The Hurricane Ridge section is a 17-mile drive from Port Angeles to the top of the ridge which is around 5400' in elevation gain. The view from the top is 360 degrees, spectacular on a good day. Today wasn't that good but we still had great views of the Olympic Mountains and caught occasional glimpses of Port Angeles, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Victoria, BC, on Vancouver Island. Jim is still so freaked out by the traffic in the city of Vancouver he didn't even want to look at Vancouver Island from miles away (and Vancouver city isn't on Vancouver island).
Going up and down the road we had lots of views of straight down and straight up. I didn't get any straight-down shots but here are a few of the other direction.
Clouds were hanging over the peaks....and the road....for long sections of the drive.
It's astounding how these massively tall trees can hang onto such steep slopes. It was obvious that there had been many slides....land, rocks and trees. A park service truck with a front-end plow was parked part way up, not needed for snow this time of year so probably used to push minor slides off the road.
One short section of the road needed three tunnels to get through the mountainside. This is very difficult rocky road-building terrain.
Damage from a forest fire. In such steep terrain fire moves uphill very quickly, often scorching only needles and outer bark so the trees can hang on for years.
On our way back down we spotted two forest fires. There were fire crews at the next pull-off assessing the situation. There are many areas of the park that are so difficult and dangerous to get to they can't get crews on the ground. Those fires are fought mainly by helicopters dropping water.
Mount Olympus (in the center), the tallest peak of the Olympic Mountains at 7,980'.
The Olympics are row upon row of mountains with no room in between. They take up the whole interior of the peninsula.
The ridge with Mount Olympus in the middle has many of the park's glaciers. As in Glacier and North Cascades National Parks, the glaciers here have lost a great deal of their volume in the past 150 years. There's a scar from a landslide at the lower left.
We found a nice quiet picnic area where we ate lunch with a great view of the mountains. Part way through several other groups arrived but they were reasonably well behaved. In addition to people we had lots of wildlife.
Then the real troublemakers arrived. There are signs all over the place that it's illegal to feed the wildlife, but the wildlife can't read. This fellow and several of his friends landed on our table. While I was reaching for the camera one of them snatched a cracker from right under my hand. He flew off and promptly dropped it so someone else ended up with it.
One of the perps.
Another of our lunch companions who quietly browsed just a few feet from us. One of the other people eating lunch said he comes up every two weeks or so and has been watching this little guy since he was a spotted fawn. He's not exactly tame but seems quite comfortable around people. Dogs not so much. Another group had a Bichon with them who wanted to get at the deer. There were lots of signs saying "NO PETS", one of the reasons being that they frighten the wildlife. Maybe the dog-owners couldn't read English as there were a lot of non-English-speakers around.
After we got back to Port Angeles we still had time to visit the Feiro Marine Center which has tanks of local marine life that I wanted to see. They have several petting tanks with sea stars, sea cucumbers, lots of kinds of crabs, anemones, sculpins and other interesting things. Unfortunately we couldn't stay long enough to see them being fed, but many of them know when it's feeding time and will follow a hand around waiting for the food.
This brilliantly colored octopus was sound asleep so we didn't get to see the show she often puts on for visitors. She is fed live crabs but the last one was really feisty and bit her. It's still alive in the tank with her but she was so put off by its behavior she hasn't made another attempt to eat it.
Our visit to Olympic National Park is done. We didn't have time to see all the sections but this park wasn't on our original trip plan so we had to pull days out of other areas in order to get here. We're very happy to have been able to see as much of the peninsula as we have. Maybe someday we'll get back here to see the rest of it.
Tomorrow we'll move 190 miles south to Castle Rock, Washington, to see Mount St. Helens.
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