After Nicole’s wedding, Jon and Brenda joined me and Karen for some hiking in the nearly one million acres of Olympic National Park, which is dominated by perpetually snow-capped Mount Olympus.
We loaded up the rental car and took the Bainbridge Island Ferry out of downtown Seattle for 35 minutes across Puget Sound to the village of Winslow, filled with boutique shops, museums, parks, and a marina.
Winslow is a tourist town and a great spot for shopping and lunch before we hit the road for our Airbnb in Port Angeles.
Port Angeles is a small, seaside community that serves as the gateway to Olympic National Park. Our cottage had an observation deck that provided an excellent view of the harbor and the August full moon.
We began our exploration of Olympic National Park in the Hoh Rain Forest. Normally, the wettest destination in the Lower 48 States, this area was experiencing its third year of drought.
The thick, green moss-clad trunks and limbs of the old-growth trees, many over 1,000 years old, had turned brown and limp, revealing their thirst
Hiking through the 300-foot-tall Sitka Spruce, Big Leaf maples, and dense sword fern on the forest floor felt prehistoric. The Hoh were Native Americans indigenous to this area.
From the Hoh’s 394 feet above sea level, we climbed to 5,242 feet atop Hurricane Ridge for fantastic 360-degree panoramas of the Olympic Mountains. The paved, 1.6-mile trail proved steeper and more exhausting than expected, but the views were worth evey step.
The road to Hurricane Ridge is 18 miles long and begins in Port Angeles. The road is curvy and windy with steep drop-offs, like the hiking trail to the top.
Skip the overlooks on the drive to Hurricane Ridge. You’ll need more time than you figured to try and take it all in from the top. This is one of those places where cameras fail to capture the overwhelming beauty of the surrounding rugged mountains.
The drive to Hurricane Ridge and the wait for parking were much shorter than the long trek and long line of cars we encountered at the Hoh Rain Forest. That gave us more time to slip in a hike to Marymere Falls and check out the lodge built in 1916 at Lake Crescent.
Forest giants abound in Olympic National Park. Walking among the massive firs, cedars, maples, and hemlocks is humbling and amazing.
The pesky drought greatly reduced the flow of 90-foot Marymere Falls, but it was still a beautiful cascade nestled into a corner of sheer bluffs adorned with colorful mosses.
A lifetime could be spent in Olympic National Park and still not see all the wondrous marvels of nature it has to offer. We barely scratched the surface, and it left us anticipating a future visit.