Plucked straight from a story book, the trail is filled with old trees – a mixture of temperate bigleaf maples and Sitka spruces – draped in green and brown mosses.
Along the main trail there is a particularly otherworldy 200 ft side path which leads to an enchanting grove of giant maple trees, cloaked in hanging moss. One visitor to the trail wrote that “the trees stand like green-robed figures of eld.”
Due to the abundance of water and nutrients in the soil of the rainforest, many of the large trees have stunted roots and fall easily during particularly windy storms. This leads The Hall of Mosses to also serve as a graveyard for fallen mossy trees. However, many trees and mosses continue to grow from and over the fallen tree trunks.
The Rain Forest receives up to 14 ft of rain a year, resulting in the lush green canopy that covers most of the forest. The National Park Services websites states, “The Hoh Rain Forest is located in the stretch of the Pacific Northwest rainforest which once spanned the Pacific coast from southeastern Alaska to the central coast of California. The Hoh is one of the finest remaining examples of temperate rainforest in the United States.”