Friday, April 24, 2015

Rain...Sun...Snow...Olympic National Park!

Day 12: Olympic National Park

Well the plan for today was to head back down south and check out Cape Disappointment State Park then head over to Mt. Saint Helens, but as we all know things don't always go as planned. Most of the roads to Mt. Saint Helen's are still closed from snow, so instead we decided to head north. 

We drove HWY 101 all the way up the coast of Washington. It ran in and out of the Olympic National Forest and Park the entire way. As the title says for today, we had a variety of weather. The whole morning drive was 5 minutes in sunshine, then 15 minutes in down pour, just to go on to another 5 minutes in sunshine. So during a brief period of sunshine we stopped for a picnic lunch. The entire Northern Coastline of Washington is part of the Olympic National Park, so we had a lovely beach view for our picnic lunch! 
After lunch we continued 101 through Forks, yes the same Forks from Twilight...we didn't stay long haha. There wasn't much to see besides a few stores that were selling Twilight merchandise. Then we headed on towards Port Angeles, this is where the Visitors center to the park was. 101 bordered Cresent Lake on the North side of the park, which was a beautiful drive. Because Olympic NP contains a temperate rain-forest, everything is so beautiful and green.





Once we reached Port Angeles, the sun came out. And it was a beautiful sight to see the snow-covered peaks of the mountains in the park in the sunlight.  Across the Strait of Juan de Fuca was Vancouver Island and the San Juan Islands! There was also a neat little Marine Center right on the pier. It had a couple of touch tanks with some sea stars, urchins, and sea cucumbers along with a couple more tanks with some cute little octopus.


We finally headed into the main entrance at Olympic National Park. We stopped by the visitors center and saw a few exhibits on animal tracks and sounds of nature. They had a video on the park with some cool footage of the area. Once again it reminded me how thankful I am for Teddy Roosevelt for having such a huge impact on the National Parks system! 


















After the visitors center we made our way up the road towards Hurricane Ridge. We stopped at an overlook not to far up the road that had a great view of Port Angeles and the temperature was 48 (this is important). We continued up the mountain and started to notice there were some snow covered trees on a few of the other peaks in the area. Then we started to see a few snow flakes...so we figured we would quickly get to the top before the center closed! Once we reached the top there was a couple inches of snow on the ground and it was snowing pretty good! It looked like a Winter Wonderland and was 29 degrees...just another chapter in the never ending adventure! 


I've said it before but everyone should go out and #findyourpark! It was such a privilege to enjoy 2 of our parks during National Park week! They were both amazing and so different from each other! Well on to Seattle tomorrow... 

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