March is a great time to fish for steelhead on the Queets River. Photo By Doug Rose

It rains a lot on the Queets River. The west end of the Olympic Peninsula is the wettest place in the Lower 48, and the Queets often gets more rain than anywhere else on the peninsula.

During 2003, a huge Pineapple Express kicked its flow from a drought-level 2,269 cubic feet per second on Oct. 15 up to 37,200 cfs the next day and 58,100 cfs on Oct. 17. But that still isn’t as much as on Nov. 23, 1990, when the Queets registered 79,100 cfs after several days of torrential rain.

For winter steelheaders, all of this water is both a blessing and a curse. It creates fish habitat by carving new channels and unearthing spawning gravel. But too much rain, too fast, can bury redds and ruin productive pools and tail-outs. Rain pulls in fresh pulses of fish from the sea, but also knocks the river out of shape for days at a time and tends to play havoc with access on the Queets River Road.

That’s a problem because this 14-mile, low-speed gravel road provides the only access to the river, its three boat launches, the Queets Campground, and the Queets Trail.

Over the years, mudslides, blow-downs and washouts have blocked the road at various places, occasionally preventing access to the upper boat launches. But they also create opportunity for independent anglers. In the late ‘80s, I used to drag my bicycle around a small minor washout and had the upper river all to myself.

But a 2006 washout on the road at Matheny Creek was entirely different. After a heavy rain in March of 2005, a major slide occurred, and the Park Service closed the road. A storm in January 2006 took out 150 feet of road, and there was a 200-foot vertical drop to the river. The entire area around the washout was very unstable, so the park banned hiking around the closure.

Matheny Creek is located at Mile Post 8, a little more than halfway to the end of the road at the Queets Campground. As a result, the campground is often inaccessible. So are the Streaters Crossing and Sams River boat ramps, and the Queets River Trail, which begins on the opposite side of the river from the campground.

Fortunately, the lower eight miles of the road, between Highway 101 and Matheny Creek, is often open. You could still launch at Hartzell Creek ramp and float down to the Clearwater Bridge take-out.

The Salmon River, a lower Queets tributary and the site of the Quinault Tribe’s hatchery, was also below the washout. Anglers who didn’t mind bushwhacking could still park at road turnouts between Hartzell Creek and the washout and hike to the river.

GLACIAL RAIN-FOREST RIVER
The Queets begins in glaciers on Mount Olympus, and then tumbles through sheer box canyons and over tumultuous rapids to the lowlands of the Olympic Peninsula’s celebrated temperate-zone rainforest. Most of its major tributaries flow through National Forest or state land, but the main stem Queets lies entirely within Olympic National Park from its headwaters to the eastern boundary of the Quinault Indian Reservation, six miles from the ocean.