The past few days, various apps have been reminding me of our trip to Olympic National Park exactly 4 years ago. This 2-day whirlwind tour of the park was definitely full of highlights and in spite of the short time, may still be one of my favorite National Park visits. I will certainly want to return to this park sometime.
To start our tour, we took the ferry from Seattle and spent our first night in the delightful town of Sequim (pronounced “squim”) — in a B&B where all the rooms are refurbished train cabooses! After an excellent breakfast in the dining car, we checked out the lavender capital of the world before heading through Port Angeles and to our first stop in the park, Hurricane Ridge.
The winding road up to hurricane ridge brings you to one of the more dramatically placed visitor’s centers you will ever see. There are great views of the Olympic Mtn range and a number of hikes that start from the area. At the advice of a ranger, we took the Hurricane Hill trail to try to spot some Olympic marmots, which can only be found in this area. Even in late June, we had to crunch through some snow and experienced springlike weather on one side of the ridge, and foggy mist on the other. For a while, I was afraid we might just miss the marmots, but eventually, we found them! I admit, I was a little obsessed with the marmots.
After the hike we took a driving tour, stopping at Lake Crescent, the beach (because who doesn’t want to hike through snow and sand on the same day!), and ending up at the Lake Quinault Lodge. I think when we originally stayed there, I thought it fit my criteria for historic inns: “If it was good enough for Teddy, it’s good enough for us”, but I now find out it was President Franklin Roosevelt who had visited.
The next morning, we took a walk through the Quinault Rain Forest, which is partly in the National Park and partly National Forest. Whichever part we were in, we saw lots of banana slugs (though they are not as banana-y as the ones at home) and a pileated woodpecker along with plenty of other flora and fauna.
