July 17, 2019

A day of travel, stocking up on supplies at Walmart, finding our site at Elwha Dam RV Park, and doing laundry; just some of the tasks you need to do when you travel for the length of time we do.

Our site at the campground was rather unique: a converted tent site where they recently added electricity and water.  It is in a grove of trees away from almost everyone, and only a small RV like ours is able to fit into it – which answers the questions they asked when we made the reservation on the phone about how wide, long, and high our RV is.  We don’t know if everyone would like this spot as you have to maneuver significantly to get into it (there is a fire pit just in front of it), but we loved it.  The trees and the seclusion are big pluses. 

July 18, 2019 – Day 1 at Olympic

We entered Olympic National Park through the Hurricane Ridge entrance.  (The closest entrance to us was the Elwha entrance but it was closed due to storm damage.)  None of the roads from the six entrances into Olympic connect with each other, so in order to to get to different sections of the park, you must go out of the park and drive to a different entry point.  Ninety-five percent of the park is protected wilderness.

At Hurricane Ridge we drove to a few viewpoints and then to the visitors center at the top of one of the mountain’s in the Olympic Mountain Range.  The view of the surrounding mountains from that vantage point was spectacular.  Point the camera in any direction and you get a picture postcard. Mt. Olympus, the tallest mountain in the range, is 7,980 feet.

We took a hike, the Sunrise Point trail, that was mostly straight up, but when we got to the top, we were rewarded with a 360-degree view of the area.  Photos followed: of the surrounding forests, the wildflowers, and even of a family of marmots playing and foraging in the field near the path.

After a trip to the gift shop (so what else is new), we drove out of the park along Highway 101, which goes around the outskirts of the park and down the west coast of Washington State, to Marymere Falls.  We took a gentle, pretty three-mile hike through an old growth lowland forest (trees have to be over 200 years to be called old growth).  According to the ranger, some of these tall trees can grow to over 200 feet and can be 600 to 1,000 years old.  

At the end of the walk, the falls were very tall and quite striking.

July 19, 2019 – Day 2 at Olympic

Being ambitious, we took a two-hour drive along Highway 101 and through a work zone to the Hoh Rain Forest, elevation 500-600 feet.  What we met with upon entering the rain forest was surreal.  It is a story in layers:  from the low-lying shrubs, ferns, and mosses on the forest floor to the maple trees that grow throughout, to the huge spruce and hemlock; as in our walk the previous day, some were over 200 feet tall and have been living over 500 years.  The forms can be truly weird-looking: trees seemingly fused together at the ground; trees growing from a nurselog (a horizontal-laying log from which seeds germinate so several trees are actually growing from one log); trees all in a row; mosses dripping from trees – all one needs to add are lighting and dark shadows, and it could be a scary place indeed.

The definition of a rain forest is that the area gets at least 80 to 100 inches of rain a year; Olympic receives 130-140.  This tremendous precipitation, combined with mild winters and cool summers, nurtures the abundant and lush green through which we walked.

Actually, the entire coast from Alaska to northern California was a temperate rain forest (versus tropical) but was heavily logged to the point that this one piece of national park is just about the only place left that has not been tampered with.

There were two easy paths to walk on (actually, there was a third but that was for very experienced hikers) and we took them both.  On the first, the Spruce Nature Trail, we walked first through old growth trees, came to a river, and then continued through a new growth area.  The feeling you get while walking this very heavily forested, dense path filled with tall, wide trees and low growth plants is like going back in time to when nature was untouched by civilization.

The second path, the Hall of Mosses, had streams running through it, but what made it interesting – and added to the general weird appearance – was moss growing all over the trees.  This growth does not hurt the trees and actually helps their growth

On the way back, before we left the forest, there was a road stop cafe where we stopped for a treat of coffee and ice cream (what better treat is there?).

We arrived back at our campground in mid-afternoon to prepare for Shabbat.  Cleaning, cooking, fixing, washing, taking out Shabbat items and putting non-Shabbat items away, dumping, maneuvering into our campsite under the trees (did we say we also had a hill on either side of us?) and giving a big sigh that all was finished and we could finally relax into the Shabbat frame of mind.

July 20, 2019

A relaxing Shabbat during which we walked to the very near ex-Elwha Dam site just outside the campground.  The Elwha Dam was built in the early 1900s when this remote area of Washington needed a source of electricity.  But in 1992, due to lobbying and ecological concerns, Congress decided to remove the dam; after twenty years of planning, the largest dam removal in U.S. history began and took six months to finish.  It was completed in 2012 (a second nearby dam was deconstructed a bit later) – and the salmon returned.

Napping, walking, davening, eating, napping, reading, talking, you get the idea – that was Shabbat which ended about 10:00 pm.

July 21, 2019

A driving day is how we spent the fast.  We left the RV park and drove down Highway 101 along the west coast of Washington State, down to Oregon, and a bit of the way along the Pacific coast.  The problem was we couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean.  Now you would think something that big would be very easy to see and, at one point, we did see a place where it was supposed to be but there was so much fog that we couldn’t see anything.  Then, suddenly we came upon an overlook, turned in, and lo and behold, there was the ocean in all its glory (as the song goes, “from sea to shining sea,’’ but shouldn’t it be ocean to ocean?).  Regardless, Kosher RV has now been to both oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, and all five Great Lakes.  North to south, east to west, we’ve been there and we’re excited about it.

Putting the Pacific Ocean aside, we were tired and needed to get to a more pressing matter, where to camp for the night.  We tried a private campground just off the road and they wanted too much money for no hookups and extra for dumping, so we said that we’ll keep driving for a bit.  After about half an hour, we came upon the Nehalem Bay State Park campground and even though the sign said “Full Up,” we tried anyway and they did have a site available.  We settled in, took a short walk to the beach, returned to the RV, and relaxed.

And to all a good night.