30/5: I just simply couldn’t miss the chance to visit famous Olympic National Park, now that I was so near. And really, it wasn’t much of a detour, I still had to get from Vancouver Island to Seattle somehow. So, I found a Couchsurfing host (wonderful Sandy and Louie) in Port Angeles and got to spend an entire day hiking in the park.
What I’ve realised here is that North America isn’t a very friendly place if you don’t have a car. Getting around with public transportation is very complicated! Luckily, I had Sandy and Louie to tell me which bus to take and where to get off, and then how to walk to reach the trailhead. Without their help, I would have been completely lost.
I’ve already written about the hikes I made in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island, how easy they were to walk, most of them even consisting of wooden boardwalks on top of the muddy ground. It was beautiful, of course, but still, it left a slightly artificial aftertaste.
Well, these trails in the Olympic National Park felt real. Really well made, but narrow and as soon as I entered the trailhead and left the road behind, I felt as if I was the only human in the world. The forest was so dense. Only me and the trees. And the ferns and orchids and birds and the moss. To put it simply, there are no words.
I made it to Marymere Falls, a small beautiful waterfall.
Next to the falls was Barnes Creek, and there I found the perfect spot to use the timer on my camera. Two trees had fallen across the river, so perfectly situated that I could place my camera on one and myself on the other and freeze this moment for all eternity. I’m not that extremely vain, but still, it felt good to have atleast one photo of me in this magical forest.
At last, I decided to climb Mount Storm King, 1382 meters high. But I wasn’t prepared for exactly how high that was. I followed the winding path up up and around the mountain. After a while, the lushness of the valley gave way for a more open forest of huge firs.
But the trail just kept on going up up up until I almost gave up. But then, eventually, I reached a turn in the trail and there it was. The lake. Crescent Lake in all its bright blue beauty, surrounded by those mountains and the ocean barely visible on the other side.
But I barely had time to appreciate the utter drama of the landscape, until I realised how extremely steep the other side of the mountain was. I am not exaggerating when I say that the slope facing the lake went straight down, from the top and about a kilometer to the foot of the mountain. The other side was not that much better, really, the trail was on this narrow ridge on the top of the mountain and it’s amazing how the trees have managed to start growing there. And there was I, sitting, right on the edge, with nothing to protect me from falling exept a couple of beardy trees.
I’ve never really been scared of heights, but now I got a severe case of vertigo. I could barely move, that’s how panicky I felt. I managed to crawl back from the edge and sit down on a big rock by an old, trustworthy fir and slowly get my breathing back to normal. Eventually, I could even admire the hawks flying above the forest way down by the lake and eat my lunch consisting of the last boiled Whiskey Creek Farm eggs and the Korean coconut cookies that Lori gave me before I left. All the while listening to podcasts from the Swedish public radio. It was a wonderful view, but I did not venture any closer to the edge. I had learned my lesson.
On my way back down, I found several wild orchids. Still as beautiful as the first time I saw them in Goldstream Provincial Park outside of Victoria. But you’ve seen them so many times now, so I promise, this will be the absolute last picture of a wild orchid from this trip on this blog. (About greenhouse orchids, on the other hand, I’m not giving any such promises.)
As the last thing, before I had to catch the bus back to Port Angeles, I walked down to the lake. There is something special about these mountain lakes. They are so blue, even when the sky is completely gray.
The bus was late, so while I was waiting, I took time to admire the huge colony of forget-me-nots that grew in the grass between the road and the trees.
Katja Malmborg 