Week 2 of our Seattle adventure had been in the planning for about 30 months, thanks to COVID. Hotels had been booked and cancelled year after year, but this time it was ON.
Because the USA is so big, when you glance at a map you see Seattle over in the top left corner, and think no more about it.
But it's not that simple. It turns out Seattle isn't really in the top left corner at all.
Because the Olympic National Park is.
The Olympics are a glacial mountain range, with Mount Olympus (of course) being the tallest, at about 8,000ft. Have a quick look on a map, and you'll see that it has some of the most precipitous terrain on earth. You don't drive through the Olympics. You drive around them.
Cliff was a park ranger here for 4 years, and Holly grew up coming here, so they are the ideal travel agents and guides. Not only that, but since Cliff recently got a new car, he also likes to be the chauffeur. So, we pretty much sat back and allowed ourselves to be shown this wonderful peninsula. And that journey, via a brief stop at Dungeness Spit (a 4-mile spit just 20 yards wide, reaching out into the Juan de Fuca strait), took us to Forks – our base for the week.
Those of us who cannot unwatch Twilight got moderately excited about staying here. The town is certainly still eking every ounce of tourism it can out of the association…. The rest of us: meh.
It turns out that Forks hasn’t fared too well from the pandemic and mostly consists of sad, empty shop fronts and Trump 2024 posters. Our motel however was great and the perfect base to leave Forks and make our way down to La Push. The majority of the west coast of this peninsula is home to Indian reservations. La Push is where the Quileute Nation call home. We hiked down to some breathtakingly beautiful barren beaches, strewn with sea-bleached trees that fell from the forest.
This was a totally different side (pun utterly intended) of the Pacific Ocean. Having seen the same water in French Polynesia, lazily lapping white sand beaches, it was a bit of a shock to see churning waves with enough power to carry whole tree trunks up the beach. Despite that, we saw sea otters playing in the surf, apparently undaunted by the jagged rocks around them.
We also saw the 'Tree of Life' in Kalaloch. This tree resolutely refuses to become another piece of driftwood. It's become a bit of a celebrity in Washington State. The stream behind it has eroded the soil right out from underneath it, and yet still it clings to the sides, it's roots doing the splits. No photo did this resolute survivor justice.
We got one day of heavy weather. Not so much rain, but 40mph winds. It made our visit to Cape Flattery (as far NW as you can get in the contiguous states) exciting! We reflected that we'd had a few days of winds around 40mph out at sea. It seemed hard to believe as we watched the waves crashing about the rocks. Somehow, when you're down in amongst it, and there are no sharp, solid things to bash into, it doesn't seem so bad.
A sign at the headland, 100ft above the waves, explained merrily that the cliffs we were standing on were riddled with holes gouged out by the waves. In a big swell, you could hear and even feel the cliffs shuddering beneath you.
'These cliffs won't be here much longer',
it concluded. We decided not to wait around to find out.
One of the best things about this park is the diversity. You get the wide open beaches, but you also get swathes of rainforest. Not the steamy mosquito havens of the tropics, mind: this is a temperate rainforest. And it's like nothing we've seen before.
It would be a truly terrifying place to be at night - Stranger Things could definitely shoot the 'upside down' here.
It had something of the Tim Burton about it too. We didn't get a drop of rain while we were there. But the evidence was everywhere. Moss clings to every surface, building layer after layer until it droops down in bizarre, limb-like shapes from the branches. The foliage is so dense that you can't see more than 30ft in any direction, and if for some reason you can't see green, well: you'd see nothing at all.
We took lots of photos here. It has been a real mission to select just a few!
Our last stop on our visit took us to Hurricane Ridge - and again the weather was kind to us. Via a 15 mile road which winds up from the coast, we reached the top (5,000ft), to be greeted by a magnificent sweeping view of the snow-capped centre of the park. Lisa and I engaged in the mandatory snowball fight (well... I did, anyway), and we reflected that it was easier to drive up to these peaks than to ski up them. Even if it felt a bit like cheating.
And then our trip to the Olympics was over. Because this is Seattle though, there was one more exciting view getting back to the city on the ferry.
