May 31
Woke up after another so-so night of sleep and dozing, and did my exercises out on the splintery wood deck in front of our room. Flocks of birds flew low overhead in the early morning, overcast sky. I took a short trip over to the grocery to get bread after getting dressed, and the rain started as I returned. Oh well, the rhododendron bushes looked fabulous in the gray morning!
We’d scoped out a breakfast place, the Quinault Internet Café in Amanda Park, and we arrived at the dining room entrance just as the waitress was unlocking the door, and just as the rain settled in like it wasn’t going to stop. Funny that when we looked over to the lounge part of the Café, there was already a group of people huddled over their laptops. Had they been there all night??
Had a fine breakfast and some good coffee while we mulled over what to do that day. We needed to end up in Chehalis that night and wanted to see some of the Lake Quinault area and hit a few places on the more Southern coast, but we weren’t sure how long the rain would last. So we decided to put off the longer hike we’d planned, the Irely Lake trail way down the North Shore Road, and instead start with a shorter hike from the Ranger Station.
Back the couple of miles North to the cheap hotel and loaded out, the Lake Quinault Inn was fine but old and worn. The air conditioning there (and the heat probably) were not working and there was a fan and an electric radiator in the room for us. The fan and an open window had worked fine, the hotel is clean and in a very quiet spot.
Turned right up the North Shore Road and after a few miles on the pavement we turned left into the Quinault Rain Forest Ranger Station parking lot. Don’t think the station itself was open, but there were a few cars already in their small lot. The rain was persistent, but we put on our raincoats, put our hoods up, and started off on the Maple Glade Loop Trail.
This was more of what we’d seen at Hoh, but was a delightful, more private version. Huge maples covered with moss and ferns, rivulets of running water with bogs of giant skunk cabbage and horsetail, devil’s walking stick, wildflowers, and a few western hemlocks, red cedars, and Sitka spruces. We opted not to take the longer trail to the Kestner Homestead, and soon were back at the car. It was raining as hard as ever and didn’t want to stop.
We decided to keep up the Road towards Irely Lake and maybe it would stop raining by the time we got there, or else we could circle over a rumored bridge up in that direction and come back by the South Shore Road, which had an assortment of shorter rain forest hikes. A few hundred yards past the Ranger Station the pavement ended and the road started off fine, but soon began featuring arrays of deep potholes that were hard to avoid. Muddy did a great job of dealing with them, but many contortions were required. Some of them were shallow and already filled with water, but when you saw a dry one you knew it went down to the center of the earth and you wanted to avoid those.
The road went on for miles and miles, and there were very few other cars on that road, we might have passed two or three coming the other direction. It sounds miserable, but we were thoroughly enjoying the wet day and the dripping forest (it *was* a rain forest after all). And then we came around a corner and there was a herd of Roosevelt elk in the meadow to our right, one bull surrounded by a dozen cows, all grazing. The herds are matriarchal, led by an older cow, and after a while she apparently gave the signal and they all trotted off into the woods.
We finally got to the promised junction where you can continue left up to Irely Lake and the North Fork campground, or turn right over a dodgy looking bridge to cross the Quinault River. It was still raining as hard as ever, so we went over the bridge and turned right again to return on the South Shore Road … but it was closed! So much for our plans. The only thing to do was to go back over the bridge and brave the sea of potholes all the way back the way we’d come.
Even this did not dampen our spirits, and navigating the potholes was a good game. Muddy sure earned her name. We got back to the start of the pavement and past the Ranger Station, and stopped at the July Creek Loop Trail on the shore of Lake Quinault before we got back to Amanda Park. Still raining, but this was a deserted and very nice area with a nice creek tumbling down to the lake and some just humongous Sitka spruces and a few hemlock, hugging secluded coves on the lakeshore.
Ok, it was time to bid a sad farewell to Olympic NP, which we loved. Was it our favorite National Park? No way we could answer that question at that point. We needed perspective and were about to see another that promised to be fabulous. But it was definitely way up there on the list.
Turned back onto 101 South through miles of forest and some small towns. The rain finally let up and the cloud cover began to thin as we approached the big town of Hoquiam, then crossed the Chehalis River at Aberdeen, all following route 101. We finally left it behind when we crossed the river, turning right onto 105 West towards the coast. We hugged the South side of Grays Harbor, the large, tidal inland delta formed by the Chehalis River and continued out towards the barrier islands that formed the harbor, turning right on 105 up the cape into Westport, a few blocks before we would have hit the beach.
Westport is a precious little seaside town with a huge State Park, a busy waterfront just sheltered from the Pacific, some big RV campgrounds, and some boutique hotels, mixed with lots of cheap ones. We were looking for a place to eat lunch and then maybe climb their observation tower, and we found a great waterfront dive bar called the Knotty Pine Tavern where the beer was cold, the fries were real, and the hamburgers were really good. Service was spotty but friendly, there was one nice woman working the tables and also tending bar for a row of regulars who looked like they’d been super-glued to their barstools. They had what looked like a great shuffleboard game (we didn’t try it), and a unique approach to bathroom maintenance. The one huge urinal in the men’s room was filled with ice, it was a truly chilling experience.
Left there after a long lunch, and it was now mostly clear out with some high clouds. We decided to head right for the not-as-big State Park a bit outside of town rather than the big one in town. We got back on 105 for several miles South along the barrier island, and then turned right towards the promised Seashore Conservation Area State Park. But where did the world end and the Park start? The small lane of beachside bungalows we were on kind of petered out, and we crossed some pavement covered by blowing sand, which eventually ended as we got closer and closer to the water, following some kind of road, that became covered with small ripples of sand itself. At some point I stopped and we got out, and we were on another planet.
Wow, how to describe this? We could turn away from the water and look a few hundred yards back to our world, where the houses ended and the sand began. But the other 270 degrees showed an alien environment right out of a scifi book. There were four elements in this world. One was the flat, flat, hard firmament we were standing on that stretched forever to the North and the South. One was the gray and white liquid/foam, that kept reaching towards us in billows that would flatten out on the firmament and run for yards and yards way up to our feet before somehow shrinking and receding. Another was the blue and white ceiling above us, that featured a huge, blazing yellow sphere that was sending waves of heat down on our heads. But the strongest element was this invisible force pushing down from the North, almost knocking us over and actually eating away at the firmament we were standing on, sending it scuttering in a river down to the South. This world seemed permanent, but we realized it was disappearing at the same time.
Yeah yeah, I’ve been on beaches before and this was just another beach. But it was totally deserted except for us, the wind was just incredibly strong, and the beach was so flat that when a wave came in, its momentum made it stretch out thinner and thinner for a long, long time before sinking into the sand. We could not face North without shielding our faces because the blowing sand was so abrasive. We soaked it all in for a while, it was thrilling in some ways, but a little scary in others. How fast was the tide coming in? Were we in danger of getting blown away by the wind or burnt by the sun? Why was there no one else there (one woman did show up, walking her dog, but they seemed distressed themselves)? And most of all, would the car get stuck in the sand?
After a while though, we’d had enough and it was time to go. The car turned around with no problem and we slowly rolled the few hundred yards back to the sand dunes bordering the beach and the small line of bungalows. That was fun! But now it was time to get serious and start heading inland.
I needed a cup of coffee and we knew that Muddy might need gas for the next section of our trip, so we stopped in Tokeland and a gas station/store right across from the Shoalwater Bay Casino. We were just barely in the tiny Shoalwater Bay Indian Reservation, and they had built a huge casino and were selling fireworks.
Continued East on 105, and then for a couple of hours on State route 6 through trackless forest, going slowly up and up as we got further inland. I should mention that whenever we were on non-NP land, you might be driving through a forest and suddenly see a whole logged hillside, bare and desolate for now, probably soon to grow back though and be logged again. Farms and factories started up and we finally found ourselves crossing over Interstate 5 into Chehalis (“sheh-HAY-liss”). We were back in civilization, or at least in a chain hotel, as we pulled into the Holiday Inn Express & Suites Chehalis-Centralia, which was in the running for the longest hotel name in Washington State.
Seemed nice and we got a really nice room, but a warning sign told us that if the trains bothered us, we could get a “silencing kit” from the front desk with earphones and drugs. We soon discovered that yes, they did have a good number of trains coming through town. They had two busy lines (at least) that went through a level crossing a few blocks away and were obliged to blow their horns, which they did loudly and gleefully all night. Actually, when we closed the window and the thick blackout shade, the sounds were ok and did not wake us up.
It was getting late already, so we got unpacked and then walked the few blocks over to the restaurant we’d targeted, Jeremy’s Farm To Table. Well, that sounded like a great choice, but none of us liked that restaurant. It was in a large barn-type building but was poorly ventilated (there was some smoke in the dining area from the kitchen), it was overrun by poorly-behaved kids and overtaxed chaperones who were in town for a baseball tournament, the service was way slow, and the food was not that good. I had a dinner salad and there wasn’t much about it to make you think that it had come from a farm recently. Oh well, the beer was cold.
Marched back to the hotel and were able to get in a good game of Here To Slay on their small table. One fun thing they had had in the restaurant was a screen showing a webcam focused on the busy railroad tracks in town. Dave watched it for a while back in the hotel, and confirmed that it was live. Soon to bed after that after a long and crazy day!
Sarah took pictures of these wildflowers during that day:
- Western Skunk Cabbage
- Horsetail
- Threeleaf Foamflower
- Candy Flower
- Purple Foxglove
- Deer Fern
- Large-leaved Avens
- Small-leaved Blinks
- Pacific Ninebark
- European Searocket
- Salsify
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