Drip, Drip, Drip
Thursday - Friday, Aug 9-10, 2007Olympic National Park, Washington

Denise has long desired to visit Olympic National Park on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. The peninsula is home to the Olympic Mountain Range and the only temperate rain forest in the United States. A beautiful, remote and brooding land, the peninsula sits across from Seattle and Tacoma, bordered by the Pacific Ocean on the west, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north. The strait is the mouth of Puget Sound – although Seattle is a ‘waterfront’ town, it sits well inland from the Pacific Ocean, separated by the Olympic Peninsula.

While the Peninsula is only a few miles from Seattle via water, it was largely unexplored until 1889. The so called ‘Press Expedition’, chartered by one of Seattle’s newspapers, made the first documented crossing of the Olympic Mountains. The expedition, which was more an extended party than a mission of discovery, took several months to make a trip that today can easily be backpacked in 3 days.


The park is diverse, and our stay in Forks illustrated this. We visited a Rainforest, coastal tidepools, giant stands of driftwood on a beach, hot springs, waterfalls and a dramatic cape in the middle of an Indian Reservation.
Hoh Rainforest

Those of you who are Star Trek fans will know of the Hoh Rainforest, if indirectly. At the end of the second Star Trek movie (The “Revenge of Khan”) when Spock dies, his coffin comes to rest in a newly generated forest, courtesy of the terraforming ‘Genesis Device’. This scene was filmed in the Hoh Rainforest, part of Olympic National Park.


The rainforest itself is incredibly lush and green. Almost everything is covered in moss, including the roof of the visitor center. We joined a ranger led walk along the ‘Hall of Mosses’ trail. At one section, the moss covered trees and branches come together an almost cathedral like setting, leading to the name ‘Hall of Mosses’. We learned about the different trees that grow in the rainforest, including the Douglas Fir and the Western Red Cedar. The Douglas fir is called the ‘money tree’, for its huge size (exceeding 200 feet) and incredible straightness. The Red Cedar was called the ‘Tree of Life’ by the local tribes, who used the cedar in a wide variety of ways, from making canoes to making rope. The ground is covered in vegetation, including a large number of ferns. It is a beautiful and inspiring area, a literal blanket of bright green.

Sol Duc Hot Springs
About once a month, the dust of the trail seems thick upon us and the weariness of the many miles on the road settles deep into our joints. When this happens, we start looking around for a set of hot springs to relax and rejuvenate in, and right on queue we find ourselves in the neighborhood of Sol Duc Hot Springs Resort, in the heart of Olympic National Park.
We started our day with a short hike above the resort, reaching lovely Soleduck Falls. The falls are rather unique, in that there are 3 side by side cascades into a small canyon that runs perpendicular to the falls. Even in August, there is still a lot of water flowing over the falls – it’s hard to imagine how the narrow little gorge could contain the water levels from the spring melt.



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