Olympic National Park

Current Location: Klamath Falls, Oregon

After driving across Glacier National Parks famed going to sun road, we decided to drive to Seattle a day early to be able to run a bunch of errands and hit a few stores we’d only be able to find there. It felt awkward driving through such a large metropolis after spending about two weeks in South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. After catching up on all the errands, we prepared to leave for Olympic National Park the following day. This time my cousin Pranav who lives in Seattle would join us. We left Seattle headed for Edmonds where we’d be able to catch a car ferry across the Puget Sound to the Olympic Peninsula. After picking up our backcountry permits from the park headquarters in Port Angeles we headed further west for the Pacific Ocean and Rialto Beach. Upon arriving at the beach we explored for a little while and then hiked one mile north on the beach to where we would be camping. Camping amongst all the driftwood and listening to the sound of waves was really pretty cool and unique.
The next day we drove to the Hoh Rainforest Visitor Center where we would hike the 17.5-mile Hoh Rainforest trail to Glacier meadows, at the foot of Mt. Olympus. The Hoh Rainforest was very unique as they receive approximately 160 inches of rain annually. Fortunately for us, out of the 160, only an average of 2.5 inches falls in July and while we were there I could count the number of clouds I saw on one hand. The rainforest was truly unique and the one thing that really stood out was how big the trees were. They were just huge and often probably too big for themselves as many of them had fallen over. The first night we camped at Olympus campground and then hiked the grueling 8.5 miles up to Glacier meadows, a climb of approximately 3000 feet. Once we reached Glacier meadows we had a quick lunch of peanut butter and jelly, set up camp and headed 1 mile up the terminal moraine trail to the foot of blue glacier. At the end of the trail we found a small ridge and went up there to see spectacular views and a mountain goat descending down a vertical rock face. It’s amazing how well mountain goats move around.
The following day we hiked back down the entire 17.5-mile trail to the trailhead and finished exhausted. After making some sandwiches we headed back to Seattle using the Bainsbridge ferry due to Sunday night delays. The cool thing about this ferry is that it heads right to downtown Seattle, providing spectacular views. It was nice to get back and take nice hot showers and crash after an exhausting but awesome backpacking trip.

Note: Pictures from Olympic National Park can be found in a previous post.