Olympian Effort -- Six-Day Trek Visits Six-Month Epic Of Courage

Compared to the Press Exploring Expedition, we were sorry individuals.

When dogs ate their bacon, the first white explorers trying to cross the Olympics made do with flour soup - a pound and a half of flour, three gallons boiling water, serves five. They survived bouts of dysentery in freezing temperatures, and during the coldest winter in contemporary memory slogged through snowdrifts, carried 1 ton of supplies and spent hours in the icy Elwha River as they hauled a boat full of gear upstream. All because it was better to risk everything than to come in second.

And here we thought we had it tough, hiking about 50 miles with heavy packs, spending six days along rivers that - in August - we found too cold for bathing. Our freeze-dried food was losing its savor. We were ready for a good night's sleep on clean cotton sheets. We were about to get crabby.

The six hardy men of the Press Expedition spent six months in 1889 and 1890 going up the Elwha River and down the Quinault. Led by folks from the non-profit Olympic Park Institute, 11 of us covered approximately the same route in six days. The early trailblazers were cowboys, veterans and prospectors with "an abundance of grit and manly vim," according to accounts in The Seattle Press, the newspaper that sponsored the expedition. And an abundance of courage.

At the time, the last great mysteries of the West lay behind the silhouette of the Olympic Mountains. According to Robert L.

Wood's definitive account, "Across the Olympic Mountains, The Press Expedition, 1889-90," some people believed a fierce tribe of Native Americans lived in the valleys, while local tribes remembered tales of catastrophe in the area. According to legend, all but a few Native Americans who had gathered for athletic competitions and trade in one peaceful Olympic valley were killed, eaten by bears and other wild animals, or done in by a landslide, earthquake, flood or angry god. Modern tribes steered clear of the Olympic range.

On Friday, December 13, 1889, the Press Party left the end of the county road from Port Angeles and headed toward Elwha Canyon. A week later their whiskey was "well nigh exhausted, which is a good job," the trip's leader, arctic explorer James H. Christie, wrote in his log.

The men took 2 1/2 months to get past where we started our trip, at the Whisky Bend trailhead in Olympic National Park. They were delayed by foul weather and ill-fated attempts to build Gertie, a leaky boat used to carry their gear. After hours spent maneuvering her upstream, often chest-deep in the water, they managed to dry out and warm up each night around raging bonfires. After making only 4 miles in two weeks, they mothballed Gertie. The men then spent more valuable days in an equally doomed competition to design sleds for their gear.

In early February, despite snowflakes "as large as an after-dinner coffee cup," the men decided to forge on by snowshoe. They strapped their supplies, 50 pounds at a time, to wooden frames on their backs, relaying loads to ever higher camps. In snow 3 feet deep it took the men all day to carry 800 pounds 1 1/2 miles. Eight round-trips per man were needed to move camp.

"It was the first of many days of similar labor," wrote Capt. Charles Adams Barnes, trip photographer and topographer, early on. "It was hard, but it was honest."

The men brought with them a dog named Daisy, "two bear dogs of quality" named Bud and Tweed, and Dike, who was killed by an elk-kick to the head. The mules, Jennie and Dollie, also met early ends. Jennie fell down a steep slope to her death, weighed down by 200 pounds of gear, including "50 pounds of colored fire," fireworks the group planned to shoot off a mountaintop to entertain Seattle. Dollie was later set free to fend for herself.

In April, after traveling up the Goldie River and climbing arduously along the ridges above it, the men believed they were about to reach the Quinault and begin the descent toward civilization. But the river they saw from the ridge flowed north, the wrong direction. They had mistaken a curving reach of the Elwha for the Quinault and saw they should have continued up what is now known as the Press Valley, rather than spend 12 days climbing the rugged canyons of the mountains.

It was "a disagreeable discovery which gave rise to sundry hard expressions not usually found in Webster, but quite excusable under the circumstances," one man wrote. They cached all but the essential gear and decided to move quickly. Some of these caches might still be found today, according to Wood.

The party also left behind three parallel ax marks as blazes on many of the trees they passed. The marks were at snow level, up to 10 or 12 feet above the ground. Mountaineers report finding them in recent times, though we weren't so lucky.

Barnes worried that others would use these blazes to catch up with the party. In April, when some of the men were scouting and heard gunshots and other noises at the main camp, they were panicked by the possibility of guests.

"We always had the fear of visitors in our minds," he wrote. "It was part of our mission to cut a trail into this region in order that the country might be opened to settlers. So thoroughly had we done it that a party leaving Port Angeles could lope after us on horseback and easily travel in a few days over a road which it had taken us months to come. So jealous were we of sharing our hard earned honors with exploiting and notoriety seeking strangers, that we would have regarded it as a catastrophe ranking next to the loss of one of ourselves."

So what did that make us?

More than a century after the Press Expedition blazed its trail, we were strangers in pursuit of wilderness and a better grasp of history. We weren't a threat, we were just out to understand the adventure and the adventurers.

They left behind some puzzles. Why, for instance, did the party name the mountains they discovered after men, the famous newspaper owners and editors of the day (The Bailey Range, after the owner of The Seattle Press, Mount Hearst, now known as Mount Queets, and Mount Pulitzer, now probably known as Snagtooth) while they named streams after the women in their lives, and then by first name only? Who were Mary and Margaret of Lake Mary and Lake Margaret, who was Lillian of Lillian River, and which explorer was attached to which woman? Was it by marriage or motherhood, lust or romance? We wanted to know.

We were a motley group - builder, financial consultant, two writers, postal worker, teacher, college math professor, Eddie Bauer employee and botany student - ages 23 to almost 60. With nine women and two men, we displayed an abundance of womanly grit.

On the Elwha River Trail, we followed the river fairly closely, watching the wide riverbed and countless eddies and rapids.

We stopped at historic sites, including a field where the garden of Doc Ludden, a hermit, poet and beekeeper, had gone to seed, with shaggy apple trees and abundant mint. We each put a few leaves in our water bottles for some local flavor, then put on our packs again, jealous of the homesteaders who had used a motorized wheelbarrow to bring supplies up the trail.

We later stopped at Remanns Cabin, built by Grant Humes, an early homesteader and great-uncle of our fellow hiker Pam Wallenstein of Issaquah. Nearby, a few of us forded the freezing Elwha to visit Semple Plateau, a place the Press Party believed was the old Native American gathering place. They named it for Gov. Eugene Semple, who had advocated the peninsula's exploration. The flat woody area close to the river was silent and sunlit, with bright needles falling from the evergreens like light rain. We saw what could have been the remains of the four huge trees that supposedly marked the site of the legendary games.

The next day, we tried to find another cabin Grant Humes built. We had two altimeters, a bunch of compasses, a map putting the cabin a quarter-mile in and a quarter-mile back from our lunch stop, and the kiss-of-death assurance from Pam's cousin: "You can't miss it."

We did.

We unearthed the place later, but only after searching for another hour, and it gave us a new appreciation for the early explorers and their low-tech search for a pass between the two watersheds.

A few days later, seven of us decided to climb Mount Seattle, which Barnes had climbed with two days' supplies: 15 pounds of bear meat, a blanket, a camera and map-making gear. From Low Divide we bushwacked up, climbing along the edge of a tumbling creek and walking over snowfields. Following elk trails, without benefit of a real path, our leader, Dave Cossa of Port Orchard, brought us directly back to our campsite with no detours.

Back on the trail down the Quinault, we enjoyed the lush greenery of the Olympic rainforests, which support more biomass per acre than any other place in the world.

Monstrously tall trees have been living, dying and rotting there for centuries, fading into thick layers of loamy soil. We could eat salmonberries, thimbleberries, watermelonberries and blueberries, the upland ones tasting like bananas. We sampled tart oxalis leaves and luscious chicken-of-the-woods fungus, neon yellow and orange, the texture of Gummi Bears and tasting lemony - unspeakably good sauteed in butter over a campstove. All these delicacies were buried under snow when the Press Expedition was here.

We had it easier than they did in other ways, too. We had Gore-Tex and well-padded packs. We fortified ourselves with hard-boiled eggs, candy and scotch. And while we groused about our griminess, we came out looking much better than our predecessors.

"We had each started out with good, strong suits of serviceable Scotch wool, a suit of overalls, a change of underclothing, stout flannel outside shirts, good leather boots and waterproof garments throughout," Barnes wrote. "These were now reduced to the actual clothes we wore, all in rags. . . . At this rate, if we reach Grays Harbor with our ammunition belts we will be doing well. We can hide in the woods while we negotiate a trade with some clothing merchant."

We did face some hardships, however minor, that the earlier expedition missed in the depths of winter. We had mosquitoes, and campfires are prohibited.

After dinner, we would listen to Dave's history and orienteering lessons, and wonder why no one on the expedition died, why they brought so much gear and how they got along so well, at least judging by the official journals. It was a notable occurrence if one of these men so much as cussed.

Every night we hoisted our food, toothpaste, deodorant and dishrags, anything that could attract bears, into the trees. It was quite different for the Press explorers, who yearned for bear visits. The three bears they killed at Low Divide probably saved them from starvation, and they drank bear grease straight from the pan after killing the first one.

The Press Party finished its journey at Lake Quinault, hitching a ride on a settler's canoe after the raft the men built for the last leg of their journey was bashed into a pile of timber. They nearly lost their lives, and they lost all their gear except one pack containing the records of their trip. They boarded a sloop to travel to Grays Harbor and landed in Aberdeen.

We had a less eventful trip back to civilization. We exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses. The original explorers were lost to each other and to history within a few years of the expedition. We parted ways at the North Fork trailhead. By this point, we had more grit than vim, but much more respect for the mountains and the men who blazed trails through them.

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If you go

The Olympic Park Institute is planning a similar trip for next year, probably in August. For information call 360-928-3720.

The North Fork trail has been closed recently because a falling tree destroyed the Kimta Creek Bridge. Repairs are under way and are expected to be completed next spring.

When it is possible to do a through-hike, you may want to leave one car at the Whiskey Bend Trailhead. West of Port Angeles, take the Elwha River Road south from Highway 101, and bear left at the Elwha Ranger Station on Whiskey Bend Road. It's five miles to the trail. Leave the other car at the North Fork Quinault River Trailhead, which is east of Lake Quinault. The Ranger Station there is 18.4 miles from Highway 101 on the North Fork Road.

For information on trail conditions, call the Wilderness Information Center at 360-452-0300. For road and campground information, call the Olympic National Park at 360-452-4501.