Qwik-E-Mart

Beach Sunset with Seastack

Olympia N.P.: A Place Shrouded in Mist and Mystery

We took the ferry from the Seattle area across to the Olympic Peninsula today to embark on the Pacific portion of our adventure. We started our time in Olympic at the Visitor Center, a tactic that has served us will in not only gathering information but getting good suggestions for hikes and camping. This place seemed a little less helpful, but then again it might attract a different sort of Park Ranger than the rugged Tetons, Yellowstone, or Glacier.

From a distance, Olympic definitely seems to be a mysterious place. Clouds envelop the peaks, only to reveal the tops for a while and fit the mountain like an ill-place cummerbund. Upon closer inspection, it still doesn’t reveal itself as the trees seem to be covered in fur…yet it is just moss. That’s what’s really interesting to me about this forest, it seems so desirable to find a place here that they are willing to grow (and tolerate others growing) one on top of each other. It’s the New York City of forests!

The mystery of the park is added to by its many contradictions. You have the aforementioned deep and green forests. But there are the rugged peaks capped with glaciers. And still more! These glaciers run off into lakes so blue I’m not sure if Crayola makes a crayon to color them! Our campsite is near the ocean (just a mile or two away), but from where I sit typing this I’m in the densest and most immense forest that I’ve ever been in (granted, I’ve never been to Hartwick Pines though I doubt that it could muster this much diversity).

I mentioned a comment of Tom’s back in Yellowstone, that it seemed like dinosaurs should be roaming about such a strange landscape. Well, Yellowstone may have seemed prehistoric in its geological features, but scale-wise, this is where the dinosaurs belong! Everything seems super-sized here. The clovers that cover the ground on the edge of the park road are almost as big as the palm of my hand; the big-leaf and broad-leaf plants and trees took this characterization to heart and have stretched their greenness to the max; and the trees, goodness are the trees big! To give you an idea, I stood next to one at the beach that had fallen and on its side, buried in the sand, it was almost as wide as I am tall.

Which brings me to the last point for this evening: the beach. Yay, ocean! I’ve been excited to get to the Pacific and see a little change of scenery. We just walked a bit today after we set up camp but we’re going to go back at sunset tonight. I guess we lucked out with the tide schedule as well; tomorrow should be one of the lowest tides in a while so we should see some good marine life specimens. We plan on walking the beach for a while in the morning and then heading off to the Hoh Rainforest for a little bit and then back to camp. We’re going to stay here tomorrow night and then it’s off to Crater Lake. (I’m saving ocean description stuff for tomorrow when we do our hike.)

On a side note, the trip is starting to make us weary. The rest of the stops should be a nice balance of sight-seeing and moving on to the next destination and the major hikes are probably behind us (possibly with the exception of what we decide to do in Yosemite). By no means do we regret taking this long of trip though; there’s something to be said for full immersion in a pursuit; you definitely appreciate it on more levels and different ways. Although, in all honesty, as we are caught up in the day-to-day, the immensity of our undertaking probably still hasn’t sunk in for us yet (someday though!)

PS-I forgot to mention yesterday that we saw our first Qwik-E-Mart (in anticipation of the Simpson’s movie). Brandon had told us that they redid some 7-11s to be like the Qwik-E-Mart and sure enough, we saw one. I’m going to look for the picture and hopefully post it for you to see…