Sorry to dig this one up, but I registered just to put my 2 cents in. I am not a hunter yet, however I am taking my hunters ed this coming weekend. What brought me to this post was I watched the show dual survival on the Discovery channel the other day and they were on the Olympic peninsula. During the show they found and killed a wild turkey.
Now what I currently am, is a Steelhead fisherman. I have been fishing the Peninsula with my father since I can remember. I currently live in North Seattle and usually spend as much as 50 plus days a year out there, sometimes more, rarely less, mostly in the winter.
So when watching the show, they were trying to head west to the coast. they walked in a small river and found a "dead" steelhead also to eat. But then later when trying to head "west" they ended up back high in the mountains and had to navigate a steep gorge. I immediatly called BS because if they were as smart as they would like us to think they would have just followed the river to the coast, Duh.....
So I found myself trying to further debunk them by looking up Peninsula Turkeys because out of my 30 plus years of exploring most of the peninsula river valleys from top to bottom I have never heard or seen one. My search brought me to this thread.
I do have several family members that live in Aberdeen, and one of them, my cousins father in law once told me about plentiful trout in the Klone Lakes. and so in the summer of 05 I thought I would hike up there for the weekend with mentioned cousin, his girlfriend, my wife and son. Anyone familiar with the area knows that there is a huge slide that made the road to this particular area impassible. This is where I parked my car and we started the hike. This could get really long, but the short version is my cousin walking ahead of us disturbed a ground hornets nest, and when we got to this point the hornets targeted my wife, she was stung 9 times initially, and were swarming, so I told everyone to go back the way we came. we got about a half mile back....and they followed and stung my wife 13 more times. So what I had us do is beeline straight down the side of the mountain as this would bring us back lower on the road than where my truck was parked. After much slipping and sliding down the hill we came out onto the road, me my wife and son first and as soon as we came out we startled a pig about 30 yards down the road. He/she grunted, stared long enough to for us to see exactly what is was (I thought it was a bear at first because wasnt expecting a pig) and then crashed into the brush, downhill side. At this point I thought I knew about the local wildlife so was kind of dumbfounded that I saw a pig. When we returned to Aberdeen (my wife was OK, but as you can guess doesnt do much back country hiking with me anymore) I asked Bill, the same guy that told me about klone lakes, about the pig. Now he grew up in the area, but is more of a mountaineer than hunter/fisherman and told me the same thing most of you are saying, that wynoochi pigs are a myth and yada yada he's never seen one, but I know what I saw and my then 7 year old boy recognized it was a pig. If I had to guess I would say it was about 100-125 pounds, dark brownish/black in color but I couldnt make out if it had tusks or not. I fish the upper nooch (below the dam) for summer runs frequently also and have never seen a pig before or after that one encounter.