Road Trip, Day 3: Drive to Olympic National Park

On the third day, we woke up somewhat leisurely (I was still kind of on Central time - so I was often up hours before my companion) and said goodbye to Mt Rainier and headed towards Olympic National Park. As my friend LF told us, Olympic National Park is "ridiculously gigantic" and she is absolutely right. We decided to make our 'home base' for Day 3 in Aberdeen/Hoaquim and do a bit of an afternoon drive from that location - and plan the next couple of days. (We ended up with 3.5 days in Olympic and we could've spent more...easily)

However, I digress. From our home base, we decided to drive at least as far as Ruby Beach (hoping to catch a sunset) but would stop at anything interesting along the way. Our first diversion was in the Quinault Rain Forest, and specifically taking a gander at Lake Quinault as well as driving up North Shore Road and South Shore Road.

Those shore roads were theoretically two way, but in reality, one way and kicked up fierce amounts of road dust from the stones. However, with the sun peeking through, it made for an amazing photo op:

Neither of us could get over the crystal clear beauty of all these lakes:

Both of us grew up in STL with the muddy Mississippi as a reference - even most of the other nearby rivers lack the crystalline qualities of the bodies of water found so far in Washington State.

The rainforest was beautiful - such diversity of plant life as well as the moss draping the trees with the sun peeking through:

This tree took nurse log (a fallen tree that serves as a feeding ground and home to seedlings) to a whole new level:

You know me and my waterfalls:

Ruby Beach was our ultimate destination - I had seen TONS of great sunset pictures on this beach or similar ones, but alas - the cloud cover wouldn't budge or clear. However, I did not come away emptyhanded.

The beach was covered in tons of smooth stones, and scattered with large logs of driftwood. But what was the most eye catching wasn't the sea stacks, but the cairns on the driftwood. I've never seen anything like it - and certainly was not expecting it.

We were there just after high tide, so these don't seem to wash away every day - but literally every surface there were piles and piles of these beautiful cairns. I became a little obsessed - I filtered out most of the endless photos of these cairns to only the best.

I tasked L with leaving our own contribution behind - I think he did an excellent job, don't you?:

Nothing in the tidepools but reflections:

I was disappointed with the lack of sunset but I did enjoy our visit to the beach. We headed back up to the car before dark and made it home late-ish for a fast food dinner and collapsing into bed at our hotel.

Pictures from Olympic National Park here.

All the pictures from the trip here.