Hoh River through the rainforest
— the green that lives under twelve feet of rain.
Not only on a wall.
“The Hoh runs about fifty-six miles from the glaciers on Mount Olympus to the Pacific, almost all of it through a forest that has never been logged. The water is glacier-pale, the colour green that only happens where rock flour meets cold rain. The Hall of Mosses sits beside it. Big-leaf maples wear seven kinds of moss at once, and Sitka spruce go up two hundred feet without a branch before they open. People who have walked the trail describe a sound the rain makes hitting that much canopy. It is not silence, and it is not noise.
Hoh River through the rainforest, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Hoh River drains the western flank of Mount Olympus and runs roughly fifty-six miles to the Pacific Ocean, almost entirely within Olympic National Park. Its lower valley holds the Hoh Rain Forest, which receives between twelve and fourteen feet of precipitation a year, one of the wettest non-tropical climates in the contiguous United States. The Hoh Visitor Center sits at the end of an eighteen-mile spur off U.S. Route 101 and serves as the trailhead for the Hall of Mosses and Spruce Nature trails. The Hoh tribe, for whom the river is named, has lived at its mouth on the Pacific coast since long before European contact.
The pale jade colour of the Hoh is glacier signature. Meltwater from the Blue and Hoh Glaciers above 7,000 feet on Mount Olympus carries suspended rock flour, silt-sized grains ground beneath moving ice. Those particles scatter blue and green wavelengths of sunlight and absorb the rest, so the river reads opaque rather than clear. The water runs cold all summer, near 45°F, and braids across a wide gravel bed that re-arranges itself after every major storm. Salmon return to it: coho, steelhead, and a small run of chinook. In dry weeks the colour pales further; in heavy rain the river runs grey with the same load it carries to the coast.
What grows under twelve feet of annual rain is structure. The Hoh Rain Forest holds some of the highest measured biomass per acre of any forest on earth, exceeding most tropical jungles. Sitka spruce reach 200 to 300 feet; Douglas-fir, western hemlock, and western red cedar share the canopy. Below them, big-leaf maples carry epiphytic mats of club moss and licorice fern that can weigh four times the branch they ride on. Vine maple, salmonberry, and devil's club fill the understory. The air smells of wet bark and slow decomposition. Roosevelt elk graze the river meadows; their browsing keeps the forest floor open under the trees.