Olympic National Park: South, Washington - July 22nd to 24th, 2024
Olympic National Park covers most of the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington. There are no roads that go straight through the park. Most of the park is accessible via dead-end roads that branch off of US highway 101, which encircles the park on three sides, following the coastline of the peninsula. This is the second of two posts covering our visit to the park, concentrating mostly on the southern half of the park. The previous post covered our explorations in the northern half of the park.
Monday was a travel day, from Fairholme Campground in Olympic National Park to Coho Campground in the Olympic National Forest. We decided to stop at the Hoh Rainforest and Ruby Beach along the way.
There is limited parking at the Hoh Rainforest. Once the lot fills up, they meter the traffic, only letting more vehicles in as vehicles leave. The ranger back in Port Angeles told us we should arrive before 10 am on a weekday (before 9 am on a weekend) so we wouldn’t have to wait long to get in. The park warns people that wait times can be up to three hours to get in.
It was about an hour and a half drive from Fairholme to the Hoh Rainforest Visitor Center. We dumped our tanks and filled our fresh tank before leaving. In Forks, we stopped for gas. By the time we were approaching the Hoh Rainforest entrance station, it was just after 10 am, later than we wanted to arrive.
Similar to the day before, it was drizzly rain during our drive. However, by the time we reached the Hoh Rainforest, the rain stopped and the sun was peaking out. Is the sun allowed to shine in a rain forest? Well, it was the dry season here.
There was a lit sign alongside the road indicating the parking lot was already full and there was up to a three hour wait. Three hours was longer than we wanted to wait, so we pulled into the Hard Rain Cafe which was just past the sign. As we ordered our two chai lattes, the staff informed us that the sign always says three hours and they thought the wait would not be that long yet. So we grabbed our drinks and continued down the road. Of course, about thirty cars or so had streamed by us as we were in the cafe.
The entrance station is about six miles from the visitor center, where most of the hiking trails are. When we pulled up in line to get in, we couldn’t even see the entrance station which was around the bend in the road. There was a pond next to the road where two cute river otters entertained us for a while.
After a little while, Ann walked up to the entrance station to get a feel for how long the line was. By the time she walked back, we were 42nd in line. We’re guessing we started out with about 70 vehicles in front of us. We originally said we were willing to wait one hour. By the time we entered, we had waited just over that, one hour and 8 minutes to be exact, not that we were counting.
We had no problems parking Red Tail (our Winnebago EKKO) in the lot. There were several RV spaces, but we grabbed a regular parking spot in the picnic area, saving the RV spaces for larger rigs.
There are two short trails along with one much longer trail starting right from the visitor center. We took the more popular Hall of Mosses Trail, just a short 0.8 mile loop. If we would have arrived earlier, we would have also walked the Spruce Nature Trail, which would have added 1.2 miles. The Hall of Mosses Trail was pretty nice, but also pretty crowded. Was it worth the one hour wait? Maybe. Is it worth a three hour wait, definitely not, in our opinion. But the river otters definitely added to our enjoyment of the area. Had we not waited in line, we probably would have missed them.
After our walk, we ate lunch before hitting the road again. On our drive back out, we stopped again at the Hard Rain Cafe, this time for a couple of Cokes. The place was packed this time, as it was lunch time. We heard it was about half an hour wait for food.
From there, we drove over to Ruby Beach. There is limited parking there (how unusual), but we were able to snag a spot. It is a short walk down to the beach. There are beautiful haystack rock formations along the shoreline. There are also supposed to be some nice tidal pools to check out, but we were not there during low tide, so we didn’t see any. However, the sun was out and the surf was rough which gave the rock formations a nice backdrop.
Heading north along the beach, there is a small stream flowing into the ocean. It was just a few feet wide and about ankle deep. Keith joined most of the others and stepped across on some logs. Ann just rolled up her pants and waded through the water, getting her socks and shoes soaking wet. She didn’t mind. Now she didn’t have to worry about a wave flowing further onto the beach than expected while she was taking pictures and videos. It didn’t matter if her feet ended up in the water again.
At the beach, we ended up walking for a little over an hour, covering about 1.7 miles with an elevation gain of 115. We combined it with our Hall of Mosses hike to count as hike number 40 of our 52 Hike Challenge for 2024.
When we returned to Red Tail, Ann hosed off her feet and changed into dry shoes and socks. It was now about 4 pm and Google Maps said we had an hour and 47 minutes of driving to reach the Coho Campground.
It took about an hour down highway 101 to reach our turn off onto Donkey Creek Road, National Forest Road 22. We were a little skeptical about a road called Donkey Creek, but there was a brown sign at the turn, indicating it was the way to Wynoochee Lake, which is where the campground is located. Plus, it didn’t look like there were any other roads heading that direction on Google Maps. OK, that made us feel better. From the turn off, the campground was about 24 miles away.
The road was fine for the first ten miles. Then it narrowed down to one car width wide. And the pavement started disappearing in sections. And potholes started appearing, some being quite large. Then the pavement went away completely and the potholes were more frequent. We had slowed down to a crawl as we made our way through the mine field of potholes, as many of them were unavoidable. After about half an hour of this nerve-wracking drive, we still had seven miles to go. There was a small spur road that gave us room to turn around. We decided to cut our losses, heading back out those awful seven miles of road.
When we returned to highway 101, we finally got our cell service back. There was a town, Humptulips, just a couple of miles further down the highway. And Google Maps showed there was an RV Park there, called Big Spruce. It was now 6 pm. We were tired, hungry, and stressed. We headed for the RV Park. They had one RV site left. We took it. They also had non-hookup sites in a grassy area behind the RV sites, but they didn’t offer us one of those even after telling them we didn’t need hookups. That’s OK, we didn’t care how much it cost at that point.
We normally don’t stay in RV Parks because it is not our style of camping. RV Parks normally have their sites right up against one another, more like a parking lot and this RV Park was no exception. But we were thankful that they could fit us in for the night. We were done driving for the day.
Luckily, we had some leftovers we could reheat in the microwave for dinner as neither one of us felt like cooking. After dinner, after we tried to relax for a little bit, we searched for another campground for the following three nights to replace our Coho Campground reservation. We finally found an opening at Potlatch State Park near the town of Shelton and booked it.
Then we went onto recreation.gov to cancel our Coho Campground reservation. The website would not let us modify or cancel the reservation now that it was our arrival day. They said that at that point, it was up to the local campground. We found an email address for the campground on the National Forest website, so we sent an email explaining that we wanted to cancel and why. They responded that there was another, much better road to reach the campground. We should have stayed on highway 101 for another 40 miles to Montesano and taken Wynoochee Valley Road back up north to Coho. And they said they have nothing to do with the reservations and that we would have to cancel them using recreation.gov. So we were back around, full circle. Since we already made other reservations, we decided to just lose our $90 for the reservation and, unfortunately, not free up the site for others to use.
Tuesday was a more relaxing day. We drove back up highway 101 to the Quinault Rainforest Ranger Station, about a half hour drive. There are two short trails there, one is a small loop inside the larger outer loop. The smaller loop is the nature trail. The outer loop goes over to the Kestner Homestead which are the remnants from the 1800’s.
The parking lot there is small, holding only about a dozen or so cars. We arrived around 10 am and there were only about five other vehicles there. That’s quite a contrast to the mobs of people at the Hoh Rainforest. We’ll take it.
We walked both of the trails for a total of two miles with an elevation gain of 41 feet. We decided it was too short to count towards our 52 Hike Challenge.
Are these trails nice? Yes. Are they better than the Hall of Mosses? That’s a matter of opinion and what is important to you. The Hall of Mosses was a little more interesting, with slightly better scenery. It had interpretative signs along the trail. The Quinault Rainforest nature trail had numbered stops along the trail, but there were no brochures at the trailhead explaining what the stops were. However, we did not go inside the ranger station. They may have had trail brochures in there. The Hall of Mosses Trail was crowded with people. We pretty much had the Quinault Rainforest trails to ourselves, seeing only a handful of other people the whole time on the trail. Instead of hearing all the voices and people around us, we heard birds singing, a woodpecker pecking on a tree trunk, and the small trickle of water flowing down a stream.
Since we were there during the dry season, neither rainforest seemed very wet. The sun was shining. We did not see any banana slugs. They apparently have them there, as stuffed animal slugs were being sold in the gift shop.
After our walk through the Quinault Rainforest, we headed back along the North Shore Road to the July Creek picnic area. It was a little point alongside the lake. Nothing very special, but a pleasant place to eat a picnic lunch.
From there, it was about a two hour drive to Potlatch State Park. Not wanting to repeat our experience of bad roads from the day before, we stuck to the major highways. Highway 101 to route 12, to route 8, to route 108, and back to highway 101. We stopped in Hoquiam for gas and in Aberdeen for some needed items at a Walmart. Our only other stop was at the Bears Den Drive In for milkshakes in the little town of McCleary. The milkshakes were made with soft serve ice cream, with the chocolate one tasting like Hershey’s chocolate syrup. It reminded Ann of her childhood, when there was always a bottle of Hershey’s syrup in the fridge, ready to be put on top of ice cream or to make chocolate milk.
Wednesday we drove up to the Staircase area of Olympic National Park. It was only a half hour drive from Potlatch State Park, with most of that time, about 16 miles, on North Lake Cushman Road. The road runs alongside Lake Cushman for several miles, with some pretty views of the lake.
After about ten miles or so, the road turns to gravel. Panic set in for a split second due to our experience two days prior. However, the gravel road was in pretty good shape. There was a little bit of washboarding and a handful of small potholes, but nothing serious.
The road crosses into Olympic National Park for the last mile, turning back into wonderful pavement. There is a small parking lot at the trailhead. We arrived a little after 10 am and were able to get a spot in the lot. By the time we left, the lot was full and people were parking along the side of the road.
There are a few trails that start from the Staircase area. We chose the short, popular trail called Staircase Rapids Loop, just a couple of miles long.
We went in the counter-clockwise direction, but would recommend doing it in the opposite direction. The views of the North Fork Skokomish River are along the south leg of the loop. If you go in the clockwise direction, then you will be going uphill alongside the river, with the views out in front of you.
The trail is shaded, through the woods, and the river is beautiful. There are small cascading waterfalls all along the river and the water has a wonderful blue tint to it. On the south side of the river, there is a short spur trail over to a large western cedar tree. It is a fallen log, with a diameter of 14 feet, very impressive.
The North Fork Skokomish River Trail continues past the end of the Staircase Rapids loop, on the north side of the river. It looks like it is a popular backpacking trail, as about a dozen backpackers passed by us while we were on the north side of the river.
By the time we returned to Red Tail, we had covered 2.5 miles with an elevation gain of 200 feet which took us one hour and 18 minutes to complete. We decided not to count it towards our 52 Hike Challenge, since it was so short.
We remembered seeing a picnic area along North Lake Cushman Road on our drive up. It looked like it would have good views of the lake, so we planned on stopping there for lunch. However, we somehow missed it on the drive back down.
We also remembered a place on the corner of North Lake Cushman Road and highway 101 which advertised having ice cream. We also thought it had food, but the only words on the signs that we could recall was ice cream. That shows where ice cream ranks in our priority list. So we continued on to that place.
The place is simply called “The Burger Stand”. It was a cute place with lots of character. Keith had a fish sandwich while Ann had the Bulgogi Burger. She had to ask what that was, but she was up for trying something new. It was a Korean style burger. The small, loose strips of meat were marinated in Korean seasonings. It was very tasty.
Of course, we had ice cream for dessert. Can you guess what Keith had? Yup, his usual vanilla shake. They had huckleberry ice cream, so, following our rule, Ann had to have a waffle cone with a scoop of huckleberry. The shake was a little thicker than Keith likes, but both of our ice cream desserts were delicious.
Even though our campground plans did not work out, we had a wonderful time, after the stress of the attempted drive to the Coho Campground wore off. We’ve been traveling long enough to know how to roll with the punches. Sometimes things work out better than the plan. Had we figured out how to get to Coho and stayed there, it was really too long of a drive to check out the rest of Olympic National Park from there. We probably would have skipped the Quinault Rainforest and the Staircase area, choosing to just stay and explore Coho and Wynoochee Lake to avoid all the driving. Since we never reached Wynoochee Lake, we can’t really say which is the better experience. We were happy with what we did see and explore, and that is the important part.
Check out our related video: Olympic National Park: South, Washington
(Ann)