Story and Photos by Bret Wirta – The Incidental Explorer
Distance: 26 miles – Time out: 3 days
Degree of Difficulty: 2 – Highest Elevation: 4,688 ft.
Pet Friendly: No
June 18th – 20th 2014
I jumped at the chance to explore the North Fork of the Skokomish River with a friend who knows many of its secrets. Donovan told me we’d be backpacking in the footsteps of the famous O’Neil expedition of 1890, and we’d also be following the path of a little-know group of explorers – the Banner Party.
Packed and ready
It looked like the summer of 1890 would be the year that the last of the unexplored regions of the Olympic Mountains would finally give up their secrets. The public couldn’t get enough of the story. Because the Olympic Mountains were not on the direct path of commerce, their geography was little understood by cartographers until the end of the 19th century. Now the race was on to find what was inside that impenetrable maze of peaks and valleys. During the winter and spring of 1890, the Seattle Press had sold a lot of newspapers by funding and promoting James Christie’s heroic expedition up the Elwha and down the Quinault Rivers. Now other newspapers where poised to cover Lieutenant Joseph P. O’Neil’s US Army explorations up one of the last unknown areas in the Olympics, the North Fork of the Skokomish River.
Per Berg Map North Fork Skokomish River CLICK TO ENLARGE
In the south end of Puget Sound was a tiny newspaper, the Buckley Banner. Its struggling editor, Charles E. Joynt, was not going to miss out on a chance to pump-up his circulation just like the Seattle Press had done that spring. The Banner Party would also head up the North Fork of the Skokomish and “out-explore” the seasoned Lieutenant O’Neil as they both raced into the unknown together.