Why, hello, my lovelies!
I have an important announcement that is both sad and exciting: the end of the Great Trek of 2020 is nigh.
[Actually, since I am late posting, as of this date, the Great Trek has in fact concluded. We’ll talk about that later. For now, enjoy this slightly behind the times update!]
Base camp
You’ll recall from my last post that I determined, while still at Yellowstone, that one does not simply go on a Great Trek without driving to the Other Ocean… not when one has already reached Montana.
That’s all well and good, but it was damn near impossible to find a campsite. I invested rather a lengthy amount of time into securing one, which wound up being at Ocean City State Park.
The state park encompasses some marshes (where the campsites are), the dunes, and the exquisite beach. The sites tend to be a little cramped and muddy. My site- clearly left available for good reason- appeared to perfectly embody both of these undesirable qualities.
I arrived at the campground and thought my site was the shittiest out of shitty sites, until I discovered that I had booked a loft.
No, really.
The trees- and mosses- had provided this wonderful hideaway. Any bigger of a tent and it wouldn’t’ve worked. So I wound up with the coolest, best site of the entire Great Trek.
Want a perfect mattress? Well, pet, let me tell you- there’s no pillowtop in the world that’ll give you as good a rest as a bed of moss.
The campground showers run on tokens. Rather annoying to have to feed quarters to a machine at the office, only to receive quarter-shaped tokens that I then feed to the machine in the shower.
Surely there is a better way? Such as… one singular machine that eats quarters and spits out warm water?
(Not that the showers spit out warm water… I don’t want you getting the wrong idea, here. Luke warm would be a generous description, indeed.)
Beach day
I elected to start off my time camping in Washington with a good, old fashioned day at the beach.
Okay. Dear, lovely, blog-reading creatures: you know better than to expect anything would be so straightforward as that with me!
I had a delicious, long run on the beach to start the morning (and, indeed, every morning I was there, each run perfectly brilliant). The beach is broad, and much of it is quite firm- much more like running on packed earth than my previous experiences at beaches. The smell, the view over the water, the mountains in the distance, the trees and dunes, the roar of the waves, the steady breeze…. egads, it was glorious. Running on that beach was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I wish I could do it every morning.
It was overcast when I set out running, but by about 10:30 the sun burned off the cloud cover (on every morning of my stay, in fact).
Went back to sunbathe and read- sunny but very breezy, and it got downright windy by 17:00. The water was not very warm, so it was wading only on this part of the Great Trek.
flowers on walk to beach 
sunbathing and tea! 
The water looked a bit different color to me- more of an olive green near the shore, and a brighter blue out to sea- than many spots on the Atlantic achieve. Buckets of crabs washed in with every tide- saw mussels the size of your open hand, too.
You have a view of tall, distant mountains to the east from the beach. Washington really does seem to have it all.
Now, although I had noted vehicles driving and parked on the beach during my run that morning, I had assumed that beach access was a good many miles away, and I had no notion whether any old person could get on the beach with an automobile or not. So, for my morning excursion to lie on the beach, I simply drove to the lot in the state park, and walked a trail out through the dunes to the beach.
During my time on the beach that morning, I took careful note of the increasingly large number of cars, and formed a rough idea where they were coming from- not at all far away to the south, somewhere about Ocean City, from the look of things.
Now, it was just as well that I had gone to the parking lot that morning. When I returned from the beach, I was greeted by the mildly hilarious spectacle of a car that had wound up in a ditch by means of an incredibly overly enthusiastic parking job.
Parker is a beast.
I got out a tow rope, had one of the stranded party put the car in neutral, and Parker just pulled it out of the ditch without even breaking a sweat. (Or raising her RPMs or whatever.)
I adore this truck.
Anyways. Good deed for the day dispensed with, it was time to go in search of any trouble I could find.
It turns out that one can, in fact, just drive out onto the beach in Ocean City (and in Moclips and… look, driving onto the beach is just a thing here, all right?).
Me and Parker.
On the beach.
Of the freaking Pacific Ocean.
Ah, bliss.
I got a latte from Ocean Beach Roasters and, instead of working in some cafe at a table or anything insufferably lame like that, I drank it on the tailgate on the beach.
Driving on the beach, aside from being a total riot, solves the perennial problem of finding parking at the beach….. by letting you park on the beach, with an RV, if you like. You can also rent a horse for an hour and ride on the beach- it looks far less exciting than it sounds. Truck tailgates sit at the perfect height where no sand blows on you- it really was extremely breezy.
Kite flying is a big deal on the beaches here, clearly due to the constant strong breeze. People tie them down at their beach spots, and this seems a very clever and visually pleasing way to mark one’s place on the beach- rather useful if you go for a walk and want to come back!
I kind of loved Washington so far. Campground area is much more like what I thought Washington would be, than, say, the eastern end of the state.
Olympic National Park
The next morning, I spotted a bald eagle on the beach when running. It was just hanging out, perched on a dead tree the water had washed in. I haven’t seen many of them, and none from quite such a close vantage. It was enormous.
I went explored the great trees and mosses of the temperate rainforest, driving up to Olympic National Park.
I nearly wept for joy and wonder: the beautiful old trees, the lush green forest floor, all the mosses and ferns… Wow.
Olympic NP spans forests, mountains, and coast. It’s humongous (nearly a million acres, or 1,400 square miles).
It’s a bit challenging to navigate, too. There’s no driving through it- only skirting around its edges. Mankind hasn’t encroached upon the wilderness very much, and I wish I’d had more time there.
But, things were afoot- never a dull moment around me, of course- the Great Trek was drawing to a close, and I only had a day at Olympic NP.
Out of everything there, I knew what I most wanted to see: the trees.
Route 101 is a long, dull drive. Did the speed limits on the way up. (I did not make that mistake twice- said fuck it and kept up with the locals on the way back.) It is, though, rather interesting to see tsunami evacuation route signs- that was a new one on me.
Lake Quinault area
I started by Lake Quinault, meaning only to peek at the lake, hop out of Parker for a quick stroll around the half-mile Rain Forest Nature Trail Loop, and then continue further north.
However, I was so taken by the rainforest that, when I spotted a fork branching off from the Nature Trail, I enthusiastically set out to explore further. Cedar Bog and Cascade Falls were nothing much to look at, but I did rescue some folks who’d inadvertently strayed off the nature trail (having not yet realized it several miles later, I might add) and couldn’t follow a map. Besides, it wasn’t bogs or waterfalls that I was there to see.
Renaissance tree!
The trees…. The insane amount of green. I adored it all. It was absolutely glorious. There is something surpassingly wonderful about meeting a living thing that dates back to the Renaissance.
The Renaissance, folks. That douglas fir above started life four hundred years ago! Some of the trees in Olympic NP are nearly 900 years old, although I did not have the pleasure of making the acquaintance of any who were quite that venerable.
Western hemlocks, douglas firs, western red cedars, and sitka spruces are the species of large coniferous trees that populate the rainforest.
The western slopes of the Olympic Mountains receive about 12 feet of rain every year. Thus, it has a rainforest. In contrast, the eastern side (in the “rain shadow”) gets less than 20 inches in a year. I was there during the dry season, and, thus, got a rather lovely look at the sun filtering through.
baby hemlock growing on big tree 
See how thickly green things are growing on the forest floor? It’s nearly impossible for a tree to get a start in life due to all the competition. Generally, new trees only have an opportunity to grow atop old dead trees- a fascinating circle of life. The dead trees are called nurse logs. They gradually decay, but the seedlings they nurtured continue to grow in the shape dictated by their nurse logs, which results is absolutely fascinating above-ground root systems. So the images above demonstrate a tree growing on a stump that hasn’t rotted away yet. Below is a tree whose nurse log is long gone, and appears to have two legs because of that.
However, the benefit of the thick green carpet on the forest floor is that it filters that insane amount of rainfall, preventing soil erosion while capturing nutrients.
Furthermore, the nurse logs play an important role in the dry summer months, where they serve as water storage facilities. The soil dries out, but the nurse logs contain hundreds of liters (quarts) of water. Isn’t that neat?
Right. As you can see, I just wandered around a pleasant, awestruck daze, petting the treebark and mosses, and taking lots of pictures.
About 80% of fallen trees in the Olympic rainforest are taken out by wind. Ever heard that adage about plants going as far into the earth as they grow up into the sky? It apparently doesn’t apply here; the trees have surprisingly shallow root systems and this makes them prone to wind damage. Aside from acting as nurse logs for new trees, the downed trees also foster an interesting variety of fungi and… stuff.
(Look, I only read so much of the signs, okay?)
This we know,
the earth does not belong to man;
man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected,
like the blood which unites one family.
What befalls the earth
befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life.
He is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web
he does to himself.
Chief Seattle
Big Cedar Tree
So, after I spent far longer than I intended in rapt appreciation of the rainforest around Lake Quinault, I got back on Rte. 101 and went off to Hoh Rain Forest.
Between the imaginatively named Beach 4 and Ruby Beach (this being a segment of Rte 101 that hugs the coastline, obviously), there is a small side road on the right with a sign that proclaims “Big Cedar Tree.”
What, you think I’m going to pass that up?
I’m a huge sucker for big trees.
The big cedar tree that is obviously considered the main attraction has been ravaged by time and much of it is now horizontal. However, there is a short trail behind it to a number of very fetching cedar trees with highly interesting trunks.
Hoh Rain Forest
Mixed reviews.
Hoh Visitor Center has the trailhead for the Hoh RIver Trail (as well as several other trails), which leads out to Mt. Olympus . It seems to be a heavily visited area and, unlike the Quinault area, there’s a park ranger booth where you must pay to enter (or, if you happen to be a genius who bought an annual pass, you just flash your VIP card and they let you through!).
[Is there some way to pronounce this name that doesn’t conjure up images of gardening implements and ladies of economically negotiable virtue?)
Parking at the visitor center is rather limited, so it would appear to pay to arrive early or, as I did, late in the day.
I was particularly looking forward to seeing the Hall of Mosses- it was the primary reason I was so set on visiting Hoh.
After all, what sort of person would not get excited by the idea of visiting a Hall of Mosses?!
Sigh.
Look, it was awesome and definitely worth the haul out there, but it was also not what I expected from the Hall of Mosses… expected more hall, and a greater variety of mosses, and a bit more help identifying the mosses that were there.
To get onto the Hall of Mosses trail, you cross a bridge over a small stream. The water is almost unthinkably clear, and- fittingly- appears to really just be a bed of moss.
The Hall of Mosses very beautiful- suspect it is at its best in the rain and mist, though. I learned that many of the trees are well over 200 feet tall.
Remember how I declared that parts of Yellowstone were almost exactly how I imagined hell?
Parts of this rainforest were almost exactly how I imagined heaven.
Mixed in with the conifers are a few bigleaf maples, who tend to support the densest populations of epiphytes (airplants- lichens and hanging mosses like club moss, that live on the moisture and nutrients just floating about in the air).
Spruce Trail was very scenic, as well; it’s a 1.25 mile loop.
Lastly, I set off down the Hoh River Trail.
More trees. More mosses. More gawking and taking lots of pictures.
Disappointed it was late in the day and I couldn’t do more of this trail. If I’d had the time, I’d have liked to go out to Glacier Meadows- there are real glaciers there! They’re 17 miles out, though, and I very definitely did not have the time for that.
However, I got up close and very personal with an elk who was having her dinner (thus the terrible pictures below- she wasn’t about to stop chowing down on my account), which was cool.
Someone else came up the trail whilst I was standing very still to watch her. She was making quite a racket as she mowed down the brush and small trees…. The gentleman inquired if she were a bear.
*facepalm*
Not a bear, sir.
She smelled surprisingly similar to a horse. Both pictures are taken looking straight ahead from my eye level- she was an impressive size.
Just right for dinner. Mmmh.
Anyways.
I got back to Parker in pretty thick twilight. (Do you see what I did there?) Did not drive up to the town of Forks for dinner, although leaving Hoh I was only 11 or 12 miles away, and a nice dinner was very appealing, especially after watching that tasty elk eat her tree leaf salad.
However, imagine if I lucked out and got bit by a vampire… only to find out that I was doomed to sparkle for eternity.
It just wasn’t worth the risk. I drove back to my base camp at Ocean City.
Wrapping up
The next morning- my final morning- had yet another of those marvelous long runs on the beach. I broke camp with bittersweet and happy feelings; it was nice to think it was the last time I’d have the bother of packing up all my gear, but it was also a bit sad.
Still, I had people to see and places to go- places to go back to, that is, for the Great Trek was about to conclude.
I just want to circle back to how amazing it is to be able to drive onto the motherloving beach. I got to have freaking breakfast on the beach, on Parker’s tailgate, with my classic Stanley vacuum bottle of tea and a Clif bar. And nuts, always with the nuts on this trip… hmm.
I didn’t much feel like eating in at a restaurant… and where, exactly, was I going to get as good a view as I’d have from on the beach? So I did a take out order of clam chowder before I reluctantly left the beach. I ate it on the tailgate, and there is just something about being on a tailgate on a beach and eating chowder- bloody fantastic. Got the chowder from Alec’s by the Sea, which I wish I had discovered when I got here.
Or not- I’d be fat by now.
Goodbye, Pacific. My first watery love will always be the Atlantic, of course, but I could easily have spent two weeks on this beach.
I could have spent forever under those magnificent old trees.