Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain: Washington's Olympic Peninsula

by Tim McNulty, David Guterson (Introduction), Fawn Sharp (Foreword by)

Overview

2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Silver Medal in Ecology & Environment
2024 Nautilus Book Silver Award Winner in Ecology & Environment
2024 Washington State Book Award Finalist in General Nonfiction

A visually mesmerizing and environmentally conscious profile of the Olympic Peninsula. — Kirkus Reviews

• Contributors include Wendy Sampson, Loni Greninger, Gary Morishima, Maria Pascua, Jamie Valadez, Lynda V. Mapes, and others
• Includes 150 stunning full-color photographs of the region

In the Pacific Northwest, many of us delight in Olympic National Park, a unique and magical UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, located right in our own backyard. Yet the famed park is just the center of a much larger ecosystem, a wild circle of rivers that encompasses ancient old-growth forests, pristine coastal expanses, and jagged alpine peaks, all possessed of a rich biodiversity. For tens of thousands of years, humans have thrived and strived alongside this natural world.

In Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain, Tim McNulty explores the Olympic Peninsula’s complex—and ongoing—story of development, conservation, restoration, and cultural heritage, while writers from the Lower Elwha Klallam, Jamestown S’Klallam, Port Gamble S’Klallam, Makah Tribe, and Quinault Indian Nation share some of their own history, stories, and perspectives.

Perhaps no other region in the Northwest offers a history of such depth, nor a future ripe with so much potential. Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain is a rich and vivid exploration of both Olympic National Park and its surrounding peninsula.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680515299
Publisher:	Mountaineers Books, The
Publication date:	09/11/2023
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	235,598
Product dimensions:	10.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, and nature writer and recipient of the Washington State Book Award and National Outdoor Book Award.

David Guterson is a novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and journalist. He is best known for his award-winning debut novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, which won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award. It has sold more than four million copies and was adapted as a major motion picture. He lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle with his wife Robin. They have five children. Visit him on Facebook @davidgutersonauthor.

Fawn R. Sharp serves as the 23rd president of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and is also the current vice president of the Quinault Indian Nation in Taholah, Washington.

Editorial Reviews

"Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain: Washington's Olympic Peninsula," by Tim McNulty, showcases the natural beauty and wonder of this diverse corner of our state as well as conservation efforts to maintain it.... This is a gorgeous book that anyone can benefit from and learn.

Yakima Herald-Republic - Rachel Fowler

The chorus of Indigenous voices from different tribes that have inhabited and stewarded the lands of the Olympic Peninsula since time immemorial — generously sharing their people's histories, stories and time-wizened perspectives — add immeasurable value to the book's initiative. So too do the abundance of vivid, captivating photographs by John Gussman, Pat O’Hara, Gemina Garland-Lewis, Larry Workman, Art Wolfe and others. All these voices blend together to create a celebratory portrait of a diverse landscape we are lucky to have in our backyard.

Cascadia Daily News - Christian Martin

Highly recommended.

Midwest Book Review

An invitation to explore a land of natural wonders, but it is also a cautionary tale about a precarious and precious ecosystem whose future integrity hangs in the balance.

Natural History - Laurence Marschall

The storms of autumn are a signal for the return of salmon to spawn in rivers of the Olympic Peninsula, and they mark a season to examine and celebrate this furthest Northwest corner of the lower 48 states. The job is gloriously done in Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain: Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.... With stunning photography, the book lays out life experiences of the Olympics, two-legged and four-legged creatures as well as creatures of the sea.

Post Alley - Joel Connelly

The hardcover book need not be read immediately from cover to cover, but savored in sections as time allows. The photography alone encourages time spent with it.... McNulty's narrative, and the supporting essays, open windows and perspectives into the peninsula's ecosystems.

National Parks Traveler - Kurt Repanshek

This book seems to rise organically out of the natural roots of the Olympic Peninsula, and from the heart and soul of its people. Salmon, Cedar, Rock and Rain will become the definitive book on this unique place ‒ a world heritage site and UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. I don't see how anything could surpass it.

Alan Turner

Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain” is pictures, prose, facts and love.

Peninsula Daily News - Diane Urbani De La Paz

2023-10-03
McNulty explores the past, present, and future of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in this nonfiction work.

The state of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula is a land rich in beauty and biodiversity. Anchored by Olympic National Park and containing Hoh, one of the United States’ last remaining rain forests, the area was once seen as the country’s last frontier, a wilderness that called to eccentrics, lush and full of life but paradoxically gloomy and claustrophobic. A rousing array of photos from numerous photographers captures the region’s rigid cliffs and curved rocky capes, moist seabeds and glistening-yet-muddy beaches, moss-covered trees and tangled roots, and the diverse species of fish, birds, and other fauna that call it all home. Global warming has affected the Olympic Peninsula; the salmon no longer return in the numbers they once did, and the Anderson Glacier is now Moraine Lake. Additional essays, many by Indigenous residents, recall the history and sacred places of the Klallam and S’Kallam tribes, the songs and legends of the Makah peoples, and the close relationships of the Quileute, Hoh, and Quinault tribes with the rivers and ocean (“The halibut spirit, for example, could make fish come to the shore so that all of the village could acquire them”). The book’s gorgeous color photographs are easy to get lost in, but they become quite sobering when considered in the context of climate change’s impacts. Recent efforts to remedy the multigenerational trauma inflicted by white settlers on the Indigenous peoples (and other ill effects of meddling in the region) offer hope that the area’s decline need not be inevitable, especially as the Olympic transitions from a resource-based economy to one that relies on tourism and recreation. McNulty shares his own experiences in the area with a contagious excitement, and the addition of Indigenous voices and perspectives places this a cut above a traditional photobook. The end result is a rallying message of equity and sustainability.

A visually mesmerizing and environmentally conscious profile of the Olympic Peninsula.

Kirkus Reviews