Day 16, Monday July 1st – Beach at Ocean City and Olympic National Park

 

Woke up really early this morning.  Decided to take a walk to the beach.  We followed the path through the dunes and scared up two deer.  We were following a small creek that emptied into the ocean.  This was an easy Landmark to find our way back.  Once we got to the beach, we noticed a large cross made out of driftwood with kelp hanging from it.  That too would be a good marker for our path back. l

We had heard the surf pounding all night.  The beach  was littered with kelp, large long brown strands of bull kelp.  Lots of broken crab shells and sand dollars.  We did find a few other shells too.  Buck is not real thrilled with the beach so we really didn’t stay all that long.

We left the campground and headed to Ocean Shores.  The sand was hardpacked here and people were driving on the beach.  They also had a string of horses lined up that you could rent. 

We walked the beach here and picked up several crab shells and a few more sand dollars and regular sea shells.   Then we left and headed north on Hwy 101. 

The road passed through lots of stands of cut timber.  There were also forests of trees that had grown up in the past 20 years or so, you could still see the large trunks of the original trees in amongst the new growth.  There were lots of logging trucks on the road.  Some full of timber and others empty and  heading up to get timber.

We entered the Olympic National Park around 11:15.  We stopped at Quinault to see the Largest Sitka Spruce tree.  It has a diameter of 54’.   It looked like the top of it was broken off, but the rest of the tree was still alive.  They estimate it is 1000 years old. There were lots of huge trees in this area.  It said they get around 12 feet of rain a year that helps the trees grow.  In the valley is also the world’s largest western red cedar, douglas fir and mountain hemlock.   Along with the United States largest yellow cedar and western hemlock. Quinault Valley is known as the Valley of the Rainforest Giants. 

We walked the Rainforest Trail and were treated to many large trees.  The trail was also lined with huge ferns and lots of moss everywhere.  We were told that the large banana slugs were in this area, although we looked, we never saw any. 

We continued to travel north and soon started to follow the Pacific Coast again.  There were many turn outs to park and walk down to the beach.  We did pull over at Ruby Beach but there were way too many people there to attempt to find a parking spot.

We walked on the trail of tall cedars and again saw numerous extremely large cedar trees.  I sat Buck in front of one of them to help contrast the size of the thing.  I truly have never seen any place like this.

We were lucky enough to find the last campsite at the Cottonwood Campground that sits on the Hoh River.  We intend to get a good rest and up early in the morning.  Some people we saw on the trail said they were at Hoh Rain Forest at 7:30am.  By the time they left at noon, it was bumper to bumper with people coming in the park.  We want to be in and out before that happens.