The Year the Rainforest Burned

The Queets valley is a rainforest right next to the Hoh, deep inside Olympic National Park. In a normal year it gets over 14 feet of rain. A place that wet is not supposed to burn. But in 2015, it did. Lightning started a fire called the Paradise Fire far up the valley, and it would not go out. It burned for more than 170 days and became the largest fire in the park's history. How can a rainforest catch fire? The answer is a strange and dry year.

The Queets River valley sits beside the more famous Hoh, deep in the wilderness of Olympic National Park. In a typical year it receives more than 14 feet of rain, which is exactly why a fire there sounds impossible. Yet in the late spring of 2015, lightning ignited the Paradise Fire roughly 12 miles up the valley, near where Paradise Creek meets the Queets River. It refused to die. The fire burned for over 170 days, from late spring into late November, and became the largest fire in the park's recorded history. Understanding how the wettest kind of forest in the country could burn means looking at one very unusual, very dry year.

The trouble started in winter. Olympic's mountains usually hold deep snow that melts slowly all summer and keeps the forest damp. But the winter before the fire was too warm. By late February, less than 3 percent of the normal snowpack was left. Snowpack is the snow that piles up and stores water like a giant frozen sponge. With almost no snow and little rain, the Olympic Peninsula fell into its worst drought since 1895. That is more than a hundred years of records. The soggy rainforest slowly dried out.

The fire's real cause began months earlier, in a warm and snow-starved winter. Olympic's high country normally banks deep snow that melts gradually through summer, feeding the rivers and keeping the lowland forest moist. In the winter before the fire, January and February temperatures ran more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit above average, so the precipitation that did fall came mostly as rain instead of snow. By late February, less than 3 percent of the normal snowpack remained on the mountains. That missing frozen reservoir, combined with the Olympic Peninsula's worst drought since 1895, let an ecosystem built around constant moisture dry out from the inside, turning a fireproof forest into something that could finally catch.

This fire did not act like most wildfires. The Queets forest is covered in thick moss and lichen, soft green plants that drape over branches and the ground. When they dried out, they turned into perfect fuel. A spark would race up a mossy tree, then drop burning bits down onto the forest floor to light more moss. Firefighters could not stop it the usual way. The trees were too huge and the ground layer too deep to dig a firebreak, and the valley was so remote that crews had to hike many miles or fly in by helicopter.

The Paradise Fire behaved in a way that startled even veteran firefighters. The Queets forest is upholstered in moss and lichen, the soft, plant-like growth that hangs from limbs and carpets the ground. Normally damp, these had dried into ideal kindling. A spark would climb the moss up a trunk, then rain burning embers back down to ignite the forest floor. Mostly, though, the fire stayed low and slow, creeping through the understory and constantly relighting itself. Standard tactics failed. Trees measured up to 8 feet across, with an organic layer 3 feet deep beneath them, making firebreaks nearly impossible to dig, and water dropped from helicopters struggled to punch through the dense canopy. The valley's remoteness meant access only by long hikes or aircraft.

Here is what worried the scientists most. Forests like the Queets used to go hundreds of years between fires. But researchers counted three fires in about 50 years, which is a big jump. That made them ask whether warmer, drier years could become more common. If fire starts visiting the rainforest more often, the special plants and animals that need a wet, shady world could be in trouble. The Paradise Fire was not just one strange event. Scientists treated it as a warning to watch closely.

For scientists, the Paradise Fire was less an accident than a signal. Temperate rainforests like the Queets historically burned only about once every 500 to 800 years, so the forest's plants and animals evolved expecting near-constant moisture, not flames. Yet researchers counted three modest-sized fires in just the past half-century, a striking change that suggested something was shifting. The concern is not a single fire but a pattern: if warm winters and low snowpack become normal, fire could visit these forests far more often than they can recover from. Park wildlife biologist Patti Happe warned that if fires like this become routine, "we may not have these forests." The 2015 fire became a clear case study in how a warming climate reaches even the wettest places.