It’s our second day on the Olympic Peninsula. Yesterday, we explored its temperate rainforests on the Skyline Trail to Three Lakes. Today, we would explore its wild Pacific coast on the 9-mile Ozette Loop.
We got to the trailhead and started the hike at 12:30. This presented a bit of a problem, since we had to get to Port Townsend, 3 hours away, to check in to our hostel before its front desk closed at 9:30. We’d have to stop for dinner, too. We had to move quickly.
There was a cool breeze. Low, broken clouds passed overhead. Unlike yesterday’s lonely hike to Three Lakes, this hike was immensely popular. Even though it was a Thursday, the parking lot was packed with the cars of both day and overnight hikers.
We crossed the bridge over the Ozette River and entered the coastal rainforest. Remarkably, the trail to Cape Alava was almost entirely on a boardwalk—nearly three miles of it from the lake to the coast. I suspect the boardwalk was necessary to prevent erosion of the soft, almost swampy, soil of the forest floor.
We immediately saw the three tree species we would see throughout our hike: western red-cedar (Thuja plicata), western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), and Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis).
We found ripe blueberries (Vaccinium ovalifolium) and picked and ate some while we hiked. Salal (Gaultheria shallon) and bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) were both blooming. Elegant deer fern (Blechnum spicant) grew next to the trail. Huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum) and skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanum) were plentiful.
The hike featured forests in various ages of maturity: ancient old-growth with massive trees, second-growth with pole-sized trees, and meadows filled with shrubs and saplings. A deer approached us in one of the meadows, perhaps accustomed to handouts from hikers.
The breeze grew cooler as we approached the ocean. The trees thinned out to reveal blue-gray water ahead. We emerged from the forest to a whopping view of Ozette Island covered in Sitka spruce. The ocean was filled with sea stacks big and small.
Once we got to the shore, we climbed across a tangle of driftwood to get to the sand. We’d covered the 3 miles to the ocean in an hour and fifteen minutes. Not too bad.
Coastal hikes are better in theory than in practice. You imagine easy walking with great views and pleasant weather, but the reality is trekking on sand, rocks, seaweed, and driftwood while you’re exposed to relentless sunshine and salt-laden winds. We got all of those on today’s three-mile beach walk: we walked on dried mounds of odorous seaweed; we tiptoed on giant driftwood logs; we hopped over boulders. That doesn’t mean we didn’t enjoy ourselves; it was a great little adventure. But it wasn’t easy.
The tide was high during our hike, so rather than walking around the two headlands on our route, we had to hike over them. Getting over the first headland involved scrambling up and down steep dirt and rocks.
Elizabeth and I found old Native American petroglyphs next to the first headland. One depicted a marriage scene with a man and a woman and some fertility symbols. Another had whales and orcas.
Getting over the second headland was more involved: we had to use fixed ropes to climb up and down both sides. The ropes were helpful—if not necessary—and the scramble was a lot of fun.
At the end of the coastal section of our hike, we climbed up Sand Point. The view was excellent, revealing dense green conifer forests reaching to the horizon. We took a break on the hill, then walked back into the forest.
The coastal walk took longer than I’d expected: we averaged only 1 mile per hour! We emptied the sand from our shoes and then hiked back at a brisk pace. Like the first leg of the hike, this one was mostly boardwalk, and we covered the three miles back to the trailhead in 50 minutes.
We got back to the trailhead at 6 and stopped for an excellent meal at Thai Peppers on the way to Port Townsend. We made it to our hostel just before its front desk closed.
I used Erik Molvar’s thorough Hiking Olympic National Park guidebook to plan our Olympic Peninsula hikes.
I used the exhaustive but easy-to-use Plants Of The Pacific Northwest Coast to identify the plants we saw.
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