Ear time along the Hoh River Trail

Kirk Ericson | Nov 18, 20210

“I dedicated One Square Inch of Silence on Earth Day 2005. Alone, I placed a small red stone, a gift from an elder of the Quileute Tribe, on a log in the Hoh Rain Forest approximately 3 miles from the Olympic National Park visitors’ center.” — Gordon Hempton, Emmy-winning acoustic ecologist in a 2010 interview in The Sun magazine. Hempton lives in Joyce near the northern border of Olympic National Park

When you’re near a particular log situated off the Hoh River Trail in Olympic National Park, you’re in a rare spot. It’s a place that a man and his acoustic devices determined might be the outside place most undisturbed by human-created noise in the lower 48.

This cone of silence is so lacking in human sound that the noise created by unzipping a backpack is loud. Even if you pull the zipper’s slider slowly, you still can hear distinct ratchet sounds as the slider moves along each tooth.

Unwrapping a sandwich was so noisy that I mindlessly whispered “shhhhh” to the cellophane.

During an early afternoon hike last September, I stood along with my friend John, my trail compadre, next to that One Square Inch of Silence. The rain had eased, but drops were still penetrating the cathedral canopy of Sitka spruce, Douglas fir and Western red cedar, our state’s sacred triumvirate of green. The silent space was marked by several small stones, mostly reddish, that sat on a mossy, fallen tree trunk 100 winding yards off the Hoh River Trail.

Hempton provides directions to the spot on his website: “Follow the path over downed trees, walk along a tree root that spans a wet muddy area and you will soon be at your destination.”

In the Hoh Rain Forest, the vast number of tree roots that span a wet, muddy area makes those directions unhelpful, but Hempton included pictures. While we searched for the reddish stones, I lost sight of the path back to the trail for a few minutes.

An employee at the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center discourages people from going to the silent inch because it’s off trail, and I was thinking of that employee as I tried to fix the sound of the Hoh River. I knew the main trail was toward the sound of the crashing water, but the sound of the river was hard to track because it casts echoes.

I imagined that employee telling would-be rescuers: “Oh, you’re looking for that guy? I warned him.”

John and I maintained radio silence for the 15 minutes we were at the silent inch — we used hand signals and wrote messages on a notepad. We ate, but I soon stashed the food because it was impossible to make zero noise while eating. Try it sometime. I sipped water, but that created sloshing and swallowing sounds.

I didn’t want to bend over to put the water bottle down, because my raincoat would have made crinkling noises, so I balanced the water bottle on my head. For five minutes, I listened and watched, forced to be motionless so the bottle didn’t drop. Balancing a bottle on your head limits your field of vision, so I stood silent and still and stared intently at a small slice of the forest.

What I hadn’t heard or seen now emerged.

A bird to the left squawked, and a bird to its right squawked back, and that turned into a squawk-a-thon. I saw a bead of water hang from the bottom of a bright red berry. I stared deeper and could see sunlight inside the drop, along with an impossibly tiny, reflected image of a section of the forest.

I heard water, or echoes of water, crash over the rocks in the Hoh River. I heard fat raindrops strike plant fronds, I heard drops hit the forest floor and I heard drops plop on fallen logs.

Oh, the noise you can hear when you stop making noise.