Olympic National Park
National Park #9
In October 2019, we decided to head to the Pacific Northwest. We started the trip with a few days in Olympic National Park before investigating Seattle for a couple of days.
Olympic National Park is gigantic so we knew we weren’t going to be able to see it all this trip but we had about a day and a half to explore as much as we could.
First stop was the Hoh Rainforest. Since we got an early start, the Visitor’s Center wasn’t open yet. So we decided to hike a couple of miles on the Hoh River Trail.
After our hike, we stopped at the Visitor’s Center. We picked up Junior Ranger Books; Zoe learned about river otters while Isaac focused on precipitation in the rainforest.
Next stop, lunch! But first we had to maneuver around some traffic.
After lunch in Forks, it was on to the coast for a beach hike to Hole in the Wall.
Hole in the Wall can only be reached during low tide and we just happened to luck into a low tide on the day we visited!
We discovered a few tide pools on our hike.
Hole in the Wall was very cool! We’re glad we made the trek.
Day 2 in Olympic presented a few challenges. First, US-101 was scheduled to be closed for construction for the majority of the day. Unfortunately, that ruled out a couple of the trails that I had earmarked. So we decided to head up to Hurricane Ridge. The weather is known to be unpredictable on Hurricane Ridge and by the time we made it to the top the weather was not ideal for hiking.
On to Plan C, back down the mountain to the Heart ‘O the Forest trail. Although the weather wasn’t perfect half way down the mountain, it was much more ideal for hiking.
Definitely not the trail I would have picked under different circumstances, but it was a nice 4+ mile hike.
Before heading out to Seattle, we visited the Olympic National Park Visitor’s Center.
Olympic was great and if there weren’t so many wonderful places to explore, we’d definitely go back.