Olympic Glory

I have failed in the previous entry or two to rhapsodize about the pines of coastal Washington, and correct that now. They are fantastic -- very tall, stately, rich dark green, with full symmetric boughs. Just about every acre of land that isn't covered by water, pavement, or crops is rich pine forest. Within a grove of those pines, it is hushed, soul-lifting, peaceful.

From Jamestown, 101 went northwest up to Sequim, where I took the scenic loop through Dungeness, right next to the Dungeness Bay and the long spits of land hooking into it. Then another few miles to Port Angeles for a dinner of delicious halibut fish and chips at a restaurant right on the blue water. The road then turned more inland and wound through pine clad hills and around the edge of Crescent Lake, as fog returned and hurried the darkening of the evening. With night nigh, I found a room in Forks, in the heart of logging country. The desk clerk told me they had seen no sun that day, and the next morning was still completely overcast. The forecast gave no hope for anything else, but as I left Forks late morning, the clouds lifted and the day became beautifully sunny and bright. The landscape now was a mixture of denuded polygons of hillside, short regrowth pine groves, and tall pine forest in areas long undisturbed. Periodically, a sign near the road would provide a chronology of when an area had been harvested, replanted, harvested again, etc.

At the Hoh River, I turned east and followed the river up the mountain and into the Hoh Rainforest National Park. This area receives more than 150 inches of rain per year. It is a pine rainforest -- enormous Sitka spruce, Western hemlock, Douglas fir and redwood cedar, trunks velvety green with moss, branches draped with epiphytes (plants that can live just on air -- they don't hurt the trees, but use them as platforms). Soon after entering the park, there was a turnout labeled Large Spruce. This Sitka spruce was 275+ feet tall, 12.5+ feet wide at breast height, and 500-550 years of age. Up at the Visitor Center, there were trails through the lush forest, with tiers of greens from ferns on the ground to needles at the tree tops. Obviously, I was very fortunate to be there on a rainless day. It was a sight to look straight up and see the spiky tops of pines 100+ feet up, green against the clear blue sky.

Shortly after regaining Route 101, I turned at the Ruby Beach sign, and there was the blue Pacific below me. My heart took a thump to see it after all these days of driving across the Continent. (I can only imagine how Lewis & Clark felt at their first sight of the Pacific.) The road went downslope to a parking lot, and from there one had a spectacular window through the pines to the beach below, thickly littered with bleached pine logs, and with a handful of enormous rocks scattered into the ocean at one side. A foot trail descended to the beach, which was coated with gray, wave-polished pebbles ranging from gravel to palm-of-hand size, all relatively flat, like a round potato knish. Since there was not sufficient sand for traditional sand castles, inventive engineers had created frame sculptures of driftwood logs and towers of pebbles stacked in descending size. Towering over the beach was a high bluff dense with flowers, shrubs and pines. The waves were small -- nothing you could surf, but they made plenty of pleasant crashing as I walked the length of the beach.

Next was 4th Beach, with a new set of driftwood on the pebbles and rocks amongst the waves. As I walked down the path, a girl was coming up holding a net in one hand and a bucket in the other. The bucket was filled with skinny silver fish, about 6 inches long; the girl said they were smelt. On the beach, the tide was out, so that one could look in pools of stranded water in the rocks and see gardens of sea anemones. As I did so, low clouds swiftly blew in and covered the sky, turning all the color to gray and silver and giving the beach an eerie feeling. About 10 minutes later the clouds just as swiftly blew away, brushing the pines as they departed inland, and it was again sunny with the blues of sea and sky, the intense white of foam, and the greens of pine and ground cover.

Filled with sunshine, surf sound, and ocean breeze, I continued southward. The road soon turned inland across the Quinalt Indian Reservation and went past Lake Quinalt. At Hoquiam, with one small flag of cloud turning pink, I stopped for the night. In the late morning, with the fog lifting, I continued south through the forested hills. At Raymond on the Willapa, I took a quick look at the Public Market on the Willapa, basically a tiny version of Pike Place Market, and purchased a yummy banana nut muffin. The road then followed the Willapa River to Willapa Bay, went around the bay, and then went west to Cape Disappointment, the tippiest tip of the north side of Columbia River. It was so named by Captain John Meares who in 1788 interpreted the sand bars at the mouth of the Columbia to mean there was no huge river as rumored and no Northwest Passage. He was wrong about the former, right about the latter. At the Cape I toured the North Head Lighthouse, shrouded in fog, and then the very well done Lewis & Clark Interpretative Center. It had several hands-on exhibits that gave one a concrete feel for how difficult their journey was, such as trying to load a model dugout canoe without tipping it over, and sighting a rifle on pictures of game, sized to look as if they were 100 yards away. Thank goodness I have a car and an abundance of restaurants!

From the Interpretative Center, there was a beautiful view of the Cape Disappointment lighthouse. I didn't take time to walk out to it, which was fortunate, as I ended up speeding to get to Portland in time to pick up my friend Mary Lou at the airport. The next entry will tell you about our first couple days on the Oregon Coast!