricane Ridge parking lot. Though it’s drizzly in Port Angeles, the air clears into a bracingly clear day up top, and visitors are dazzled by the wild frontier. She knows differently; as a former backcountry ranger and current search-and-rescue leader, Lustig sees a park that has been entirely searched at one time or another. "Human eyes have seen every inch of it," she says. "There is no undiscovered wilderness left in the lower 48. That’s sad; people want the unknown wilds."

Lustig’s unknowns can be animals—she won’t meet any bears today, but last year rangers put down a mountain goat that killed a hiker and this year they put down an elk that had become too brazen around campers. Or she might be grappling with the complex histories of the park’s neighbors; as the sole ranger at Lake Ozette for six years, Lustig carefully liaised with the Makah tribe next door, even attending their whale hunt potlatch in 1999.

One mantle she doesn’t have to wear every day is that of searcher and rescuer. "People can get lost for a few days or forever," she says. Being in charge can mean deciding when to call in the helicopter cavalry and when to haul out a hiker over several days by mule. And sometimes it means being under the copter full of rescuers that crashes during a foggy search—it’s the worst tragedy she’s endured yet as a ranger.

Lustig still finds ways to be entertained by the same stretch of blacktop she wears down all day. About a mile from the summit, the road swings around to present a postcard-perfect vista, a cornice of snow-covered peaks and lush river valleys. Seeing it every 30 minutes has hardly made her jaded; at each rounding of the corner, she takes a moment to enjoy the view. "I forget that it’s that amazing," says Lustig. "Every time I come around the road and see it, there’s a shock wave."

Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: Summer Things to Do

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Philip Cheaney

STARGAZING
Astronomer John Goar lugs telescopes up to the Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center to talk stars in a one-hour night-sky program at 9:30pm (Aug 1-4) or 9pm (Aug 19-31). During a sunset-to-full-moon hike up Hurricane Hill, the star talk is two and a half hours long (Aug 12 & 13). HURRICANE RIDGE

SWIMMING
In the middle of a rain forest, it’s rarely hot enough for a dip in lakes filled with snowmelt. But the mineral pools of the Sol Duc Valley get as hot as 104 degrees, filling perfectly round manmade pools. For a more natural dip, the Olympic Hot Springs are simple steaming pools in the dirt, surrounded only by a few boulders. While once a day hike from the Elwha area, dam removal road closures mean that these springs will require a more intense 14-mile walk from the Sol Duc Valley. SOL DUC

ROCK CLIMBING
There’s little climbing on the Olympic Peninsula due to the rock quality—scrambling up the brittle rock on the coast’s big sea stacks isn’t recommended. But the jagged peak of Mount Cruiser in the park’s southeastern corner can get crowded with climbers and is the best-known route in the mountain range. STAIRCASE

KITE FLYING
The only wide-open stretches of even land in the park are on the shores of Beach Three near Kalaloch; the unrelenting winds off the Pacific don’t hurt either. KALALOCH

SURFING
Much of First Beach near La Push is part of the Quileute Indian Reservation, but the tips of the mile-long stretch are parkland. Waves are brutal on this coast; don’t forget these beaches are lined with memorials to Chilean and Norwegian sailors who perished in these gnarly waves. RIALTO BEACH

Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Andrew Waits

Plan Your Trip

Olympic National Park
Nature guides, destination brochures, and back-country pass info. nps.gov/olym

Recreation.gov
Campground reservations for Kalaloch, available up to six months in advance, as well as bookings for nearby National Forest cabins.
recreation.gov

Washington Trails Association
Trip details for dozens of peninsula hikes.
wta.org

Climbers Guide to the Olympic Mountains
Climbing route descriptions, photos, and maps that supplement a hard-copy guide by Olympic Mountain Rescue. climbersguideolympics.com

Welcome to the Olympic Peninsula Local event calendars and trip suggestions from the local visitors bureau.
olympicpeninsula.org

WE JUST SAY "the Olympics" when we talk about our rainy national park, a bumpy line of peaks we can see over the Sound. Named for the home of the gods, Olympic National Park reigns as the fifth most visited national park in the country. Its three million annual visitors rank just behind blockbusters like Yosemite and Yellowstone. For a wild, unmarked space that isn’t on the road to anywhere, our mossy peninsula is far more than a backdrop to Seattle sunsets.

It helps that Olympic National Park is in pieces: one big round blob encompassing the peaks and rain forest, then a sliver that runs a third of the length of Washington’s Pacific shore. Visitors stream into the meadows of Hurricane Ridge, the sands of Kalaloch, and the forest canopies of Hoh—or all three.

It took two Presidents Roosevelt to preserve the nearly one million acres of Olympic National Park. Today it cradles forest creatures you won’t find anywhere else, rare temperate rain forest where winters drown in up to 14 feet of rain, and the largest unmanaged elk herd in the world. But now the park faces dwindling federal funding, and the challenge of removing dams that have gummed up its rivers for a century. Zeus may have lived on Olympus once upon a time, but these days the Olympics, and the expansive lands that make up Olympic National Park, are our treasure and our responsibility.

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Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park:: 10 Top Places to Visit in Olympic National Park; Follow the Ranger; Summer Things to Do; Park Trails You Don’t Know; Poet of the Park; Places to Stay in the Park; The Marmot Brigade; Where the Wild Things Are; Art of the Park; Essential Rain Gear; Saving the Park; Timeline of Olympic National Park; The Elwha’s Last Dam Summer

Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: Park Trails You Don’t Know

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Andrew Waits

Don’t Look Down The view from Hurricane Hill.

LITTLE RIVER TRAIL

5.5 MILES ONE WAY
"It’s the most beautiful trail in this area of the park," says Rod Farlee of Friends of Olympic National Park about the route down from the park’s biggest visitor center. "It has everything from deep old-growth hemlock forest through to alpine meadows. And secret waterfalls and an historic mine." HURRICANE RIDGE

PJ LAKE TRAIL

1.8 MILES ROUND TRIP
The drive to Obstruction Point can get a little white-knuckled, but it’s worth it for this precious little lake less than a mile off the road. "Usually there’s nobody there," says Craig Romano, author of dozens of hiking manuals including Day Hiking: Olympic Peninsula. "Berries, flowers—I think there’s even decent fishing in there," he says. HURRICANE RIDGE

BOGACHIEL RIVER TRAIL

UP TO 48 MILES ROUND TRIP
The crowds head for the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center. But about five miles from Forks, this separate trail accesses an equally lush wonderland of trees, ferns, and mosses. "The trail has the same beautiful mossy rain forest, sightings of elk, a beautiful salmon-bearing river—the classic temperate rain forest," says Lauren Braden, communications director for the Washington Trails Association. "But there’s a chance you might not see anybody else." TRAILHEAD ON HIGHWAY 101

DOSEWALLIPS ROAD

10 MILES ROUND TRIP
A washout blocked the park’s only eastern access point in 2002, but who needs wheels? Drive up to the washout and bypass the glacial till on foot; the gravel road is wide and on a shallow grade. "You go through beautiful forest looking down on this gorge, and follow the trail under classic pillow lava basalt by a really spectacular waterfall," says Cebe Wallace, a climbing leader for the Mountaineers outdoor club. DOSEWALLIPS

CEDAR LAKE TRAIL

24 MILES ROUND TRIP
"It’s super off-the-charts," says Steve Sutorius, owner of Wildernest Outdoor Store in Port Townsend, of his favorite alpine pool. After navigating down to Three Forks and up the Grey Wolf River, take a side trail to an expansive view of the Needles peaks and Mount Deception. "You know the Olympics that you can see from downtown Seattle? You’re just on the other side of those peaks," says Sutorius. DEERPARK

Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: Places to Stay in the Park

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Kim Nelmark

Room with a View Backcountry camping in Enchanted Valley.

IF YOU'RE PICKY
Of the park’s 16 campgrounds, Kalaloch is the only one to take reservations (recreation.gov), though waterfront erosion has erased some coveted bluff sites. Choice Spot D29 is, according to the Kalaloch Visitor Center, "the hottest site. Everyone wants it." Besides a killer ocean view, it boasts an easy-to-back-into parking spot. KALALOCH

IF YOU PROCRASTINATED
If you waited until a sunny Friday to dust off your pup tent, head to the huge Heart o’ the Hills campground outside Port Angeles. One hundred five sites are a lot to fill, and the lack of a flashy lake or peak helps, too. Choice Spot E Loop sites reach the farthest into the old-growth forest. HURRICANE RIDGE

IF YOU'RE FUSSY
The crackling lobby fireplace and well-stocked bar make the waterfront Lake Crescent Lodge the polar opposite of roughing it. Choice Spot The lodge rooms boast oodles of old-timey charm but no private baths, while the two-bedroom Roosevelt Cottage No. 35 has a fireplace, mini fridge, and lake view. LAKE CRESCENT

IF YOU'RE EXTREME
Schlep 13 miles up the Quinault River to the backpacker’s heaven of Enchanted Valley. The water streaming off 3,000-foot cliffs gives it the fairy tale nickname "Valley of 1,000 Waterfalls." Choice Spot The 1930s chalet is for rangers only, but lush meadow campsite amenities include bear wires to hang food from trees and a pit toilet—what more do you want, turndown service? LAKE QUINAULT

IF YOU'RE ANTISOCIAL
The primitive Queets campground doesn’t have potable water, paved-road access, or RV hookups. Or, best of all, many people. A hike to abandoned homesteads and a 212-foot Douglas fir requires fording two treacherous rivers. Choice Spot There are only 20 sites and all are gravel; take your pick.
QUEETS

Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: The Marmot Brigade

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Andrew Waits

PICTURE A CHUBBY, HAIRY CREATURE that looks like a tailless squirrel, popping up from the talus on the high Olympic slopes. It calls at you in short, high-pitched bursts, sounding like a kid with a neon whistle at a warehouse rave. The animal is a dusty yellow, the size of a well-fed house cat, and sports the paunch of a middle-age couch potato—this is the Godzilla of squirrels. It’s Marmota olympus, our own special marmot.

This summer, more than 100 volunteers will scour Olympic National Park for evidence of the creatures. When a grad student discovered several years ago that the marmot population here was dwindling, park staff were faced with an ecological mystery and few resources to solve it. Enter the marmot monitors.

"Volunteers augment the funding crunches," says park biologist Patti Happe. "We can’t keep on top of everything." Buoyed by the Washington National Park Fund, last year more than 80 volunteers turned weeklong backcountry trips into scientific excursions. They checked 260 sites in the park‚Äôs remote interior, armed with a GPS device and a radio, finding marmots at a little less than half of them.

So why are the rodents of unusual size disappearing? "We think there’s an unsustainable level of coyote predation," says Happe, but they need cold, hard numbers before they can act. Aside from the statistics, she’s thrilled to see the program take off—this year volunteers joined a wait list to participate, happy to donate a week to the park’s cause. "I want good data, but this is your vacation," she says. "I want you to have fun."

Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: Essential Rain Gear

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Andrew Waits

GOPRO HD HERO 960 HELMET CAM

Waterproof polycarbonate housing surrounds a headlamp-style camera that goes anywhere, so you can preserve your cold-to-the-bone memories forever. $180, GoPro, gopro.com

Image: Andrew Waits

MAGNESIUM FIRE-STARTING TOOL

Scrape off magnesium with a knife to get a reliable spark, making you feel like a triumphant caveman under even the dampest conditions. $6.95, REI, 222 Yale Ave N, 206-223-1944; rei.com

Image: Olivia Brent

OUTBOUND GUIDE GAITER

Avid Olympic outdoorsmen call these lower-leg coverings the most absolute necessity in the rain—they’d sooner hike barefoot than without them. $25, Second Ascent, 5209 Ballard Ave NW, Ballard, 206-545-8810; secondascent.com

Image: Andrew Waits

REI DUCK’S BACK RAIN COVER

A drain hole lets out trapped moisture underneath this backpack cover made with polyurethane coating and a reinforced bottom. $30, REI, 222 Yale Ave N, 206-223-1944; rei.com

Image: Andrew Waits

MICROFIBER POCKET TOWELS

If you can’t find a use for cloth that soaks up to 10 times its weight and wrings out 85 percent of that…well, you’re not on the Olympic Peninsula.$14, seattlesportsco.com

Image: Andrew Waits

JETBOIL FLASH COOKING SYSTEM

An enclosed stove with no open flame can’t be soused in bad weather, and a two-minute boil time won’t prolong the precoffee misery. $100, Pro Mountain Sports, 5625 University Ave NE, University District, 206-522-1627; promountainsports.com

Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: Poet of the Park

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Andrew WaitsFrom the swamplands down in the draw, all the frogs you could ever hope to know are singing to each other.

From the swamplands down in the draw, all the frogs you could ever hope to know are singing to each other.

—FROM “MEDIATION ABOVE OZETTE” BY TIM MCNULTY

IT’S A FAMILIAR TALE: Eastern boy hears the call of the wild, heads West, and makes his mark on the frontier. Only for Tim McNulty of Connecticut back in 1972, the Wild West beckoned in the form of Theodore Roethke, Kenneth Rexroth, and Robinson Jeffers—all poets who adopted the Northwest as their muse. Like his predecessors, McNulty found Western riches not in fame or fortune, but in literary circles. Nearly 40 years after he forwent graduate school to, in his words, “apprentice [himself] to the wild,” he has become a kind of poet in residence of Olympic National Park.

Pick up a park brochure in the Hoh Rain Forest and you’ll see McNulty’s work: “In the rain forest, thoughts intuitively yield to a slower and grander pace.” Or see his collaboration with peninsula photographer Pat O’Hara; he notes how suited the Olympics are to the lens: “Blowing mists, fog, that disappearance and reappearance of landscape—it seems to lend itself well to photographic imagery.” His self-taught environmental education led to Olympic National Park, A Natural History, an award-winning ecology tome.

Conservation journalism and teaching gigs followed, but despite penning a series of books about national parks across the country, he remains settled outside of Sequim, with the Buckhorn Wilderness and Olympic National Forest as his backyard. He wanders everything from paved nature trails to the backcountry, notebook in hand. “The Olympics are much more of a hidden secret” than other parks, McNulty says. “You have to do more work to where you can interpret them artistically.”

The Elwha’s Last Dam Summer

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Mikal Jakubal

Eco-Prank at Glines Canyon In 1987 removing the Elwha dams was a radical idea.

ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 3, 1987, A MASSIVE CRACK appeared on the face of the Glines Canyon Dam, a 210-foot concrete arc that sits on the Elwha River, under the shade of Olympic National Park’s mighty cedars and firs, 12 miles upstream from the timber mill town of Port Angeles, Washington. Fortunately, the crack posed no threat to Port Angeles. It was merely symbolic—made of black paint, as were the letters Elwha Be Free written across the dam’s face. Glines, one of two hydroelectric dams that plug the 45-mile-long river, prevents salmon from reaching their ancient spawning grounds. As eco-pranks go, this one was audacious, beautiful, and wildly successful.

The crack’s anonymous artist seemed to spring from the pages of The Monkey Wrench Gang, the 1975 Edward Abbey novel that inspired the creation of the radical environmental group Earth First! A photo of the dam ran in newspapers nationwide that evening. Until then, few people outside of the Elwha River Valley even knew the dams existed. Removing them—or any dam—was a radical idea. In the American West, dams were our pyramids, monuments meant to last forever.

Twenty-three years and nine months later, on June 1, 2011, Kevin Yancy, a stocky Bureau of Reclamation project manager wearing a mustache and a hard hat, threw a switch and killed the turbines at the Glines dam and its brother, the Elwha Dam, forever. Yancy’s act was no prank. It came at the order of Congress, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. In September, a private engineering firm will begin demolishing both dams notch by notch. By 2014, if all goes well, the radical prophecy written in paint a quarter century ago will come true. The Elwha will be free.

On the day the powerhouses died, I tracked down the anonymous crack painter at his home in Northern California. He’s now a 48-year-old EMT and documentary filmmaker. He operates a bamboo nursery. His name is Mikal Jakubal. And he’s ready to fess up.

Back then, he was a 24-year-old Earth First! activist. “I might as well come out about it,” he told me, after initially feeling reticent about claiming credit. “I’m not ashamed or worried about the law, but that’s part of my past and I’d rather not be known for it,” he said. “I’ve got other things going on now.”

Like most radical activists, Jakubal has mellowed in his middle age. But the passion still burns inside. When I mentioned the death of the dams, Jakubal brightened. “I think it’s awesome,” he said. I asked if he ever imagined the day would come. He paused. “I didn’t bring those dams down,” he said. “We were just one little bitty pinprick in the side of the system, trying to make this idea go forward.”

He’s right. One prank didn’t destroy the dams. But next month’s demolition of the Elwha River dams brings closure to one of the greatest environmental battles in Pacific Northwest history. It also marks the extraordinary evolution of an idea. What began as a radical scream from Mikal Jakubal— Tear down this dam!—became, over the course of a quarter century, a commonsense solution carried out by Kevin Yancy. Yes. Let us tear down this dam—calmly, methodically, and together.

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An Outrage for Salmon The dam’s builder simply ignored the law requiring fish passage.

THERE’S AN EBB AND FLOW TO THE movement of radical ideas into mainstream acceptance. It’s a little like the movement of legislation. Many bills get submitted. Few become law. Most are considered, found wanting, and get quietly washed out by the system. You see the pattern with gay marriage. Once off-the-charts extreme, same-sex unions gained some form of state sanction. Then comes a backlash—the Defense of Marriage Act, California’s Prop 8—and then the voters calm down, regret the backlash, and the idea’s acceptance rises again.

The extreme idea of tearing down the Elwha dams began with a tiny coterie of supporters, not just Earth First!, but a small coalition of Native Americans, fishermen, and more mainstream environmental activists who had been quietly tossing around the idea amongst themselves. To them, the idea didn’t seem so crazy. That’s because the dams were criminal from their inception.

In the early 1900s an enterprising Olympic Peninsula homesteader named Thomas Aldwell spotted a business opportunity in the Elwha River. With its tight gorges and steep drops, the river seemed perfect for a dam to produce power for sawmills in Port Angeles. With out-of-town investors backing him, in 1910 Aldwell hired a crew to raise a brutally ugly concrete structure. In 1912, they completed the 108-foot-high Elwha Dam.

Local history books treat him as a hallowed pioneer, but I’ll say it plainly: Thomas Aldwell was a corner-cutting, law-breaking, profit-driven son of a bitch. More interested in construction speed than dam safety, Aldwell anchored his structure to the canyon walls but not the bedrock under the river’s substrate. So when the reservoir—named, humbly, Lake Aldwell—filled in 1912, it promptly blew out the dam’s foundation. Aldwell ordered his men to stuff a bunch of fill material upstream of the dam, called it good, and began producing power in 1913. The Elwha Dam’s power sold so well that in 1927 Aldwell built a second dam eight miles upstream at Glines Canyon (named to flatter Aldwell’s investor, George Glines). The Glines dam was at least more structurally sound than its older brother, and the dam’s quarter-moon arc and long fall-away face had an undeniable elegance in its design. The dams’ combined 28.6 megawatts of power nourished the growth of Port Angeles. Thomas Aldwell’s Olympic Power Company prospered, and the Aldwell family became a fixture of the Seattle society pages in the 1920s and 1930s.

That prosperity came at a price. State law required all dams to provide fish passage. This proviso had been in effect since 1890 and was well known in a state whose citizens drew wages, recreational pleasure, and dinner-plate protein from salmon. But Aldwell didn’t want to build a fish ladder. So he simply ignored the law.

On another river, Aldwell’s malfeasance would have been regrettable. On the Elwha it was an outrage. Born nearly three quarters of a mile high in the knuckled fist of the Olympic Mountains, the river runs fast, steep, and cold—perfect conditions for spawning big salmon. The Elwha was one of the few rivers in the West to host both steelhead (an oceangoing trout) and all five species of Pacific salmon. The river’s narrow canyons and big rapids “acted as a biological filter, which selectively admitted only the largest and strongest spring Chinook to the spawning grounds,” fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich explained in his book Salmon Without Rivers. “Over thousands of years, the run evolved into a race of giants, with individual fish commonly weighing over 75 pounds and many over 100 pounds.”

Salmon fed the bellies and the souls of the local tribe, the Lower Elwha Klallam, for millennia. A tribal elder recalled that as a little girl she once helped prepare a salmon so big it took her mother three steps to walk from the head to the tail. Then Thomas Aldwell erected his dams and brought the salmon, and the river, to ruin.

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The Elwha Runs Free In 20 years, some 120,000 spawners could be swimming up the Elwha.

DAMAGE INFLICTED BY THE ELWHA DAMS was hardly a secret. Through the windows of the Elwha Dam control room, five generations of engineers watched coho, Chinook, sockeye, and pink salmon circle beneath the concrete wall every autumn. For the salmon, it was like returning to spawn in an Escher drawing. They could smell the upstream water but never quite reach it.

There was invisible damage, too. Like all dams, the Elwha structures trapped sediment behind their walls and messed up the river’s natural temperature controls, which are critical to the health of salmon. Instead of growing and flourishing with fresh sediment, the river’s estuary shrank under the force of the scouring, silt-deprived river. Salmon runs dwindled as the fish returned to an ever-more-barren stub of a spawning ground. A river that once nourished an estimated 300,000 salmon now sees about 5,000 return every year. “We only take about four Chinook a year for ceremonial purposes,” says Robert Elofson, the Lower Elwha Klallam member who directs the tribe’s Elwha River restoration efforts. Other types of wild salmon “don’t come back in numbers that would let us harvest them.” The Klallam lost both salmon and land as the hungry Elwha ate its own banks on the tribe’s river-mouth reservation.

Similar sagas unfolded on rivers all across America, which spent much of the twentieth century in a dam-building frenzy. The loss of a few fish seemed like a fine tradeoff for the benefits of flood control, irrigation, and cheap electricity. By the time we stopped building, America had erected 75,000 dams and left only a single major river—the Yellowstone—unblocked along its entire length. The Yellowstone empties into the heavily dammed Missouri, so the number of wild major source-to-sea rivers is…zero.

The nation’s love affair with dams began to sour in the summer of 1976, when Idaho’s Teton Dam burst and killed 11 people downstream. That disaster prompted a national inspection by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and—surprise!—the Elwha dams popped up on the radar. The Elwha Dam was found to be unsafe, and the Glines Canyon Dam’s operating license had expired. “That’s when we started work on the fish passage issue,” recalls Elofson.

The tribe’s complaints about the dams had been ignored for more than 50 years. But the 1974 Boldt Decision, which affirmed treaty-guaranteed fishing rights, had given tribes like the Klallam newfound political clout. Their need for healthy salmon runs wasn’t just a quaint cultural yearning. It was literally a federal case. “As we studied the fish issue, people began to realize that, if the dams had to include fish passage, their electricity would be more expensive than just buying it off the grid from the Bonneville Power Administration,” Elofson told me. “At that point we thought it was possible to try for dam removal.”

Tribal officials and eco-activists weren’t the only ones floating the idea of dam removal. In 1986, Deputy Under Secretary of the Interior William Horn sent a memo to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the agency that licenses hydropower dams, expressing concern about the Glines Canyon Dam. Those worries were couched in terms of safety, but it was actually a ploy to revive the salmon runs.

I reached Horn recently at his office in Washington, DC, where he’s a natural resources lawyer in private practice. He recalled the memo. “We were trying to put the fish back in the Fish and Wildlife Service,” he told me. Horn’s boss, interior secretary Donald Hodel, had been hired to clean up the mess left by James Watt, the notorious antienvironmentalist who served as Secretary of the Interior in the Reagan administration.

The memo and the idea remained largely buried. It was just another deputy-level DC issue. Enter, in the late summer of 1987, Mikal Jakubal and a bucket of paint.

JAKUBAL WAS NO DIRECT-ACTION ROOKIE. TWO YEARS earlier he’d helped invent the tactic of treesitting by climbing to the top of a Douglas fir to halt a clearcut in the Willamette National Forest. In the spring of ’87 he’d driven his van to the Olympic Peninsula to attend an Earth First! camping rendezvous and plan protests against the Elwha River dams. He returned in the summer and late one night, drove his van up the gravel road that leads to Glines Canyon. He parked on a side road and pedaled his bicycle the final mile to the dam. Using a mountain climbing rope and harness, he lowered himself over the side on a moon-bright night.

“I’d done plenty of climbing in Yosemite, so this was no big deal,” he recalled. With a bucket of paint clipped to his harness, Jakubal used a paint roller to put the crack on the dam. Then he started with the slogan. “I had to do running pendulums, back and forth, and kind of swipe out the letters.” Then, disaster: Jakubal ran out of paint. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I can’t leave it at ‘Elwha Be Fr’!”

He climbed back to the crest of the dam, unclipped, pedaled back to the van, refilled the bucket, and raced back to the dam. At daybreak, he snapped a photo—with those final two Es in place—and rushed the film to a local wire service stringer.

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FACTS KEPT PILING UP AGAINST THE ELWHA DAMS.

In the early 1990s FERC issued a report that, Shawn Cantrell recalled, “affirmed 90 percent of what those of us advocating for dam removal had been saying”: chiefly that it would be cheaper and more effective to remove the dams rather than install fish-passage screens and ladders. Cantrell worked for Friends of the Earth on the Elwha issue for more than a decade. He’s now the executive director of Seattle Audubon. In 1991 the Klallam tribe, the feds, and mainstream eco-groups mounted a challenge to FERC’s authority to license the two dams. Then a little realpolitik came into the game. Reading the writing on the wall, a few years earlier the James River Corporation, which owned the dams, had spun off the two structures into a separate holding company. If a legal judgment were to go against James River, the holding company might just declare bankruptcy and walk away, leaving two abandoned dams blocking the river.

In the end they cut a deal. The feds offered to buy the two dams from James River for $29.5 million and absolve it of all legal liability. James River agreed and instantly flipped from being a dam removal opponent to being one of the idea’s greatest Congressional lobbyists. In January 1992, less than five years after Mikal Jakubal’s painting prank, Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act, which authorized the Secretary of the Interior to acquire the two dams and remove them.

And then, predictably, acceptance gave way to backlash. The citizens of Port Angeles said, Whoa! They’re dynamiting our dams? Draining our lakes? No way! “Save the Dams” signs popped up all over Clallam County. There was widespread fear that dam removal would lead to job losses at the Daishowa pulp mill, which used the dams’ power. Senator Slade Gorton, who’d earlier supported dam removal, reversed course and became the nation’s chief dam hugger. It’s worth remembering the cultural moment: Nineteen ninety-two was near the height of the spotted owl war, when folks on the Olympic Peninsula felt their way of life was under attack by urban environmentalists determined to halt the logging of old-growth forests. Dam removers became as suspect as spotted owl lovers.

At this point, the idea could have died. The 1992 Elwha Act authorized the purchase of the Elwha dams but—critically—appropriated no money to carry it out. Gorton blocked the project’s financing, citing local opposition in Port Angeles. But for the goodwill and courage of a handful of politically moderate Port Angelenos, the project would have faltered.

What happened was this: In 1994, Bart Phillips, a Clallam County economic development official, and Joe Mentor, a Seattle lawyer and board member of Olympic Park Associates, a park advocacy group, formed a citizens committee of business owners, paper mill executives, and other Chamber of Commerce types. “We were at loggerheads, and nothing was happening,” Phillips told a reporter. “Everybody was shouting, and nobody was listening to the community.”

The citizens group looked at the facts and found that the dams were, indeed, outdated salmon killers whose power could easily be replaced without the loss of jobs. “The aha moment came when we saw that the cost of relicensing the dams would be so exorbitant that it would jeopardize hundreds of jobs at the Daishowa plant,” Phillips recalled in July. The group’s final report, issued in 1996, recommended removing the dams. It had a profound effect on the community. The citizens group didn’t win over everyone in Port Angeles, but the bulk of the opposition melted away. “Up to that point it was seen as an extreme outside environmental perspective being foisted on the local community,” Joe Mentor recalled recently. “The citizens advisory committee changed that. People were pretty skeptical at first, but after hearing the arguments, they realized it was in fact in the community’s best interest to remove the dams.”

Once the Port Angeles citizens committee came aboard, Slade Gorton was left nearly alone in his opposition to dam removal. He held the Elwha dams hostage for a few more years before being swept out of office in 2000. Soon after $325 million in dam removal money came through.

Today, Gorton belongs to the remaining few of those bitterly opposed to the removal of the Elwha dams. Lynda Mapes of the Seattle Times called him up for a quote on the day the power shut down. “It is something with which I disagreed, and I don’t wish to be reminded of it,” Gorton told her.

THERE WILL BE NO GRAND DENOUEMENT FOR THE DAMS. The Bureau of Reclamation removal plan includes explosives, but they’ll be used in small doses, not in one big bang. They’ll start chipping away at the Glines Canyon Dam in September, removing it in seven-meter cubes like a game of Tetris played backward. The reservoir will drain slowly. The Elwha Dam may be more exciting—its bedrock plugs will be blasted away. But few will be on hand to see it happen. The dam’s road closed in July and the whole area will remain a secured construction zone until the project’s completion in late 2014. The return of the salmon will take a little longer. Fisheries experts expect spawning runs to ramp up steadily over the next 20 years. If all goes well, by 2031 there could be 120,000 spawners swimming up the Elwha.

Mikal Jakubal, the crack painter, wishes he could be there this fall. “I’d like to take the first swing” with a sledgehammer, he told me. But he won’t. Dam removal has long since left the hands of radical environmentalists. It’s in the care of engineers, contractors, heavy equipment operators, botanists, and fisheries biologists. It’s in Kevin Yancy’s world now. A few days before pulling the power plug, Yancy sat at his desk in the Elwha Dam control room, faced a wall of hundred-year-old dials and gauges, and reflected on the dams’ end days.

“For this river and this story,” he said, “it’s time.”

Olympic National Park

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Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: Follow the Ranger

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Winter Things to Do

Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park

Plan Your Trip

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Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: The Marmot Brigade

Insider’s Guide to Olympic National Park: Essential Rain Gear

GOPRO HD HERO 960 HELMET CAM

MAGNESIUM FIRE-STARTING TOOL

OUTBOUND GUIDE GAITER

REI DUCK’S BACK RAIN COVER

MICROFIBER POCKET TOWELS

JETBOIL FLASH COOKING SYSTEM

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The Elwha’s Last Dam Summer