Olympic National Park

Olympic National Park has to be one of the few parks (if not the only park) that has beach, rainforest, and snow-capped mountains.

We got an early start on this one without even trying. The road to our campground went through the beach section of the park. We didn't stop, but we were technically in the park so we could consider that a visit, right? I'm glad we didn't.

Ignoring the initial drive through, our first real park visit was unplanned. Shortly after getting set up at the campsite, a circuit tripped somewhere. It was unseasonably hot in the rainforest, so we were running both A/C units, and Julie fired up the microwave. Oops. Tripping a circuit is not an uncommon occurrence, especially when we're on 30 amp power as we were here, but tripping a circuit other than the one on our site's power pole is uncommon. And having half the campground go down too is very uncommon. Having cell towers go down with it? Well, I can say with certainty that we've never experienced that before.

We never did get the full story, but we've come to believe Julie's soup wasn't at fault. The fact that the campground's restaurant still had power is what confused us and made us think that we blew a circuit on our half. If there was a power issue offsite (as the cell tower going down would suggest), then I'd expect the restaurant to lose power too.

Whatever the case, it was too hot to stay in the RV. It was cooler outside, but rather than just sit at the site, we figured we might as well go somewhere. We had noticed on the way in that it was about 20 degrees cooler back down at sea level, which seems backwards, but we weren't concerned with whether or not it made sense. We just wanted to cool down. And we had two bunnies that shouldn't be staying in 95 degree heat (yes, it got that hot in the rig). So we grabbed the bunnies and headed for the beach.

Have you ever brought pet bunnies to a beach in a national park? Bunnies aren't really take-out-for-activities pets, and they definitely aren't beach pets. They don't like water or sand, for example. Therefore, we set them up in their fence as far away from the water as we could, which was on a rocky area of beach. I'm not sure they really like rocks either, but it would have to do. And it was cooler, which they do like.

The kids got wet (of course), and we all enjoyed the sunset, which didn't happen until well after 9. We're still getting used to that, and it's only going to get later as we continue north.

The power was back on when we returned to the RV, and it never went off again during the rest of our stay.

At this point we had driven through a section of park and played at a beach within the park. No one could argue that we hadn't visited Olympic National Park. But it still felt a bit like squandering an opportunity by limiting ourselves.

Our campsite was in the Hoh rainforest, which is near the Hoh Rainforest section of the park (go figure). Julie and the kids took a scouting trip to that visitors center during the week while I worked. They picked up park maps and junior ranger books and got a headstart on figuring out what other part(s) of the park we should make a point to visit.

We all returned to the rainforest section Friday evening for a hike on the Hall of Mosses trail. We've seen big trees. We've seen moss on trees. We've even seen moss on big trees. But this was easily the most dense collection of mossy big trees that we've seen. It was beautiful. I told Julie that we should look for a property like this when it comes time to settle back down!

We drove to the Sol-Duc section of park on Saturday to hike to Sol-Duc Falls. It's certainly not the biggest waterfall we've seen on this trip, and it's not even the prettiest, but it was still quite nice. You may recall that I just love being outside, so I wouldn't have minded much if it had been a stream trickling over a one foot drop.

Not Sol-Duc Falls; this was a feeder stream that was more accessible for playing

We ate lunch near the falls, and the kids played in the water. Some of us weren't feeling 100% due to some colds going around, so we decided to head home after the hike. It was nice to get home from a park before 10pm. We also wanted to wake up early to attend a ranger talk on tide pools the next morning. Tides being what they are, the time of the talk was dictated by the tide schedule. Low tide was at 10am, so the talk started at 9am.

This "talk" was different than most. It was basically the ranger telling us a little about what we'd see and then telling us to go explore. She would be available if there were any questions.

We love tide pools. We've explored multiple on our way up through California and Oregon. We've seen lots of neat creatures in them. But we have never seen the concentration of creatures that we saw in these. There were rocks completely covered in anemones (and I do mean completely). There were rocks with a dozen 8-12" sea stars attached (and the numbers are apparently way down due to a disease that hit a few years ago). There were rocks covered in gooseneck barnacles. It was really something to see. We spent a good 3 hours exploring the pools, only quitting because the tide was coming back in.

The kids took their junior ranger pledges on the beach

So we hit the rainforest and beach sections of the park, but we hadn't been to the mountains. The park is named for Mt. Olympus, so it could be argued that this was an important oversight on our part. The problem was that the mountain section was 2.5 hours from our campsite (by road, far closer as the raven flies). We could make a point to drive by it on the way to our next site, but that added an hour to the trip.

In the end, we decided against it. We knew we had multiple mountain parks coming up, and the best we would have able to do was to see the mountain from a viewpoint. Plus, Mt. Olympus isn't even that tall, comparatively speaking. Sorry, Mt. Olympus; the beach won out.