Hey Guys!! We spent two weeks exploring as much of the Olympic National Park as we could. We didn’t get to see nearly as much as we wanted to due to the amount of smoke from all of the nearby fires, but we saw enough to fall in love with the area.

National Parks are usually big. There are smaller monuments or historic sites…but the parks are…well, they’re huge. Usually, they’re more wilderness than not and unless you’re up for doing really long or overnight hikes, you’re not going to get to see most of the park. Olympic National Park is so accessible. You can explore coasts, tall trees, and mountains. The NPS has done a fantastic job with this park and it’s trails.

 On our first full day in the Olympic Peninsula (OP) we headed out to the coastal part of Olympic NP. When we started out it was an absolutely gorgeous day! No smoke in the are…the sun was shining…it was amazing. We stopped by Tongue Point on our way over to our first hike of the day. We got there really early in the morning and spent a few minutes exploring the tide pools. The tide wasn’t very low, so we didn’t see much. The view wasn’t bad though.

Our first hike that day was Cape Flattery. I’d done my research and knew ahead of time that the Cape Flattery hike is super popular and parking can be difficult to find. So, we headed there super early and had our choice of spots to park. There were already quite a few groups there…we weren’t the first that morning. I really love this trail. It’s mostly up on this boardwalk which is cool, but did make it kind of hard to pass people.

It was so sunny that morning when we started out! But Guys…look at all of that fog! I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was a little disappointed. I really wanted the unobstructed view here. But, look how gorgeous the view is even with the fog. I mean, when you’re surrounded by beauty it’s hard to be anything but in a good mood.

We were impressed with this tree. It looks like a candelabra to me. You can also kind of see how people were having to hang off and scoot around each other on that boardwalk trail. It was a little narrow, but workable.

It was lunch time when we made it to Rialto Beach and the place was packed! We circled around a couple of times then headed back down the road to find a parking spot. We had lunch in our car and then headed back to the beach to do some exploring. I’d seen online that there was a neat rock formation a little ways down the beach. There were some conflicting distances though, so I wasn’t sure just how far down the beach it was.

Check out the driftwood. It’s huge! And there was a ton of it lining the beach. The farther down the beach we got the fewer people we saw. If you squint at the upper right picture, you can see a couple of the boys next to that big rock. The look like ants. The bottom right pic is another look at how big those rocks were. The boys are standing down below them. It ended up being about a mile down the beach, but it was an enjoyable walk with only a few other people venturing that far. We did find a few little shallow tide pools on our walk. I was hoping to find some sea stars, but…we didn’t see any. Something to look forward to next time we’re in the area.

One of our favorite areas in the Olympic NP is the Hoh Rain Forest. We got to the visitor center right before they were closing, but the park was still open for a few more hours so we did the Hall of Mosses trail. Check out that moss! All of the trees on the trail were dripping with green moss. The entire area was green. Green fuzzy moss, green ferns, green grass in the water…it was a lot of green.

Before we made it to the Olympic National Park, I checked the website to do some last minute research on a trail I wanted to do. It’s always a good idea to check the alert section of the NP website you’ll be visiting. This time I learned about a wasp problem. And they weren’t lying. We had a whole group of wasps decide to take up residence under our car. We drove to a gas station and saw a few of them coming out from under the car, but didn’t think much of it. When we got to our next stop by Lake Crescent we’d lost several of them, but almost didn’t make it back in the car. The wasps that were left were not happy with us. We drove to the Sol Duc trail head and lost the rest of the wasps. We didn’t see any when we got out or came back after the hike. Thank goodness! We did see a whole nest of the same wasps on the Hall of Mosses trail.

We found another tall tree that’s now on our list of favorites. The Sitka spruce averages 220 feet tall and looks very cool dripping with moss.

We walked right by this fawn and its mom while we were on the Hall of Mosses trail. They weren’t terribly worried about us.

We found some decent foodies in the Port Angeles area. We had to stop by a local chain called Frugals. It’s a drive through only so we took it back to our home-on-wheels to eat it. It was pretty good considering it was pure fast-food.

There weren’t very many pretties around, but I found a few. I know this is a mushroom…technically a fungus. But I love the colors in it.

And then there was this pretty. It was all alone on one of the trails we hiked. I love how pristine white it is.

We absolutely loved the OP! More than we thought we would.

See y’all down the road!

#westernloop2018

Hey Guys! We made it all the way up to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington! This is the farthest north we will go on this loop before we turn south and head for Florida for the winter.

We’d spent the last month in smoky and hot Oregon. We started keeping track of where all of the wildfires were the first week we were in Oregon. It felt like the entire western US was on fire. We managed to keep ahead of it, but it got close a few times. Close enough for ash to fall on us. We’d seen a report that there was a wildfire in the eastern side of the Olympic National Park. So, as you can imagine, we were kind of thrilled to see the rain as we were driving into Washington.

We stayed at a great little RV park right near the old Elwha Dam in Port Angeles. We were there for two weeks, but due to the smoke, we spent quite a bit of that time inside. On days when the smoke receded enough, we headed out to explore. We walked down to the old Elwha Dam one afternoon. We could walk there from our RV park which was great. We meant to go back and follow a trail we found but it ended up not happening.

The Olympic Peninsula (OP) of Washington has quite a large population of Native Americans. I loved seeing the dual language signs everywhere!

Our first drive up to Hurricane Ridge (one of the Olympic NP areas) was a little…foggy. If you’ve been following along on our adventures for awhile, you might remember our Sequoia NP fog experience. If you need a refresher, you can find that here. We got a little worried as we drove up the mountain to get to Hurricane Ridge and it kept getting foggier and foggier. I thought, well…here we go again.

Thankfully, we drove up above the fog/clouds and this was our view. Not bad, right? Some of that is fog or clouds and some of it is smoke. It’s still an impressive vista even with the smoke.

We ended up going back up to Hurricane Ridge on a clear-ish day. You can see in the top picture above how the smoke hung around. The smoke was a constant, but the view was still beautiful. One of the cool things about Hurricane Ridge is that during the winter months, you can snow shoe and ski from there. The NP Service has a little snow cabin for the Ranger’s that’s manned during the winter months.

On one of our full days to explore, we headed out to hike and on the way there we drove by Lake Crescent. It was choked with smoke. We’d heard that the smoke would be coming in that day and we were hoping to get in a hike before we had to retreat back inside.

We made it to the Sol Duc Falls that day and it was gorgeous! You couldn’t even tell the smoke was hanging around while we were hiking. We did start to smell it as we were on our way back to our car though. But the hike was awesome.

On a different day, we made it to Marymere Falls. The trailhead for this hike was right on the Lake Crescent shore. I loved the trail for this hike! Check out this bridge we walked over. (top right picture) It was an old log that the NPS had fashioned into a sturdy bridge across a stream. And check out all of the moss. This is what I’d always thought this area would look like. I had a specific vision in my mind of what hiking in the OP would be like…and this picture is it. This is what I thought it would be like…what I had hoped it would be like. You know how sometimes you get it in your head that something is going to be a certain way, but then when you get there it’s so different than what you’d thought that it’s a let down? This place totally held up to what I was hoping it would be. Actually, that’s not true…it was better. In the right picture you can see a little stream the bridge took us over. There was a path down to it. You can get a sense of how big the trees are in this area with this picture. Can you find the person in the lower right corner of this pic?

Here’s another picture of Lake Crescent for you. You can see more of it here and you can kind of see just a hint of the beautiful water color.

We saw so many deer! So, so many! And they weren’t real shy. Guys, don’t try to pet or feed the wildlife. We saw a few people actually trying to take selfies and feed/pet the wildlife. Don’t do that. If you frighten the animal and it harms you…the animal is the one who will suffer. Some parks are required to put down any animal who’s harmed a human. So, just don’t do it. Admire them from afar…take pics from afar, but let them stay wild. Oh! And Guys…check out the blue of this bird! It reminds me so much of the blue water in Crater Lake! There were a couple of these birds playing around while we did the Marymere Falls hike.

I’m realizing that there are tons more pics I want to add on to this post…so I’m going to break it up into two posts. I’m going to show you some foodies we found…and pick up with some more explorations on the next post!

Lets talk foodies for a minute! We hit a BBQ place our first night in the area. It was pretty good! Check out the sandwich one of the boys got. Huge! They ate it all. There wasn’t anything left. We found this little burger place in Forks while we were out exploring one day. You can’t tell, but that burger is huge! Huge! It’s sitting on a regular sized dinner plate. It was and 8″ or 9″ plate. Alex laid waste to this burger. Teenagers…whattaya gonna do? You’ve got to feed them. It’s a good thing we have a residential sized refrigerator in our home-on-wheels!

I found this pretty up on Hurricane Ridge during one of our excursions. Love the purple pretties!

Well, I’m going to leave off here this time. I’ll pick back up with some more OP adventures next time so stay tuned!

See y’all down the road!

#westernloop2018