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.