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!