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