Highway 101: WA coast

A few weeks ago, we went on a springtime road trip. You would think that I would know better than planning a road trip through several rain forests in April, but that's exactly what I did. Sunday morning, we loaded up the Toyota Adventuremobile and headed south to the Pt Townsend ferry.

First stop: LaPush. And really big driftwood logs!

 The first day was shockingly nice. The cloud cover was high, and we were only spat on a few times as we wrapped our way around Lake Crescent and towards the west coast. We caught our first view of sea stacks in LaPush, and headed from there to Ruby Beach.

Ruby Beach

 We were planning on camping that night at Kalaloch Campground. After circling the loops a few times, we finally found a spot to pitch our tent that had the perfect balance of tree cover, privacy, and slope (but not too much slope) in case it rained. We pitched our tent and made dinner (quesadillas and ravioli!) and tried to find our way down to the beach.

A man and his essentials: shovel, bucket, pasta

We found out later that this is the Kalaloch "tree of life"
Its amazing roots were our way down to the beach. 

 After playing in the sand for a while, we decided to take a walk up the deserted beach. It was peaceful, punctuated by a firey sunset for the few minutes that the sun cut between the clouds and the horizon.

 It took some convincing for M to agree that my tent would be okay for the road trip. While it was a good choice, the last couple inches of the wall weren't covered by the rain fly... we were dryer than we would have been in a Coleman tent, but our sleeping bags were damp at the bottom where they touched the wall. Fortunately, we had a bucket to hold the drenched fly! We made our favorite camp oats, tossed everything into the car after shaking the water off, and hit the highway.

 An hour or so into our drive, M saw a sign for a really big Sitka Spruce, so we swerved left and went on an adventure. We ended up at Lake Quinault, which had hot coffee and a National Parks lodge that I'd never heard of. It was beautiful, a more human-scale version of the Many Glacier lodge we stayed at last summer in Glacier NP.

After a soggy walk around the lodge and down to the really big Spruce tree, (which I'm fairly certain was bigger than the 5' circumference that the sign next to it claimed) we piled back into the car and hit 101 again. Going South was a drizzly, splashy drive. We wound around Grays Harbor and finally crossed the bridge to Astoria, Oregon...

Trip Info:
Start - Days out: 0 - Mileage: 0
End - Days out: 1.5 - Mileage: 360