July 14 - Olympic Peninsula, Washington

We wanted to drive around the Olympic Peninsula of Washington that we had visited in the past, so we hopped into the truck after breakfast and drove north to Olympia where we caught US 101. Now, Highway 101 in the west is similar to A1A in the east, it follows the coast like a boa constrictor hugging its dinner. I had driven on it in California when I visited Chris some years back, and it is the perfect highway for driving a motorcycle: twisty, hilly, and utterly fantastic scenery. I had flashbacks to that ride with Chris when I started driving up the eastern coast of the Olympic Peninsula along the Hood Canal, because it was exactly the same. Unfortunately I was now driving a truck, so I could only snatch glances at the scenery instead of becoming a part of it like you do on a motorcycle, but I was almighty glad that I wasn't towing the trailer! That would have been extremely difficult at best and downright dangerous at worst.

The highway straightened out a lot when the main road from Seattle joined us from the east, and the section from there up to Port Angeles was, in comparison to the first stretch, almost relaxing. Port Angeles is burned into our memories as the town where we went literally bust during our 1972 camping trip. Our 1960 Chevy blew its engine midway into the drive up to Hurricane Ridge just outside of Port Angeles, and we had to tow it into town to have it fixed. Having a used 289 V-8 installed set us back a little over $400, but unfortunately we were on the last leg of our planned trip and didn't have $400, so we had to call my mother and sister Lois who wired us the money they had been saving for Dollar Days back in Kenosha. How embarrassing! How humiliating!

I wanted to exorcise that ghost by driving back up Hurricane Ridge and finally take the walk there that we had planned so long ago. Serendipitously, we had found in the "Starting Point" that the local Volksmarch club had a walk set up where you signed up in Port Angeles and then began the walk up at the Visitor Center on Hurricane Ridge. Yippee! We drove into town looking for the starting point at Swain's General Store and also looking for any sign of the town we had walked through while waiting to have our engine transplant in 1972. We couldn't recognize a single thing in the town and it seemed much, much larger than we recalled. After all, Monika remembered walking from one end of town to the other and finally buying "The Mouse That Roared" at a used book store, that being the only thing that would fit into our greatly diminished budget! I don't know how she manages to remember ancient trivia like that, but it certainly seems that our taste in literature hasn't changed all that much in a quarter of a century!

But we did find Swain's General Store where we signed up for the Hurricane Ridge walk, which involved first driving the 14 miles up the mountain to the Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center. I tried to spot the place where the car threw its connecting rod and stopped dead, but all the curves seemed about the same. Monika was driving at the time and felt guilty for years about having "killed" our car although I really was at fault for not changing the oil during the previous 9,000 miles or so. Modern oils, especially synthetics, can safely go that far, but the multi-viscosity oils of that time would break down and degrade to a very thin residue, allowing the bearings to scrape each other among other disastrous things. It was a fact that I only found out in the School of Hard Knocks, and like many of those scholastic lessons a very expensive one. Some people probably have wondered why I'm so religious about changing engine oil, but one of the major focuses of my religion is to not repeat the same mistake twice. Running out of fuel while flying an airplane, for example, puts you immediately on the horns of a very uncomfortable dilemma ("Crash now with the engine sputtering or crash later with the engine completely off?"), and after that almost happened to me I have been equally religious about stopping to fuel the plane well before I run low on fuel. Ah well, live and learn.

From the Visitor Center we started walking down the road to some parking lots where the actual hiking trail up the ridge began. We had fabulous views of the snow capped Olympic Mountains from each twist and turn in the road, and they were stunning. Looking straight out at a whole range of snow-covered peaks that ring the horizon around you is an experience that is quite rare to everyone except mountain climbers, I expect. It gave me a really awe inspiring "on top of the world" feeling, but it was also mixed in with the "I am so glad that I don't have to march across those snowfields and glaciers!" feeling that gave me the shudders. Non-climbers like we are don't see mountain ranges from this angle very often; the last time was on top of a ridge in Yellowstone during Wanderung 3.

At one overlook we even ran across a deer foraging around who seemed to have completely lost her fear of humans. Possibly she was looking for a handout as they gave us all "don't feed the deer" warning pamphlets when we entered the park, and that always indicates that folks are feeding the wildlife in my experience. The chipmunks we met when we started hiking the trail to the top of the ridge were also suspiciously friendly, and the pamphlet also dutifully warned us about the danger of chipmunk bites and the terrible consequences of feeding cute cheerful little rodents. The tundra wildflowers were just in the middle of blooming--it was effectively still spring at that altitude--so we could marvel over bluebells, Indian paintbrush, small orchids (or something that looked like an orchid to me!), and other assorted flowers with colorful and intricate blossoms.

Although, as our instructions informed us, the elevation gain was only about 800 feet, that gain was from 4,900 to about 5,700 feet and we just were not used to the altitude. As a result, by the end of the ascent we were panting for breath and had to stop every 100 yards or so. But we met a mother with three children who were roughly in the same fix as we were, so we kept up with them and chatted during some of our rest stops. (Maybe I should clarify, but it is rather embarrassing, that as it was the four year old that was setting the pace for that family, we were essentially keeping pace with a four year old!)

However, all the huffing and puffing was worth it because when we finally reached the top we had a marvelous 360 degree view of the mountains to our west, south and east, and Canada and Vancouver Island to our north. In fact, we could clearly see Mount Baker, the volcano that is only a couple of miles from the Canadian border, on the horizon to the northeast. I could even pick out the small city of Victoria on Vancouver Island across the Juan De Fuca straight; it was a pretty little city when we last visited it a couple of decades back. The National Park folks had installed plaques with panoramic views that had all the major mountains and features labeled, and that helped a lot in figuring out what we were seeing. The view of Vancouver island, for example, was more like the view that you would have from an airplane descending to land, and that is enough of a different viewing angle that it makes the island hard to recognize from the map outline.

Although this was the middle of July, we saw residual snow banks and even a jewel-like tarn below the crest of Hurricane Ridge. One snowfield or teeny, tiny remnant of a glacier was right beside the crystal clear waters of the tarn in the cirque just below the crest of the mountain, so we had a great view of that. It is hard to imagine that the glaciation during the last Ice Age was so extensive that it covered the tops of some of the smaller mountains! Although that would surely be spectacular, I was just as glad that I was alive in one of the balmy interglacial periods rather than being around back then. Some of the snow in the nearby snow banks had that greenish tinge that glacier snow acquires after it has compacted a bit, which is a very curious sight if you expect snow to be white. I found out our cell phone was in range of a signal tower somewhere down below, so I called Martin and Judson to let them know where we were while we enjoyed the vistas spread before us.

The way back down from the ridge was, as you might expect, a whole lot quicker than the way up, but it also was such a steep descent that it really stretched our calf muscles and Achilles tendons. We also had to do the final mile or so of uphill on the street back to the Visitor Center in stages with rest stops, and by the end we were far more tired than we had been with a 10 kilometer walk and 25 kilometer bike the previous day. All in all the Hurricane Ridge walk is a great walk on the alpine tundra that offers scenery that you would otherwise only see in picture books, but it has some really steep sections and deserves its 3+ difficulty rating. Given how much my muscles were aching at the end, I personally would have given it a 4, but that's just my subjective impression. Some folks were walking the trail in sneakers and there weren't any really bad rocky sections, but I would still recommend hiking boots for this walk. Finally, it clouded over and spit a cold rain at us briefly twice during this walk, so you really must be prepared with extra thermal layer and a rainproof outer layer. It was a dead calm the day we walked, but the wind often howls across these mountaintops and that combined with a cold rain would push you into hypothermia quite quickly.

The walk had taken us from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., so we didn't continue our drive around the peninsula until the late afternoon. Highway 101 followed the banks of Crescent Lake somewhat to the west of Port Angeles, and it looked just like the fjords of Norway did when I drove through them. The steep, densely forested mountain slopes seemed to just dive right down into the clear, cold waters of the lake.

It was beautiful scenery indeed, but all the twists and turns of the road also slowed us down and I began to wonder just how long it would take to complete our circuit of the peninsula. But I also contributed to the time problem because I wanted to take a picture of the truck at the northwest corner of the United States to go with the picture of the truck at Key West (see Wanderung 1). Monika thought this was silly but she went along with it so we detoured north to the coast of the Juan De Fuca straight and followed a really curvy road out to the reservation that occupies that corner of the State of Washington. The town of Neah Bay there had a harbor with the usual assortment of pleasure boats but also one very intriguing square-rigged, two masted wooden ship. I'm not sure whether technically that type of ship would be called a barque, barkentine, or whatever, but it was surprising because that type of rigging is harder to handle than the usual sloop rigging on small sailing craft.

The road from the town out to Cape Flattery was a gravel road with a lot of potholes, washboard ripples and ruts, so we had to slow down a lot. There were also no signs at all on the way out, but I followed the outline of the coast on the GPS, and we finally made it to someplace on the cape. I say someplace because a fog bank had rolled in from the Pacific and was blanketing the cape like pea soup. Still, I found a parking space and took a picture of the truck in the fog just to prove we were there, wherever "there" was, and we turned around to get back to 101.

The Pyrric victory of getting to land's end cost us another three hours of driving, and dusk was falling as we had submarine sandwiches at a Subway in the town of Forks. Night finally fell as we reached the beaches on the Pacific Coast, so unfortunately there wasn't enough time to walk along the beach as we did on our previous visit. At some of the coves on our last visit we found huge piles of driftwood and culled a couple of nice walking sticks from them.

We continued driving back through Aberdeen to Olympia and arrived at our campground shortly before midnight, totally exhausted, only to find the gate locked and the "Park Closes At Dusk" sign out. This should be a lesson to all of us who use public campgrounds that we should always check when the park closes before we take an all-day jaunt into the countryside. Fortunately, a policeman had apparently just locked up the gate when we arrived, and he was nice enough to open it so that we could get back in. There is Luck, and there is Dumb Luck, and this was clearly Dumb Luck. Be that as it may, the result was that we could crash on our own bed, at least, and I was so tired that I never even remembered my head hitting the pillow.