A small red stone on a moss-covered log marks what Gordon Hempton once called “very possibly the quietest place in the United States.”
Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records sounds in the natural world, told SFGATE his favorite place is Olympic National Park in Washington State, which he called “the listener’s Yosemite.”
Inside the park, in the Hoh Rainforest, Hempton started One Square Inch of Silence on Earth Day in 2005. The site sits 3.2 miles from the visitor’s centre on the Hoh River Trail, about a two-hour hike from the parking lot along what SFGATE described as a “gentle path” lined with ancient trees and ferns.
The project grew out of Hempton’s effort to catalogue the quietest places on Earth in 1984. At that time, he found 21 silent spots in Washington state alone. A decade later, only three remained.
Road traffic contributed to the problem, but Hempton said jet aircraft had become the biggest source of noise. “No place near any kind of flight path is reliably quiet anymore,” a Conde Nast Traveler article wrote about Hempton’s findings. “As a result, says Hempton, there’s not a single square inch of silence left anywhere in the continent of Europe: Too many planes.”
Hempton said the One Square Inch of Silence project set out to protect one of the last remaining quiet places in the United States.
“The logic is simple; if a loud noise caused by an aircraft could have a noise impact over many square miles, then, would it be true that a single point of quiet, if maintained in a completely noise-free condition, would also have an equally large quiet impact?” Hempton wrote on his website.
“Indeed, this proved to be the case between the years of 2005-2018 when the One Square Inch project [was] active,” he confirmed.
“During those 13 years, when noise intrusions were observed, the noise source was identified via internet flight tracking data and the responsible party asked voluntarily to avoid flying over Olympic National Park. Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, and Hawaiian Airlines all cooperated.”
The project ended in 2018. SFGATE reported that it was followed by increases in “electronic warfare exercises” by the US Navy that disrupted the area.
Hempton launched Quiet Parks International in 2019, a nonprofit with a “mission to save quiet for the benefit [of] all life, both human and wildlife, and not just at one place but worldwide.”
The group certifies quiet places around the globe and lists parks in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America. Hempton told SFGATE that places in Olympic National Park still qualify as “quiet.”
“It’s the most sonically diverse [national park],” Hempton told SFGATE. “It’s three parks in one: You have the alpine, glacier environment; you have the largest contiguous coniferous forest in the United States, including temperate rainforest; and you have the longest uninterrupted wilderness coastline on the western U.S.”
One of his favourite places in the park is Rialto Beach. Hempton said the Sitka spruce logs there are “nature’s largest violin,” alongside rattling pebbles that move with the surf.
“Rialto is my personal favorite. It basically has four seasons of sounds, of surf sounds,” Hempton said. “It’s just a concert.”
Quiet Parks International describes its vision this way: “A world that offers quiet within and without. A world where everyone has daily access to quiet and opportunities to listen to the sounds of nature. A world where the experience of quiet nature is directly linked to inner quiet, peace, and joy of being.”
“When we save quiet, we save everything else.”
Read more from GoodGoodGood.
