Qualla: Pyramid Mountain (Clallam County, Washington)

Pyramid Mountain (Clallam County, Washington): Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Clausen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Somebody had to carry the lumber. In the fall of 1942, with the Pacific war less than a year old and the Washington coast braced for an attack that never came, two National Park Service employees named Joe and Rena Shurnick hauled boards and shingles up the steep flank of a 3,100-foot peak above Lake Crescent and put together a shed. Thirteen feet by sixteen. Wood shingles on the walls, shakes on a simple pitched roof, windows facing every direction. From that one small room, watchers were supposed to scan the sky over the Olympic Peninsula and report anything with wings. The Army paid for it. The building is still up there.

Image: Ron Clausen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pyramid Mountain (Clallam County, Washington): Watching an Empty Sky

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Buaidh, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Aircraft Warning Service was, in practice, a national volunteer effort: ordinary people posted on hilltops, rooftops and headlands with binoculars, a telephone line and a set of aircraft silhouettes. Radar was young, coverage was thin, and the West Coast in 1942 genuinely did...

Image: Buaidh | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pyramid Mountain (Clallam County, Washington): The Lake That Was Split

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Clausen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Look down from the summit and the geology explains itself. A vast landslide scar runs across the slope below, and where it reaches the valley floor it has plugged the drainage entirely. Roughly eight thousand years ago that slide came down, choked Indian Creek, and cut the valley...

Image: Ron Clausen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pyramid Mountain (Clallam County, Washington): Sugarloaf, Renamed

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Clausen, CC BY-SA 4.0. For years this peak was Sugarloaf Mountain, a name people all over North America gave to any hill shaped like the cones of refined sugar sold in shops. In 1928 it became Pyramid, which is not a better name so much as a more geometric one. Either way the mountain earns it from bel...

Image: Ron Clausen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pyramid Mountain (Clallam County, Washington): Where the Weather Lands First

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Clausen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Storms here arrive from the west with nothing in their way. Fronts form over the Pacific, run northeast, and hit the Olympic wall, where the peaks force them upward until they let go of their moisture as rain or, in winter, as snow. It is the same mechanism that makes the western...

Image: Ron Clausen | CC BY-SA 4.0