Pacific NW: day 2
This post is part 2 of the "pacific_nw_2008" series:
We left Salem early, and headed west towards the coast. Google Maps gave us this route. Little did we know that the very squiggly part of that route were logging roads. Roads with few signs, that curve all over the mountains. The entire thing had this Deliverance feel to it, with the rusted out vehicles, babbling streams and old shacks. We eventually found our way to US-101 and the coastal fog, and made a brief stop at the Tillamook Cheese Factory.
We continued north towards Olympic National Park. The fog broke just as we were crossing the bridge over the Columbia River from Astoria, OR to Washington state. We arrived at the Lake Quinault section of the park in the early afternoon, and hiked the Kestner Homestead and Maple Glade Loop trails. The trails were gorgeous, and the first of two temperate rain forests that we'd be exploring on the trip. Everything was amazingly lush & verdant.
Afterwards, we drove east on the North Fork Road (of the Quinault River). The first few miles were paved, but then it was another 7 miles of dirt & gravel, crossing two bridges (one of which was a single lane, made of wood) over the river until we reached the North Fork Campground. Along the way we saw hundreds of downed trees from the past winter's storms. The river itself still showed signs of the storms. The campground itself was beautiful. It was semi-primitive, with no running water, no trash service, a picnic table, fire-ring and just nine campsites, all well spaced by the surrounding forest. Once we had the tent setup, David & I took a walk another half mile to the end of the road. Along the way, we almost stepped on a snake which was sunning itself in the middle of the road.
That evening, we noticed how significant of a difference there is in the length of the day further north. At 9PM, it was still rather bright outside, and it didn't start to get dark until nearly 10PM. The next day, it was already getting light outside at 4:30AM. So basically the day was nearly 17 hours long.
Anyway, that night, I was briefly awakened to a rumbling noise which kinda sounded like thunder, but I was really tired, and fell back to sleep. At some point later, Denise woke me up screaming that it was raining. Since we didn't expect rain when we put up the tent, we never put the rain-fly on. So we both jumped out of our sleeping bags, and ran outside to put on the rainfly, in the dark, pouring rain. About 15 minutes after we got back into our sleeping bags, the rain stopped, for the rest of the night.
This post is part 2 of the "pacific_nw_2008" series: