Day 103 - Olympic National Park, WA

We woke up after a lovely night's sleep listening to the waves crashing at the beach. Our campsite was only a few yards from the shoreline so after packing up, we headed down to explore.

The beaches on the Oregon and Washington coast are beautiful. Rather than the pristine beaches we were used to seeing, these are rugged and natural, they feel untouched by humans and give an insight into what beaches maybe should look like without people around.

We loved seeing all the driftwood lying around on the beaches although the sheer scale of it looks like a whole forest has fallen. The information stations around the beaches say that all the driftwood is completely natural and has probably traveled down rivers and out to sea from locations miles away from where it finally ends up on the shoreline.

Today we were exploring Olympic National Park. We're starting to realise just how unique every National Park is in the US, no two parks are the same and when visiting a new park, you never know what to expect. We expected Olympic National Park to be similar to Big Bend but rather than being a desert in the South, a wilderness in the North. We were surprised that as well as being a large area protecting the mountains, it also covers a large amount of the shoreline on the Washington coast. Kalaloch and Ruby Beach are both part of the National Park as well as many other beaches all the way from the border with Oregon up to Canada.

There were also a number of lakes protected by the National Park, including Crescent Lake which we visited. The areas around the lakes are known as rain forests. I found it a little strange since a rain forest to me is along the equator, incredible hot and where lots of monkeys live. There were no monkeys here but the sheer amount of rain these ares have makes them a rain forest. In these areas, the moss drops down off the trees giving it an eerie feel similar to what we saw in the Redwoods.

Most of the mountain area in Olympic National Park is inaccessible, it is a wilderness that the only way you could see it is by back country hiking for several days and even then, there are some areas you still can not reach. We traveled along the Hurricane Ridge scenic route, the only route that goes into the mountain area of the park and did a couple of short hikes at the end of the road by the Hurricane Ridge Visitors Center. Although it was smoFy from the fires, the scenery was stunning. We loved the way that so many habitats are covered by Olympic National Park, coastline, rain forest, pine forest, mountains and even glaciers are all present.

Around the edges of the National Park there are towns and cities, a couple of them we visited including Forks (were Twilight was set) and Port Angeles. Apart from the hardware store which we really needed to fix the camera, there wasn't a lot in Forks to see and if we came again, we wouldn't bother to visit instead we would try Quileute Indian Reservation. It is a 30 minute drive from Forks and is a traditional Indian village located on the coast (it's where the wolves live in Twilight).

Port Angeles is a bigger city and we enjoyed watching the boats on the harbor including on from Alaska that must have been doing a tour of the Alaska, Canadian and US coastline, something we would like to do one day.

Our campsite was in the Olympic National Park, along scenic drive to Hurricane Ridge and was called Heart O' The Hills. It was a first come first served campsite and although we arrived on a Friday, we thought that we were out of season and would be fine finding a space. When we arrived, the campsite was nearly full, we had one of the last sites but we had a good site. It backed into the forest where Lee went looking for firewood and was lovely and peaceful at night despite being really full.