Trip Report: What More, Ozette?

The Ozette Triangle is always a fun and interesting early-season hike. I’ve written about this hike twice before so I am going to skip a lot of the details about the hike itself in this post. If you are looking for more general information about the hike, see my post Ozette Triangle and the follow-up Revisting Ozette Triangle.  In this post, I am going to share a little more beta about a couple of homesteads and a gravesite you can find that take you back to the days of the early Scandanavian settlers.

Background

First, a (very) little history. Most of the early history that I can find focuses on Anders Victor Nylund. He was clearly influential but he was not the first. The area was already well known and written about by James Swan, an Indian Agent that lived among the Makah in the mid 1800’s.  And, there were other Scandinavia settlers in the area, like the Palmquist’s in what is now called Old Royal, WA. You’ll find names like Palmquist, Andrews, and Johns around the Clallam Bay area and it appears that they have largely been settling independently. So it was perhaps Nyland that had the idea of establishing a village at Ozette Lake and thus responsible for the influx that would lead to about 130 families settling around the lake.  In any event, Nylund came to Ozette Lake in 1892, a journey that would not have been as straight foward as it is today as there were no roads. Instead, he would have departed Seattle by steamer to Neah Bay where he would hire a Makah boat to take him around Cape Flattery, and land at Ozette Villiage. He would have then completed the journey on foot, walking the several miles along the trail that is now the Cape Alava trail.

Nylund’s family joined him in 1895 followed by many others. Within just a couple of years there were established schools, a church, and even a couple of post offices. In 1897 the area was placed off-limits to homesteaders by the Washington Forest Reserve and many started to abandon the area. The reserve was reduced in size in 1900 and the lake was re-opened to homesteading, but the vision of a village was lost and few remained long.

Most all traces of these early homesteaders have been erased, save for two. The first is the homestead of Peter Roose who settled on his homestead in 1907. He settled on a prairie (natural and/or maintained by the Ozette/Makah people) that is now called Roose Prairie.  The second is the homestead of Roose’s friend and fellow Swede, Lars Ahlstrom, who settled on a prairie adjacent to Roose. And as you would guess, it is now known as Ahlstrom’s Prairie.

Pete Roose Homestead

Pete Roose settled near the prarie in 1907 and there he maintained a flock of sheep, grew vegetables, and an orchard. He originally built a log cabin to live in and eventually added a storage shed and root cellar, and a barn. He even built a sawmill and milled his own lumber. This he used to build the two-room house that you can currently find on the property.

The Roose House

Not all maps will note the presence of this homestead, but you will see markers of buildings on the USGS maps:

USGS Map

There are no maintained trails to these sites, though there are definitely primitive trails that can be followed. The trail to Roose’s homestead is overgrown, and thick with Salal. Some may find it difficult to follow and I do recommend taking a GPS receiver or compass to aid in your navigation. It’s easy to get turned around in the thick and high Salal.

Most of the maps I have seen showing the trail to the Roose homestead do not accurately pinpoint the location to depart the Cape Alava Trail.  I marked the intersection as 10U 0373187E 5335023N (also on my CalTopo map to the right). At this location, you will see a small clearing just of of the trail with a pile of timbers. Head to the right, just beyond the timbers and you will pick up the primitive trail.

Roose Primitive Trail

Follow the primitive trail, which will roughly follow a bearing of about 345° from the intersection w/ Cape Alava Trail to the house, for not even .5 miles. Given the absence of a maintained trail, the site is clearly not managed by the Olympic National Park as a feature they are inviting visitors to see. But they do have a welcome plaque on the window of the house for those that do find their way here. And the site is maintained and kept in a good state of repair, thanks to its inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.