The Twilight Zone

The Twilight series may have brought some unwanted fame to the Olympic Peninsula, but the more legitimate and far less fantastical reason this area is so incredible is because of its amazing variance in landscapes. 

We started our tour of the park at Hurricane Ridge, a region which boasts several mountains over 6,000 feet and a host of huge white glaciers clinging to mountain cliffs. We saw lots of deer in the alpine heights along with a big fat yellow and white spotted that scared the bejeesus out of Ryan when he let out a loud warning whistle with Ryan a few feet away. Man those animals can be loud. 

Marmots scare Ryan

 

We're following the leader...

Well hello there

We camped at the Heart o’ the Hills campground, 12 miles below the crest of hurricane ridge, which offered an exhilarating bike ride downhill to the campsite (we switched off halfway). We even managed to get ourselves out of our sleeping bags for the sunrise over the bay and mountain tops.

After breakfast in the mountains, it was lunch by the ocean with the waves booming over the surf and fog rolling between sea stacks. We walked up the beach about a mile and half, skipping stones and chasing waves. A bald eagle stood sentinel over the Hole in the Wall, an aptly named cliff barraged with waves and eroding into an arch. Sea urchins clung to the tide pools inside, with little hermit crabs scurrying among the sea kelp. We were in the mountains this morning looking at glaciers? Weird.

Then dinner was spent in the Hoh rainforest, a lush environment of green mosses, sprawling ferns and delicate clovers blanketing the ground. The trees were huge, their trunks easily towering over Ryan… when lying on their sides. We followed the ice blue Hoh river to our backcountry campsite, stopping at this beautiful waterfall along the way.

Now obtaining that picture was quite the ordeal because 1. I had previously broken my second tripod of the trip and was trying to balance my camera on a stick to help with stability and 2. because of what Ryan managed to spot among the ferns. He was behind me and let out this sort of muffled gasp. Turning, I asked what was wrong. “Nothing, but it’s best if we keep walking.” The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I felt my eyes grow wide. It wasn’t vampires or werewolves I feared, it was something far worse. Of course the little trail we were following only led to a lookout point of the falls, and not back to the main trail, which meant we had to go back the way we came. I know it’s bad when Ryan’s keeping as far to one side of the trail as he can and stepping with very deliberate, careful motions. I decided I wanted to know where it was rather than accidentally run into it or something, but in this case, ignorance would have been bliss.

The spider’s body was about the size of a quarter, bright orange with black spots. His legs were poised, barbed, and curled in anticipation of the next unsuspecting fly. He was suspended on a delicate web between two ferns, making him hard to see when your eyes want to focus on the greenery past the web, one of my top reasons for hating his species. You never know when you might run into a web, unsuspecting, and this was all I could think about as I squealed and booked it down the trail to get as far away as possible. Needless to say, Ryan went first the rest of the way through the forest.

Luckily no other spider encounters occurred, and we enjoyed a relaxing night on a gravel bar with a nice fire (Ryan’s first successful blaze in Washington) and stars looking down. Ryan even got some fly fishing in, and the sky was clear enough we ventured to take a risk and sleep with the rain fly off. We could even see the milky way faintly outlined in the sky.

Overall, we decided that while the area is (unfortunately) now known for old red pickup trucks, vampire danger “high,” signs and other Twilight references, we felt The Twilight Zone was a more appropriate pop culture reference. Where else can you go from mountain to sea to rainforest in a day? No where else, but in a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man…