QUINAULT, Wash. -- The first two weeks of the year were the rainiest in the history of Los Angeles, as nearly 17 inches fell and all of the state's major insurance companies declared a "catastrophe." Highways closed, hillsides collapsed and at least 15 people died across Southern California.
Here in Quinault in the northwest corner of Washington state, more than 18 inches of rain fell in just four days last week -- and nothing much happened.
The nearby rain forest in Olympic National Park absorbs about 140 inches of rain each year, almost 2 billion gallons of water per square mile. A single Douglas fir can hold 5,000 gallons.
(Photos Blaine Harden -- The Washington Post)
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It was so not a catastrophe that most students at Quinault High did not bother with an umbrella. "You are lucky if they wear coats," said Jim Bennett, the school superintendent.
Juliann Morrison, 15, is a cheerleader at the high school and knows from rain. Her pompons become drooling deadweights during football and baseball season. "For Quinault people, raining is, like, normal," she said.
Quinault is the rainiest place in the rainiest forest in the Lower 48. Annual rainfall averages 140 inches, nearly 12 feet a year, which dumps almost 2 billion gallons of water on each square mile of the encircling rain forest, which may well be the most efficient moisture blotter on Earth.
Researchers have found that this temperate rain forest -- a uniquely lush matrix of ferns, moss and some of the world's tallest spruce, cedar and Douglas fir trees -- has more living biomass per acre than any tropical rain forest, even those that get twice as much annual rain. A single Douglas fir here can hold 5,000 gallons of water; an acre of forest can slurp up 250,000 gallons.
Quinault reliably holds the wetness record in the contiguous United States because it sits near the upper end of the largest V-shaped, westward-facing valley of a rain forest, much of which is inside Olympic National Park. Warmish moist air off the Pacific moves into the valley's embrace and dumps precipitation as it climbs the steep walls of the Olympic Mountains, a jagged range of rock that tops out at nearly 8,000 feet.
Even when it is not raining in Quinault, it seems to be.
Fog and mist from the nearby Pacific slithers endlessly into the valley, condensing on billions of needles in the conifers and falling as precipitation. About 30 inches of this non-rain, which some locals call "tree pee," falls annually here, which nearly equals the total average annual rainfall in supposedly soggy Seattle.
People here often speak of rainfall not in inches but in feet.
"The only time you notice it is when you get a foot and a half in a day; otherwise, you don't notice," said Sandy Larsen, 54, the school district business manager, who was born and raised here.
There is, of course, a price to be paid for living with wetness without end. Roofs grow moss. Shoes sprout a mildew that looks like gray hair. Horses get "rain scald," which makes their hides pink with pus.
After an especially horrific rain, the undammed and petulant Quinault River, which drains the valley, has a habit of ripping huge trees out of the forest and sending them downstream at destructive speed.
The logs occasionally stitch themselves together into rafts on Lake Quinault (a wide, slow-moving part of the river) and, if the wind blows real hard, smash into lakeside houses. Last week, after the big-but-not-horrific rain, there was concern about the logs, but local men with chainsaws unstitched a potential logjam.
