Dover

Running alongside the cliffs

We found a new running series, the coastal trail series. It's whole idea is to run along the coast somewhere. The UK has a lot of coast, and a lot of it is pretty nice, so long as you don't want to swim in the sea. Even though we've been here for a while now, we still hadn't visited the cliffs of Dover. And this race series allowed us to actually run along the cliffs. How could we say no? It was only when we turned up that we discovered that any pictures you may see of the white cliffs of Dover are usually filmed in Sussex. Still the ones we saw were pretty white, and there was even a castle there.

This has got to be one of the toughest races we have done, we signed up to do a 10km race, then it turned out to be 12.3km, that's not an insubstantial increase in the race. The worst thing was it was incredibly muddy, I have been in some muddy races, but this was crazy. The real problem wasn't the mud so much, it was more that the ground underneath the thin mud layer was completely frozen. You just couldn't get much purchase, I managed to fall over within 200m of the start line. That was a bit painful.

Dover castle - didn't even know this existed

Otherwise it was a great run, good views and blue skies. I've done a lot of muddy, long 10km races this winter, I'm kind of wishing I had signed up for a flat, road race somewhere amongst all that.

The lighthouse - the trail dried up for the second half

The finish line was the muddiest point of the whole race, you were finally finished with this slog, had climbed the last hill, and you want to do a nice run across the line, what with everyone watching. Yet it was so muddy you had to just tip toe your way across hoping not to slip. It was a bit of a let down. The poor ultra-marathoners had it the worst, they had to slog through 56km of mud and hills only to get to the end, when all your stabiliser muscles are gone, and try to inch their way across the finish. Some didn't make it, and it took them a long time to stand up again.

The massive Dover harbour, with herd of horses

The Queen of the Park

Mount Olympus in the distance

The last walk we did in Olympic was just amazing. I had found it mentioned a few times on the web, the High Divide loop, sounded just want I was after. A high ridge circular walk. Only downside was that it was 33km with something like 1200m elevation gain, but I thought we could manage that. We just had to keep moving. Most of the time this is done as a 2-3 day hike, so nearly everyone else we met on the trail were doing it in a few days. We did meet another person who seemed to be doing it as a day walk. They were super fast, like Olympic walker fast, it was quite incredible watching them go. They also managed to overtake us twice without us ever overtaking them, not sure how they managed that.

Deer lake - didn't see deer though

Waterfall at the start

I can see why the campsites along here are some of the only ones in the park which require proper reservation permits. It really was the queen trail of the park. A loop, a ridge, amazing views, lakes, forests, mountains, it had it all. We started pretty early, so nobody else was on the track, in fact we didn't see anyone until we hit the first campsite. It's a bit of an uphill slog for the whole morning. We had lunch on the top of Bogachiel peak, and from there it was almost all downhill.

I unfortunately stopped taking photos kind of early in the day. It was so incredibly hot and we ran out of water with 5kms to go. That wasn't pleasant, we could have filled up from a river if we were desperate, I should have taken my steripen with us. I have a new awesome backpack with bladder. I'm totally sold on the bladder idea, one downside is that you have no clue how much water you have left. It would be nice to have some sort of warning message somehow. Since it was so hot I was just sucking it down, and really I should have rationed a bit more carefully.

View of Deer Lake, we started in the valley below that

The end of the walk was really great too, you are following a river through this thick forest, and the trail is lovely and soft under your feet. And it is all downhill, there is hardly even one step of uphill, so I really should have mustered the energy to take a few more photos. The trail was fairly quiet too, except right at the end when you reappear back on the waterfall track, apparently there had been a bear sighting right at the trail head, so everyone we met was pretty excited. We saw no bear though, must have eaten it's full of tourists by the time we got back.

Seven lake basin

Typical trail - great forest

We weren't really worried about bears on this walk, the biggest fear was mountain goats. There were heaps of signs up saying beware of the aggressive goats. These are not little spindly ibexes or anything but massive goats, if they decided they didn't like you they could definitely cause trouble. They had once gored someone to death, so you don't want to come against one of those. Though in the end we didn't see any wildlife, no bears, no deers, no goats. Perhaps it was too hot for them.

The trails the whole way round were great, it was only right at the start that we managed to go wrong, again I blame Scotland. I'm just not used to these beautifully large trails. We managed to follow some muddy deer track for a few hundred metres before we realised it was going the wrong way. Overall it was super easy to follow the trails, which was good, since we didn't have much in the way of a map, no 1:20000 for this walk. There were signposts at all the junctions though so really it was pretty easy.

Mt Olympus with glaciers

You get a fantastic view of Mt Olympus on this walk too, much better than what you get at Hurricane ridge. It feels like you are a lot closer to the mountain, and it really does look foreboding. It's like an open mouth, with sharp teeth and full or ice and snow.

Heart Lake

Once you have looped around Seven Lakes basin, which looked strangely volcanic, and had your fill of the views over to Mt Olympus it was then the long descent. Starting with a stroll down to Heart Lake, it really did look like a heart. And the forest below this lake was just amazing, some of the best I'd been in. We hardly saw the sun for the rest of the day, since the canopy was so thick. I can't recommend this loop enough, it really is one of the great (long) day walks.

Olympic - Hurricane Ridge

Surrounded by ridges

Olympic national park really gets its name from mount Olympus, so we definitely had to spend some time with the big mountains of the park. It was back to Port Angeles, which is at the base of Hurricane ridge, it was nice to get out of Forks, I have to say. Definitely try to stay somewhere other than Forks when you visit. We were a bit tired after the 16km along Hoh river the day before, so did the easy walks from the Hurricane ridge visitor centre. This place is tourist central, so don't bother trying to ask any questions of the rangers, they are overwhelmed with people. You don't really need to speak to anyone though, there are lots of maps around the place.

Can just see mount Olympus peeping up behind the ridge

Funny, fat marmot

It was surprising given the sheer numbers of people how much wildlife we saw. This was wildlife central, we saw marmots and deer and a weird bush turkey thing. Easily the most wildlife the whole time we were there. The marmots were pretty funny, I think they have their own species in this park, they were completely different from the ones we saw in Spain, really fat, with black on them. They still made the classic marmot call though, which was pretty cool. They really didn't care about people, I guess if you live on this ridge you are going to get used to people.

Again here you could really see the effects of the drought, everything was brown and it was super hot. We climbed Hurricane hill, which was 1700m, it's funny to think we were already almost as high as Australia, and had barely done any work. And there were still mountains much higher than us.

View to Canada, with Mt Baker appearing to the right

From the top of the hill you could actually see across to Canada, that was also pretty cool. It really is quite close to Port Angeles, you just have to catch a ferry across quite a narrow strait. We could also see Mt Baker from the top. That was surprising, to see across water to some snow capped mountain. I was expecting that at all. The dead trees in the foreground are from a fire I think. Visiting when we did you could definitely feel that forest fires could be a danger, it was so dry and hot, and I think pine burns like crazy.

Quite pretty around here.

It was really a very pleasant stroll, and well worth the slog up to the top. I would highly recommend visiting here, even with all the people, because the views are just amazing. Plus marmots!

Olympic - Rainforests

That's a lot of moss

The reason we were staying in Forks was to visit the Hoh River rainforest part of the national park. This is meant to be one of the largest temperate rainforest in the US and receives something like 3.5m of rain every year. Unfortunately it was the middle of a drought when we went, which on the upside means you get better weather for hiking. The mosses were perhaps less spectacular than they usually are, having shrivelled a bit and turned brown.

We decided on a walk out to 5-mile island, this is along the Hoh river for most of the walk, unfortunately it was an out-and-back. It seemed hard to construct loop walks without either staying out for 3 days, or walking for less than a mile. I'll take what I can get though, and it was a very pleasant, easy walk. Just enough to get us ready for what we had coming up.

There were great ferns, big trees and a lot of moss all the way along the trail. I could definitely go back here and construct some sort of through walk from Hoh valley to Sol Duc valley, which is the next one over. There wasn't much wildlife, which was a bit surprising, at least maybe some more birds, given all the trees.

Nice, easy trail

We could tell when we were getting close to the car park on the return. The density of other walkers along the trail is definitely some sort of power law.

It's these sorts of walks that keep us coming back to the US, it's so different from anything you get in the UK. And it just feels so big, with this crazy thick undergrowth.

Yet more waterfalls

Cool trees around here

Olympic - Coasts and Wildlife

An unforgiving coastline

We had visited the lakes and waterfall section of the park, now it was time to check out the coastline. This is not a tame coastline by any stretch of the imagination. This is the north Pacific ocean, with nothing between the beach and Japan, it did not look like a place you would go swimming. It was rocky and windy, with the spray being whipped up to make this sea mist all along the beach.

It felt a bit like the great ocean road, with the funny rock structures in the sea, and the cold wind. Even though the sky was blue.

Some of the beaches we visited were actually in Indian reservations. We visited one at La Push, which is part of the Quileute reservation. I was kind of hoping to find some sort of cultural centre that we could visit, I mean this beach is also in Twilight, so they must get lots of extra tourists, but there was nothing. It seems kind of hard to find museums or cultural centres devoted to the American Indians, which is disappointing.

Cool rocks in the ocean

Very sad bear at Olympic game farm

We also had one of my strangest experiences in the US whilst in the Olympic national park area. We visited the Olympic game farm. Game farms are different from zoos in that they are privately owned. It also seems that the laws as to whether or not you can keep exotic animals in effectively your back yard, are different state-by-state. But pretty much most states seem to allow it.

So you drive around the farm, of course you do, throwing bread out the window at the animals. It was completely surreal. You turn up and buy the bread, I think it's wholemeal, but you aren't allowed to bring in any of your own food. I'm not sure how they monitor that though. The first animals you visit are the llamas. The animals all know that cars bring food. So they are all standing right at the gate, you can barely even drive into their paddock. They then surround you and force you to throw bread out before they will let you move.

They also have a lot of bears. This was pretty weird, you have these really fat bears sitting in a paddock waving at the cars for food. That was pretty depressing. They had some timber wolves, you didn't feed them bread. They were smaller than I thought they would be, but in quite small cages and one of them was doing this weird pacing up and down which never looks good. Overall I wouldn't recommend it, I'm not sure about just anyone being allowed to keep these exotic animals, it doesn't seem very humane. Though a pen full of llamas begging for bread, I am totally down with that!

An otter replacement

One of the best wildlife experiences we had was actually in Port Angeles. We had a few hours to kill and the tourist information suggested a walk along the bay. It was prettier than I thought it would be, and even better we actually saw otters! They are my favourite animal and we saw them just swimming around the bay. The info person had said there were otters, but I wasn't going to get my hopes up, so to see them in the wild was pretty great. They weren't holding hands or anything, but they were swimming along together, they were definitely a team.

Sleeping Beauty

Another Christmas tradition of ours seems to be to see a Matthew Bourne production. This year it was Sleeping Beauty. I think this has been my favourite of his so far, the plot is not as weird as Swan Lake or the Nutcracker, and perhaps I like the music more. The set design is amazing, as are the costumes. It really was something else.

The only disappointment, and it was fairly major, is that they don't use a live orchestra! That was super disappointing, half a ballet is the music! When you have an orchestra there is always this slight background noise, as they get their instruments ready and tune up, but for this show you walk in and it's quiet. We were actually sitting so close to the stage, that it's normally where the orchestra would have been.  I would have been happy to be further back and have the orchestra.