Olympic in Washington was
never on my bucket list (which is extensive), but I am so glad we came. This park has nearly everything: lush mossy
rain forests, rivers, lakes, ocean beaches, and glacier-capped mountains.
And it has trees. Glorious, huge, ancient, towering trees. I am in love.
We may have a new theme going here with hugging trees. This is the largest spruce in the world, a
Sitka spruce 1000 years old and 59 feet around.
The Hoh rain forest (named
for a local tribe) is deep and shadowy with mosses hanging everywhere, another
one of those cathedral atmosphere woods.
The maples, cedars and firs are enormous.
Fallen trees eventually rot
and provide a nourishing place for seedlings to get started. The young trees grow ever larger with roots
reaching down around the rotting nurse logs.
Eventually the old logs are gone and strong trees stand with hollows
underneath.
We camped on the beach on the
Pacific coast. Sea stacks are rock
formations that resisted weathering. The
driftwood here is a bit larger than we expected, but when you think about it,
the trees that tumble off eroded cliffs and are tossed up by tsunamis are the
same size as those we saw in the rain forest.
We woke up here on the Fourth of July, so Don dressed accordingly and
wished everyone a happy Fourth.
Nice view for lunch. Crescent Lake is a large inland lake.
Foxgloves adorn the roadsides.
Madison Creek falls.
Hurricane Ridge is up the
mountains from Port Angeles. We were
above the clouds, a lovely feeling.
These glacier covered mountains looked different from those Glacier
National Park. The Olympic peninsula is
isolated from all other mountains in Washington, so their plants and animals
are a bit different from their cousins in other places.
John Muir is a hero of mine,
so when we saw this shirt, my dear husband bought it for me. It says, "The mountains are calling and I must go."
Now we will leave the wilderness we love and head to a city we have never been to: Seattle.
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