Olympic National Park - the lakes and falls

Beautiful Crescent Lake

We seem to have started a new tradition, which is to visit an American national park once a year for a hiking holiday. It was the Grand Canyon in 2014, we are doing the Great Smokies in 2016, and in 2015 we did Olympic and Glacier national parks (and got to visit 2 more US states). The reason we visited these two parks, is that on the revelation that was the grand canyon we asked our guide what his favourite national parks were, and these were the two that he said. And they were pretty damn special. Both quite different from each other. Olympic is meant to be much wetter, it has rainforests, and Glacier is all about big mountains.

Storm Mountain ranger station

Marymere Falls

We first spent a week in Olympic national park, this is in Washington state, it's basically the Washington peninsula which is just west of Seattle. At the time I didn't realise that this is where Twilight was set. It was only when I started researching hotels that I realised where we were going. I always find the US a bit strange, you have this amazing national park, about 3 hours drive from Seattle, and yet when you arrive in the area the only touristy things you can do are related to Twilight. There is nothing to do with the amazing scenery that is all around them. They have such amazing back country and yet the vast majority don't even seem to realise.

We spent a couple of nights in Port Angeles, which also features in Twilight, and a few nights in Forks. Now Forks was Twilight central, since this is the actual town where they all live. And the way they go on in the book, you think the town is going to be quaint and pretty, little log cabins nestled in trees. Nope, really depressing, worse than country towns in Australia. Gross diners are the only places to eat, really sad run down shops everywhere. But the worst thing is anything touristy you want to do has to be related to Twilight, even though they are the closest town to the largest temperate rainforest in the US!

I really don't know what they did before Twilight, there was nothing else in this town, they must really love these books, I think they are the only thing keeping half of them employed. And the even funnier thing is that the author never even visited Forks before writing the book. Though I'm guessing if she had visited, it would probably be set in a different town.  Port Angeles was a bit better, it seemed to be less of a total hole, and had a more outdoorsy vibe to it. And less of a desperate Twilight theme.

Great forests

The Olympic national park is massive, you have temperate rainforest, coastal areas and mountains covered in glaciers all in the same park, pretty impressive. The first day we were there we were taking it pretty easy, so it was a bit of driving and sight-seeing. This was probably how most people visit the park, and it is still quite accessible this way, with lots of small walks, and great viewpoints. Since we were driving from Port Angeles to Forks we go past Lake Crescent, which is one of the main spots in the park. It was really beautiful, really peaceful, super clear water and great forests. I had really wanted to stay here when organising this week, but I had dilly-dallied too much and all the rooms had disappeared.

There were a couple of very easy walks, just a few kilometres at most, to give us a taste of the forest and waterfalls. It's an interesting approach that is being taken with Olympic national park, it's actually becoming less accessible as time goes on. As roads fall into disrepair, the locals lobby to make sure they aren't fixed, which means they just get worse and worse. Eventually they are undrivable which effectively blocks that part of the park off from visitors. It's such a massive park, it just means that there are whole portions now that you can only visit by walking in. Thinking back on it, that actually sounds pretty good to me.

Madison Falls

This particular trip was a more of a reconnaissance trip, it was mainly to suss out how bad bears are, and what you have to do to try and protect yourself from them. This park only has brown bears, which I think are not as dangerous as grizzlies, I think we could definitely go back and camp here pretty safely. This time round it was all about day hikes. It's good to see that there is this wilderness that is surprisingly accessible from London.

Lake Crescent - looking across to Pyramid mountain