unexplored (and wild) trails: Olympic National Park

Tree of Life at Kalaloch Beach

We have been wanting to explore the Olympic National Park for over a year. I sent away to AAA for information, I've combed the internet for blogs and pictures, I've gone to recreation.gov to check out campsites, I've found planetware.com-a "group of travel writers who offer their ideas on where to go, what to see, and tips for making the most of your trip", I found internet sites that rated campgrounds and posted pictures of individual sites, and talked to people who have been there. All that information just increased our desire to make the trip. So we decided that this was the year. We wanted to go after school started but before winter. So in September, the week after Labor Day, we decided to go.

Being the frugal people we are, we decided to go tent camping. Tent camping is something we do all the time so we were used to it; the only part of this trip that we really had to think about was the rain. The annual precipitation ranges from 100-170 inches of rain along the coast and western-facing valleys. That could amount to over 14 feet of rain a year! So we knew we would be dealing with rain, more rain than we were used to. In anticipation of all the wetness, we brought a few things to help us. We bought some nice containers to hold all our clothes, jackets, pillows, shoes, etc. this really helped to keep things dry-we usually use some canvas bags. We also bought a smaller version for food-we usually use a cardboard box. And for food we bought a big box of freeze dried food, figuring that with all the rain it would be easier to just boil water and eat something hot. It had enough food for our whole trip, we did supplement with some favorite things in our ice chest. We brought our pop up shelter, and a couple of tarps. Tarps, one for under the tent and an extra-turns out we needed the extra. We also brought lots of large garbage sacks for keeping the wet things and dry things separate. And of course, we brought all of our rain gear.

Camping in the Olympic National Park is interesting. There are only a few campgrounds that accept on-line reservations in the park. The Park is large, it is a large area in the middle of Washington and also has a beach area. Many people I talked to were surprised to learn that the Olympic National Park has a section of the Park that is by the ocean. We made reservations at 2 places, Kalaloch Beach and Sol Duc-the only 2 that took on-line reservations, everything else is first come-first served in the Park. Kalaloch was accepting on-line reservations thru 9/8/19, on 9/9/19 it became first come-first serve. So we made reservations for 9/8/19 and hoped we could stay in our spot for a few more days, since we were the first ones there. And it worked. Sol Duc was taking on-line reservations thru 10/29/19. So we got reservations for 9/11/19-9/13/19. The weekend was booked, so there was no possibility of staying longer, unless we got one of the walk in sites-and those were very few. We decided to leave the last few days of the trip up in the air. Most of the sites in the Park are first come-first served so we figured we'd find something, somewhere. I did research some of the campgrounds in the Park that were on the way home so we had some choices. Mr UAW has a senior National Park Pass and can get campground sites for half price, yay!

We left on a Sunday morning, traffic was great. It took us about 4 hours to get there. Set up camp and headed for the beach.

One of the things I wanted to see was something call the Tree of Life. If you google Kalaloch beach you will see a picture of it. It's a Sitka spruce tree that has apparently been there for ages, it sometimes has a creek that flows down the cliff and underneath it out to the ocean. The tree has a cave underneath it, the roots cling to the upper sides of cave while the trunk sags in the middle of the cave. The tree is not dead and it is amazing that it continues to live.

With the sunset behind me, you can clearly see inside the cave.

We walked to the northern end of the beach. Along the way we found sooooo many whole sand dollars. We picked up some to take home and also saw some live ones. It's so interesting to see their little hairs move that help them to get around. Eventually we had to stop picking them up, I've never seen so many sand dollars in one place.

Towards the end of the beach there is a wonderful hole in the side of the cliff. It made a great opportunity for a picture.

Looking thru this hole makes me want to keep walking to the end of the beach. Turns out holes in cliffs and rocks are a big deal in the Olympic National Park.

Rain coming. Destruction Island. Google Destruction Island for some interesting history !

That night we weathered our first major rain storm. The tent did fine, some drips under the pop up, but overall pretty good. We stayed 2 more days without rain so that gave us time to dry out.
And it made for some good sunsets the next day.

This was the sunset thru the trees as we walked back to our camp

On one of our walks towards the sound end of the beach we ran into these Arctic Terns. These birds are real athletes in the bird world. They have a long yearly migration. They travel from their Arctic breeding grounds to Antarctica where they enjoy the Antarctic summer, covering about 25,000 miles. I looked it up and found that they feed from the water while flying and can live up to 34 years! The average bird flys more than 1.25 million miles during its life-that's about three round trips to the moon!

Arctic Terns enjoying a few moments on the land

There seems to be a lot of drift wood on Washington's beaches. I noticed that the logs get larger the farther north I went. Look for pictures of bigger logs as the posts continue on the Olympic National Park. Many times we had to climb over the logs to get to the beach.

Most of these logs came up to my knees

Practicing with my DSLR camera

We used our camp at Kalaloch as a base camp to explore other areas of the Park. The second day there we went to Ruby Beach. It's called Ruby Beach because of the ruby colored rocks that used to be on the beach. Over the years all the ruby colored rocks have been picked up and the ocean doesn't seems to throw any more on the beach. This beach has wonderful sea stacks. Sea stacks are amazing vertical rock formations standing in the sea or close to the sea on the beach. They were formed by wind and water. The headlands used to go out farther into the ocean. The water and waves and wind creates cracks in the headland, causing the land to collapse and what is left is a steep vertical column or columns of rock in the sea. Many of them are large enough to have trees on them, like little islands. Others are just rock formations. Some have holes in them, a window into another view of the ocean. I took a lot of pictures of these things. They are so interesting.