Olympic National Park

Okay, we're a little behind in posts to the blog.  We've been staying inside national parks for the last five days or so and have not had Internet connections.  So, I'll try to catch up a little now.

We're in Winnemucca, Nevada.  No, there's not a national park here.  This is about half way between Crater Lake, OR and Salt Lake City.  We'll stop at SLC on the way to Rocky Mountain NP, our last park.  So, we are on our way home.  Our car has been pointed west and north for the last month or so.  After Crater Lake we are driving south and east.

So, back to Olympic National Park.  This is maybe our favorite park so far.  It is a combination of mountains, rain forest, and ocean.  This park is also a little unusual in that a higher percentage of it has remained in the "wilderness" state compared with other parks.  For example, unlike Glacier park and Yellowstone, there are no roads that go through the park.  There are only roads that circle the park and then there are occasional park roads that go into the interior to see the mountains or rain forest.  The park has been recognized as a Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site.

Day One

We drove up from Olympic and entered the park on the north/east side.  There is a drive up to the peak of Hurricane Ridge.  This is a ridge that let us see other mountains in the park.  From the parking lot at the peak, we hiked a mile trail to a second peak.  This gave us a phenomenal view of the mountains to the south and also Puget Sound to the north.

During the hike we saw quite a bit of wildlife - a bear, some marmots, some deer.  It was a beautiful, sunny day and not too warm for our hike.  But Matthew did have to cool off his feet!

After the hike, we drove down the mountain and went to our hotel on a small lake in the park called Crescent Lake. It was a beautiful setting.

Day Two

We went to the Hoh Valley, a part of the park that is a rain forest.  This is the only temperate rain forest in North America and there are huge trees - Cedars, Firs, and Spruces.  We hiked two trails here and saw amazing things.  One thing we learned about is "nurse" trees.  The floor of the forest is so packed that new seedlings have trouble finding a place to take root.   So, when a tree falls, it provides some open space for new trees.  The original tree decays over time and the roots reach to the ground, so sometimes there are big open spaces in the roots.  We could see a number of places where the newer trees (now mature) are in a row, in the line of the old, fallen nurse tree.

Oh, did I mention the banana slugs, that can grow to be six inches long?  Yuck!

After our hikes we drove west and saw the Pacific Ocean!  This was the western-most part of our trip.  Our hotel was right on highway 101 and we could see the ocean and beach from our room.  After dinner we walked the beach.

Day Three

In the interest of combining education and fun, we got up early and had a beach walk with a park ranger.  The focus was on tide pools and the various organisms and ecosystem in tide pools.  This was a fascinating time.  The ranger was very knowledgeable and we saw amazing collections of sea stars, sea anemones, barnacles, mussels and snails.

In the afternoon we went to another beach, Ruby beach and spent the afternoon walking and climbing on rocks.   This was at low tide so we had a chance to see lots of things that are covered up during high tide.  It was a fairly short walk up the beach to be completely alone on the beach.  We had a picnic supper on the various logs/driftwood.  This was maybe the best part of the vacation for all of us.