Olympic National Park

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Caught the ferry to the Olympic peninsula and drove through the drizzle all the way to the Olympic Coast and a park campsite a few miles from the Pacific….and what luck, we saw that our campsite was adjacent to another family with a baby! Back to back nights…what luck. This baby turned out to be a delight, however, as we didn’t hear a peep all night. The campground really emptied out the next morning, and we went for a couple hour stroll along the beach as the sky cleared. Many huge rocks offshore made for a pretty amazing vista, as did the huge accumulations of driftwood logs. Lauren was adroit at finding starfish washed up along the shore, although they all seemed to be dying. We then drove into the town of Bend and checked things out. Not much of a town. We cooked dinner at the campsite and then made the short hike to Second Beach to watch the sunset. It was also a really low tide, so we got to do some great tidepooling and found many lurking starfish, in a variety of colors. The sunset fell right behind a big hole-in-the-rock, which made for a rather fantastic finish. The next day we drove to the Hoh rainforest and hiked for a couple hours along the Hoh River trail and saw some huge trees draped in moss and massive ferns, all on account of the 140 or so inches of rain that fall annually. We also got some great looks at Roosevelt elk foraging around the river near the trail. We drove up towards the northern part of the park and camped at Crescent Lake for the night. It began to rain (and wouldn’t stop for about 7 days). We had planned to spend a couple nights in the backcountry, but the poor weather changed our minds, so we drove into Port Angeles for the day and saw Harry Potter 5. Spent some time in town and found (you guessed it) a tasty Indian buffet. After another wet night at the campground at Crescent Lake, we did a few short dayhikes in spite of the rain and got to a cool waterfall and some more old growth trees. Had dinner at one of the resort places in the park, which warmed us up nicely. Packed up in the morning and headed to Port Angeles to pick up our ferry north….we’re Canada bound!

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