Wednesday, September 14th
After I left the James’ house, on Laura's advice I headed for the Edmonds-Kingston ferry, which was going to take me to the Olympic peninsula and to Olympic National Park. I was due in Portland on Thursday evening, so I had time to play and explore in this close-by national park.
We got off the ferry in Kingston and followed our noses west. After a few bridges and a few cute small towns, we made it to the Olympic National Park visitor’s center at Hurricane Ridge.
Hurricane Ridge is a 5,242-foot high peak that offers fantastic views of the Olympic Mountain Range and, of course, Mount Olympus (7,980 feet). Take a look.
Mount Olympus is over there in the snow-covered group, toward the right-hand side. (Cloud cover makes it a little challenging to discern snow-capped peaks from clouds.)
We even saw a black-tailed deer up top on Hurricane Ridge, who did not seem to mind the fact that people were following it around and pointing their cameras at it (myself included!). I, however, did mind that my dog wanted to spring off after it. I had to hold Auggie in close so he wouldn’t chase off hunting venison.
Since dogs were not allowed on trails, we didn’t do any hiking up top. Instead, we slowly made our way back down the mountain. A short way down, we were flagged to stop by two bikers who we had seen sitting/resting on the side of the road on our way up. The young guy wanted to know how much farther to the top. I told him about five miles. He then asked me if I had any food and/or water to spare for them. I gave them some energy bars and filled their single water bottle up twice for them. Why they decided to do a 17-mile all-uphill climb on bikes with just one half-liter water bottle between the two of them is beyond me. I wished them luck and drove off. I hope they made it, or better yet, turned around and headed downhill before something happened.
[Note to self: you are getting old. You clearly no longer understand the excitement and reckless abandon of youth. That just seemed dumb.]
Hurricane Ridge is on the northeast side of the Olympic Peninsula. We were next headed to the west side of the peninsula, where we would spend the night in the Hoh Rain Forest. On our way, though, we passed pretty Crescent Lake.
For those of you who have read the “Twilight” series, we also passed through Forks, Washington.
We LOVED the Hoh. We stopped on our way into the rainforest to take a gander at what the roadside sign indicated was a "Big Spruce Tree." We looked up at it - it certainly was big!
More than 240 feet tall, in fact. And the diameter of the trunk was more than twice my size.
[I know – you, dear readers, all are saying to yourselves out there, “She’s not that tall. That’s not saying much.” And, yes, you are correct. But suffice it to say that the diameter of the trunks of some of these trees is more than 12 feet thick – so to all of you even around six feet tall – fooey on you. It’s bigger than two of you, too!]
Seems my inner five-year-old is alive and kickin about now, eh? J And my five-year-old wide-eyed mystification with the world was alive and active in this rainforest, too. You look up and all around you are these massive, massive trees, draped in green lichen and smiling at the sun on top of the world. The rest of us, however, are shielded from the sun by the tall trees and left to feel very, very small indeed.
Auggie and I took a brief walk in the late-afternoon mist to check out a bit of the park. What I wished I could see and experience was the other ecosystem that lives in the tops of those trees. There are supposed to be some pretty cool birds and even flying squirrels up there!
On our way back to the van, we walked right by an elk, who was quietly munching on grass behind us. I heard something and looked around and “Oh, hello!” – there he was.
I was immediately conscious of the fact that I had a dog tied on the end of my arm. I pulled Auggie in close and tried to break the eye contact between him and that elk. (I couldn’t help thinking back to that sign in Jasper warning of male elk being aggressive this time of year.)
We were just a hop, skip and a jump away from the van, so we hopped, skipped and jumped right into it and closed her up. Nice to see you, Mr. Elk, but we’ll just be disappearing into here right now. I looked out the window in about five minutes and our friend the elk had gone. Oh good – incident averted!
We went to sleep to the sound of a light rain on the Champagne Chevy.
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