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In all my time living in Washington I’ve never spent any time exploring the Olympics. I may have done a day hike of a few miles back in the early 90’s but outside of that I think maybe we drove up the coast once or twice and that’s about it. Even that was so long ago I don’t recall any of it.
I decided to fix that, at least in a small way, so earlier this year I put in for a permit to hike the Enchanted Valley. The valley is part of the Olympics National Park so for any overnight backpacking you need a reservation. The way this works is to enter a lottery early in the year and then hope you get to pick a slot. Some lotteries are very difficult to ever get a reservation just because the area might be so popular that you’re competing with thousands of other people for the same weekend. The Enchantments, for example, are incredibly popular and although I’ve entered the lottery every year for many years I’ve never successfully scored a permit. It turns out the Olympics, at least the Enchanted Valley area, are not nearly as difficult to obtain and so I snagged a permit for three nights this week (July 25-27th).
The day started early and I was out the door by 4:30am Tuesday. The small town of Quinault (basically a lodge, store and ranger station) is the entry point into the valley. Getting there from Monroe involved a roughly 3 1/2 hour drive down to Olympia via I-5 and then over to Aberdeen and up Highway 101 to Quinault. I stopped in Aberdeen at Duffy’s for breakfast. Duffy’s is your typical mom and pop restaurant in a style that was popular 40 years ago. The prices were not from 40 years ago though. Inflation is alive and well but, even so, $20 for a basic omelet seems out of line. I had a couple of pancakes instead… Full, but with a lighter wallet, I continued on to Quinault.
My permit technically showed that my first night would be at the Pony Bridge camp, the second in the Enchanted Valley itself, and the third night back at Pony Bridge. I did this without really knowing what I was doing but my thought process was that I might not get an early start and I didn’t know how long it would take to get to the trailhead when I had initially made the reservation back in March. It was about 13.5 miles from the trailhead to the valley and if you didn’t get started until three or four in the afternoon you’d have a hard time getting there and finding a site before dark. Pony Bridge was only a couple of miles from the trailhead and seemed like a safe bet. Similarly, on the third day I thought maybe I’d be exploring until late in the day and not want to hike all the way out.
By the time I actually embarked on this little journey I had done enough research to know that I didn’t want to stay at Pony Bridge. With the early start, even stopping for breakfast I was going to be at the trailhead by 9 or 10am. If I stayed at Pony Bridge I’d be setting up camp by 11am and based on what reading I’d done Pony Bridge was literally a wide spot in the trail with nothing really to see or do. It is in a gorge and you can’t even get to the river (known as a “dry camp” when there’s no water readily accessible).
With all that information I decided to stop at the ranger station and see if I could change my Pony Bridge reservations to something further along on the trail. Quinault is on Lake Quinault and there is a road completely around the lake. There’s a ranger station on the north side so I went that way. The ranger working the station was very helpful and told me that with my permit I basically had three days in the area and could stay anywhere along the trail I chose, including any dispersed camping site I could find. She told me that they kind of liked to know where people were thinking of staying just for their planning purposes but realistically I could just hike to the valley and camp three nights there if I wanted to. Good information! It also would have been good to know that the road around the back side of the lake was washed out and there was a ranger station on the south side I could have stopped at and asked the same question. Oh well.
I turned around, drove back to 101 and took the south lake road through Quinault, past the other ranger station and out to the Enchanted Valley trailhead (technically known as the Graves Creek Trailhead).
I had read that most people stop and find a camp site as soon as they enter the valley but if you keep going to the far side some of the best campsites can be found so I hiked 14 miles to the east side of the valley and found a decent site. Of course I found a better site not far away but it was already taken. Funny, we always covet that which we can’t have. The next night that spot had opened so I moved a couple hundred yards just because. To be fair it was a nicer spot. Realistically it didn’t matter but I had the time and energy so why not move.
In the middle of the valley is an old chalet. It was built in 1931 and apparently was a popular destination in it’s time. It appears to be in good condition although you can’t currently go inside. The river bank is moving closer to the structure and I’m guessing they’ll need to move it at some point if they don’t want the building to fall into the river. There was an old guy who appeared to me to be living under the structure. I’m not sure what the Parks Department has to say about that but it seemed pretty evident to me that he’d been there awhile. He had a tea kettle and when I walked by he was enthusiastically telling a couple of guys he’d corralled about how you could make a “delicious tea” from some fronds that were growing there. He showed me the fronds and they did have a nice aroma when you crushed them. I don’t know, there’s tea and then there’s just grass in water. I’ll pass…
Anyway, the first evening I was messing around camp and looked up to see a black bear a hundred feet or so from me. He (she?) was completely ignoring me and seemed to be intent on looking for something. The ranger had told me there were a couple of adolescent bears in the area that I should look out for. The rangers had spent the spring hazing the bears to try and keep them from getting comfortable with humans. As I understand it the main method of “hazing” is to shoot the bears with paintballs. Sounds like fun but I find it hard to believe a bear is overly concerned with a paintball. Sam worked at a paintball field last summer and came home with welts all the time but bears have considerably more protective covering than Sam. Because of the constant bear presence you must have an approved bear container for your food while in the valley. My food container was stashed a couple hundred feet from my campsite and the bear was in that general area. I could tell it wasn’t looking at my container but figured he might get around to it if he spent enough time looking around so I decided to try and move him along. By this time he had gone behind a log and just his hind end was sticking out. I started yelling at it, banging my hiking pole on a tree and whistling as loud as I could. Nothing. The bear completely ignored me. I moved closer and kept yelling at it and eventually he turned around and casually wandered off. All the while he never even looked directly at me. It’s like he was saying, “I’ll move but just because I’m bored, not because you’re a scary human”. Once he was gone I went over to the log to see what had been interesting and found he’d been tearing into an ant colony that was around the log. Guess that was supposed to be dinner.
The next morning I was awakened around 5:30am by more commotion. I could see something moving through the trees about where the main trail was and initially thought it might be hikers getting an early start but things kept moving and I realized it was a herd of elk. I laid there for a bit but decided I shouldn’t miss the opportunity to see more wildlife so I got up. It turned out that this was a huge herd of elk. I counted at least 30 and I’m fairly certain there were quite a few more. They were considerably more skittish than the bear had been and there were quite a few calves so I kept my distance. The calves were the noisy ones, constantly bleating to stay in contact with mama I assume. The herd moved slowly and it was a good 30 minutes before they all moved along and out of sight.
With the early wake up call I was on the trail by 8:30. I was effectively doing a day hike so I left my tent and everything set up and took off with just some water and snacks. It was nice to leave 15 pounds of weight behind for the day! The trail doesn’t just stop at the Enchanted Valley. It continues on and if you choose to do so you can do a through hike end-to-end and come out at the Dosewallips Trailhead. That requires more logistics than I have at my disposal but several people had told me I should hike up to Anderson pass and climb to the Anderson Moraine. What’s a moraine? Well, it looked like a huge basin to me but apparently the official definition is, “A moraine is a mass of till, or unconsolidated debris, that is deposited by a glacier. The material is usually soil and rock, and can include boulders, pebbles, sand, and mud. Moraines are often in the form of a long ridge, and can be distinct ridges or mounds of debris.” I guess that fits with what I saw and the pictures of the lake were taken when I was standing on a huge ridge that must be the moraine part of the area. Regardless, from the perspective of being an impressive geological formation, it was the highlight of the week’s hike. I met a couple of other hikers who told me the rest of their party was swimming in the lake but I never saw anyone. I can’t fathom swimming in the lake. There were huge patches of ice still and the lake couldn’t have been more than a few degrees above freezing. It was getting to be a warm day by the time I got there, but not that warm!
I was back at camp by 3pm so had plenty of time to move my tent to the now empty coveted spot. I was right by the river and it felt good to bathe in the river and get cleaned up.
Thursday morning I had to make a decision. I had a permit to stay another night but the only trail I hadn’t hiked was to O’neil Pass. To get there would have required hiking a couple miles of the same trail as Anderson Pass and then branching off on the O’neil Pass trail. That sounded like a plan until I looked at the map and realized that O’neil Pass was at least 9 miles each way and the real destination, Marmot Lake, was 11 miles. I didn’t feel like doing a 22 mile hike so decided to just shorten the trip by a day. I packed up and headed out and was back to the truck by 1:30pm.
So that’s my first Olympic peninsula hiking trip. I’ll have to do more hiking in the area. It’s a bit of a drive to get to but it was a great trip and well worth it. I had some rain as I hiked up the first day but by the evening it was clearing and the rest of the time it was perfect weather. A very nice experience.
Here are some more photos for you.
