Crazy Happy Lifestyle: Day 39 - Olympic

Tuesday, July 18, 2016

Posted from: Forks, WA

Miles driven: 152

Total trip miles: 6,651

After trying out a rain forest and beach yesterday, we decided to try mountains and lakes today.

Our primary destination today is Hurricane Ridge. This is a "must see" in Olympic NP as it provides the best views of the mountain range.

The road up to Hurricane Ridge is a 6,000+ ft climb in elevation. There is a series of short tunnels to drive through.

We saw a bear! This was the first bear we have seen in this trip. We were beginning to wonder if the most ferocious bear we would see is the little stuffed animal in the camper.

Hurricane Ridge was beautiful. You could see several mountains from this point. One was named Cameron, so here is Cameron standing by his mountain.

The clouds were not helping us here, but right between Caleb and Matt was Mt. Carrie. We had to take this picture for my sister, Carrie.

We attended a ranger program on the overlook. Afterwards we began talking to the ranger and he asked the kids which parks they had been to. I think he was thinking they might rattle off acouple, but they started in on the long list and he was amazed. He started asking questions and we had a great conversation.

While we were talking with him another family joined the conversation, and we discovered that they were traveling all summer too! The park ranger eventually moved on, but we stayed there and our families talked for two hours! (We both ate our lunches at some point during this time.) It turned out that they were fellow Midwesterners from Wisconsin and we had a lot in common. At the end of our conversation we exchanged information. They are planning a vacation out east next year. Who knows, maybe we will run into them in some eastern states!

As we sat there talking, the clouds really moved around a lot. We finally parted ways and went to look for a trail to walk.

But first our Junior Rangers were sworn in.

We decided to walk the Hurricane Hill trail. It was relatively short and with the clouds moving in, that sounded like a good idea.

This path was full of wild flowers; many more than we have seen on a trail so far.

These trees were so perfect they looked fake.

The Canon camera did a better job of capturing the color of the wild flowers in the foreground, but this give you an idea. There are 7 different colors of flowers in this picture.

This trail was a steady increase in elevation, but then it became quite steep. A hiker walking down assured us it was worth the hike up. I'm glad she did, because we may not have continued with the clouds moving in and blocking the views.

This is why it was worth it. There were several mountain goats at the top.

The clouds have really moved in now, but there are goats on the rock behind us.

Our shepherd watching over his goats.

When we drive into the park, they handed you information asking you to not get close to the goats and to make a lot of noise and act scary. Once the goats decide the humans are not a threat, they can become aggressive towards us. In order to walk back down the hill, we had to walk within 100 ft of them, so we drug our feet on the gravel and stamped our walking sticks on the ground in an attempt to be scary. (Not sure how scary we were, but they moved away from us.)

Once we were back to the trailhead, we looked at the map of where we had walked and read the information. This is something we typically do before we begin a hike... But for some reason, we didn't this time. We had talked to a ranger and I thought he had said a "moderate mile hike." Turns out it is categorized as strenuous and is 3.2 miles round trip. Either way, it was a good hike and we were glad we did it. The low clouds/fog really added an interesting element to the hike. It became so silent and calm.

We had not drove for more than two miles before it became hard to see in spots due to the dense fog and it began raining. This was the first rain we had seen since Rocky Mountains during our first week.

The flowers on the side of the road made the drive more scenic even with the clouds and rain.

Daiseys!

By the time we came down from the mountain, the rain had stopped.

This is Crescent Lake. We drove along its ten mile length and stopped to look around and enjoy the views...and the color. This lake had the glacier melt too, which made it that very unique blue we saw yesterday.

This is me trying to capture the color in a picture again. My obsession knows no end.

Back at the campground, it wasn't raining, but would occasionally get misty. We decided this was a good night for chili in the Dutch oven. We had new neighbors to share the fire pit with tonight (did I mention our fire pit is shared with the site next door?). So we talked with them, a very nice retired couple in a beautiful new fifth wheel. We had a nice chat with them while dinner was cooking.