10 Things in the Pacific Northwest Woods That Shouldn’t Be There

Last summer I did the Haunted Waters episodes, which featured the lakes, the rivers, the oceans, the things down at the bottom where the light doesn't reach.

And you may have noticed that this year I've gone with a different summer tradition.

And this year we've gone into the woods.

Summer is when we get in our cars and drive somewhere we've never been or to our very favorite woodsy spot.

Summer is when we hike and camp.

It's when we rent cabins or set up our tents and take our families to the lake.

It's when we pull off at scenic outlooks and wander a little further down the trail than we probably should.

Summer is when we are most likely to find ourselves standing in a stretch of woods we don't know, in a part of the country we don't know, as the light goes down.

We've done the Appalachian woods.

We've done the New England woods.

And now we're going all the way to the other coast.

We're going into the Pacific Northwest.

The Pacific Northwest is not like the other forests we walked through together.

Appalachia is old, close, and human.

Every holler has a family in it.

New England is haunted in that brittle, Puritan, 400 years of guilt kind of way.

But the Pacific Northwest is something else entirely.

The Pacific Northwest is big.

The trees are the tallest on Earth.

The old growth goes up 200, 300 feet, and the canopy closes over you so completely that at noon, on the forest floor, it can be the color of the bottom of a lake.

It rains for eight months of the year.

The fog comes in off the Pacific and sits in the valley for days.

There are places in the Olympic Peninsula that get 12 feet of rain a year.

And there are corners of those rainforests that no human being has ever set foot in.

And the folklore of the area reflects that.