Return to Olympic

I got a chance to go back to Olympic National Park and go camping with two of the other girls. Thanks to some nice scheduling we were able to leave Monday afternoon and stay through Thursday afternoon. Our first day we got there around 4 and camped in the Hoh Rainforest. It's a temperate rainforest. I didn't realize the US had rainforests but I guess the Pacific North Wet would be the place for them. It gets about 137 inches of rain a year! After setting up camp we took a couple of shorter walks.

 The first was the Hall of Moses, about 1/2 mile loop from the visitor center. We saw some amazing moss and lychen, as the name implies, but the best part was the trees. Some were hundreds of years old and easily 200 feet. Many have been blown down due to their shallow root system and the roots, and often the circumference of the trunk was taller than I was. We saw beautiful evergreens and a couple amazing groves of maples trees turning to fall colors and covered with draped moss.

The most vivid (natural) green I've seen in a while

The maple grove

 The next trail was about 1.5 miles and took us to the river. We started up higher and then progressed down old river terraces until we reached the current flood plain. The landscape went from old, dense rainforest to secondary growth to new saplings. You could look behind you and literally see the stark difference between each type.

The trees actually grow on old fallen trees, they look like they're merging together

Secondary growth

Banana slug!!!!!! Largest slug I've ever seen and they're all over the place!

About that point we were all hungry so we headed back to camp. Luckily we were smart and had already set up the tent so all we had to do was start a fire and cook dinner. Thanks to the somewhat wet wood from the campground this was easier said than done. After an absurd amount of time and many, many matches we were able to finally start a fire. The one upside in the whole process was that I finally got to use my hatchet, thanks Dad. Dinner was black bean burgers followed by s'mores. All in all pretty good.

You'd never guess we had so much trouble starting it

I thought this was pretty cute