On the afternoon of Monday, July 31, 2023, Andy, Kathrin, Sean, and I continued our daylong visit to Mount Rainer National Park. We had just completed a wonderful hike and had eaten lunch on the trail. For the afternoon, we decided to go up to Sunrise on the Mountain’s northeast side. Then some would head home and others of us would continue to hang out in Seattle.
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Flying into Seattle from Chicago on Wednesday, July 19, 2023, I was able to see all three of Washington’s National Parks. And I would continue to glimpse them in the week and a half before we actually set foot on Mount Rainier. Meanwhile, Bold Bison was out there to be with a client, and Patrick and I had work to do. But we also made time for a really fine day hike up on the flanks of Mount Baker, right on the doorstep of North Cascades National Park.
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On Tuesday, July 26 [2022], I continued my solo circumnavigation of the Olympic Peninsula and Olympic National Park. This was both my second visit to Olympic and only the second time I’d visited a National Park alone. (The first was the previous November when I stopped at Great Sand Dunes National Park for a hike on my drive home from New Mexico). The first time I’d visited Olympic (a decade earlier in April 2012), it had been with Sean and Kathrin. But on that day too we did a day of highlights on a long drive between Portland and Seattle. Someday, I’ll visit Olympic and stay a while.
That April day with Kathrin and Sean, the weather had been more expected (cool, rainy). But on this late July day, it was 90 degrees at Hoh Rainforest, my next stop. It made for a completely different experience.
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On Sunday, July 15 [2022], Bold Bison continued an epic journey from West Coast client to West Coast client by flying from San Diego to Washington State. Patrick would only be there four days, but I would be there for over a week and a half. Along with a bunch of adventures and a lot of good work, I ended the trip with a day at Olympic National Park, the park that Sean and I visited just second on this whole National Park odyssey.
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In his engrossing Wilderness in National Parks: Playground or Preserve, John C. Miles, professor of environmental studies at Western Washington University, traces the history of wilderness protection in the parks from their earliest days to the book’s present, 2008.
The history of the National Parks and other protected lands in the United States is the story of continually evolving ideas about how and why natural and historical areas should be protected for the common good. At its noblest, it is an acknowledgement that the people, collectively, own and administer the wildest, most beautiful and most historically important areas in the nation. The hows and whys of acquiring and administering these places is intrinsically tied to the concept of land held for the common good.
Almost 150 years ago, on June 30, 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill granting scenic Yosemite Valley to the state of California to be held in the public interest as a park (eventually the valley would return to federal control as part of Yosemite National Park). Eight years later, when Congress moved to protect the geothermal features around the headwaters of the Yellowstone River in a region that lay in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho territories, there was no state to give the park to, so by default it became a national park. The concept of the national park was born out of necessity.
Lake Crescent in the northern Olympics formed when a glacier-carved valley, whose river drained into the Elwha River, was dammed by a natural landslide some 8,000 years ago. Although it has since been stocked with alien fish species, the lake’s Beardslee and Crescenti trout evolved over millennia into genetically distinct populations found nowhere else on earth.
Lake Crescent’s official depth is 624 feet, but there are parts that are almost certainly deeper than 1,000 feet.
Highway 101 follows the southern shore of the lake, which allowed us to stop for a brief visit.
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After Ruby Beach, we continued northeast on 101 out of the park’s coastal section and up the Hoh River Valley, which has been heavily logged. We turned east on Upper Hoh Road, and the walls of the Hoh Valley grew steeper around us. Shortly after reentering the park’s main section, the forest got denser and more otherworldly. The road twisted and turned along the river to our right.
We stopped to have a look at one of the largest Sitka spruces in the United States: over 270 feet tall and over 500 years old.
Ruby Beach lies just south of the Hoh River’s outlet into the Pacific. We parked in the lot on the bluff above the beach and made our way down the switchback trail. The trail emerges along Cedar Creek, which is flanked by piles of driftlogs. Sea stacks rise from the beach at low tide. Although they are massive, they are dwarfed by Abbey Island (to the left in the images above and below).
Low tide was at 12:15pm, and we arrived at Ruby Beach at ten after, perfect timing. Immediately in front of us was an unbroken stretch of sand, but we were hoping to see sea stars and other tide pool life, so Sean and I walked off hand-in-hand toward some of the smaller sea stacks and large rocks to the south.
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After leaving Beach 1, we continued north on 101 until we came to a pullout on the inland side. Near Beach 5 was a short side road that led to one of the world’s largest cedar trees, boasting a girth of 66 feet.
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From Quinault Rain Forest, Highway 101 descends through the Quinault Indian Reservation to the lower Queets Valley, a section of the park added by the Truman administration. From there, the road turns abruptly north and follows the coast for eleven miles, past seven specific beaches that comprise the southernmost coastal area of Olympic National Park.
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The three of us spent two fun days exploring Portland from Powell’s Books to the Hawthorne District to food cart pods. Saturday morning, April 28, we returned to Seattle via the Olympic Peninsula. We rose early to get a head start on the three hour drive to the first, and southernmost, section of the park areas we wanted to see: Lake Quinault and the Quinault Rain Forest.
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We woke up early, dressed, picked up our rental car (which we got upgraded to a Prius), and started down I-5 toward Portland. Almost immediately, we noticed how verdant the landscape was, from vines growing from overpasses in downtown Seattle, to moss on cut logs on the back of a lumber truck.
In January, my cousin Kathrin visited Chicago. She is looking to move on from our native Michigan, and while Chicago is on her list of potentially livable cities, so are Seattle and Portland. Kathrin suggested that Sean and I travel with her to both cities at the end of April. She and Sean had been to Seattle, but not Portland. I had never been farther north on the West Coast than Napa Valley. Sean and I were game for the trip, and soon we had our dates set.
That there are three National Parks within two or three hours of Seattle was not at all lost on me. And once we decided to fly in and out of Seattle and drive a rental car to and from Portland, it became obvious that we should stop at Mount Rainier National Park on the way. Rainier seemed an easy choice because it’s between the two cities, not out on the peninsula like Olympic or two and a half hours northeast of Seattle (the opposite direction from Portland) like North Cascades.
(more…)I’m about half way through the revised edition of Tim McNulty’s Olympic National Park, A Natural History.
It was an Easter gift from Sean, along with the new seventh edition of the National Geographic Guide to the National Parks of the United States, both of which I’d asked for. What I hadn’t asked for, but which is intriguing, was the National Geographic Guide to the National Parks of Canada. A whole other world…literally.
The title of this blog is an adaptation of Theodore Roosevelt’s words upon seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time:
Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American if he can travel at all should see.
Roosevelt was talking about a great natural site before it would be protected. Already there were mining designs on sections of the canyon. Parts of it were no longer pristine wilderness, and they aren’t now, nor will be. Now, as then, there are parts of the park designated wilderness and others for heavy tourist use.
I have no illusion that the parks as my traveling companions and I will experience them are truly pristine (save for perhaps the remotest of the Alaska parks), but they are somewhere on a continuum between civilization and wilderness.
We’re rethinking Mount Rainier. While it is the most accessible, in some ways, during our trip to Portland and Seattle next month, it is also the least accessible in others. I had been prepared for there to still be a lot of snow on the ground, and that we’d essentially be driving into the park up to where the road is closed at Paradise to look at the scenery, etc. In my mind, I’d likened it to the trips to Park City we’d taken when I was younger. Snow? Mountains? No problem.
In digging further, though, apparently all vehicles entering the park are required to carry tire chains until May 1, a big problem with a rental car. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that it would be going to the park at about the least optimal time of year just to say we’d done it. Advice from a friend in Seattle had some impact on this thinking.
So, we’re going to a different park, which I think will be much more rewarding, and which won’t alter our larger travel plans at all: