The Forest's Voices

Ease your pace here, and let your ears do the walking for a minute. The creek's still down there, but layered over it is a forest full of voices, and this stretch climbing toward the next falls is the best place on the whole loop to pick them apart. Sound behaves oddly in here. The canyon walls and all that hanging green soak up the sharp edges, so what reaches you arrives soft, close, and strangely without direction. Hear that slow, hollow hammering — knock... knock-knock — like someone's tapping a deep wooden drum? That's the pileated woodpecker, a crow-sized bird with a flaming red crest, chiseling rectangular holes in the firs. Now wait for the thrush. The varied thrush sings one long, eerie ringing note, then a pause, then another a hair off-pitch — a sound that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, the loneliest, loveliest call in these woods. Up in the high branches, a chestnut-backed chickadee scolds in a thin, buzzy chatter, and somewhere a band-tailed pigeon claps off a limb with a startling slap of wings. And down low, somewhere in the sword ferns, the Pacific wren: a bird barely bigger than your thumb, pouring out a song so long and so fast and so loud you won't believe the size of the throat behind it. Here's the trick — close your eyes for ten steps and count how many separate voices you can hold at once. Most folks lose track at four. Walk slow through here. Let them find you.