Whirlwind Washington – Part 1: Quinault Big Sitka, Hoh Rainforest, and Rialto Beach

Well, aren’t these blog posts just ridiculously delayed or what?! In May 2022 I spent a week and a half in Washington. I had flown out to climb Mount Saint Helens, but since that only takes a day, there were more adventures to be had! Not sure why it took me so long to get some photos and words up, but better late than never I suppose.

I don’t know what’s with me and fast and furious trips around the Olympic Peninsula, but here we are again.. To kick off my week and a half in Washington we headed around the Olympic peninsula to chase national park passport stamps and to show me some new stuff that I hadn’t seen during my last fast trip through Olympic National Park.

The first stop as we neared the coast and Olympic National Park was the massive sitka spruce tree in Quinault. A very short path leads to this champion tree… yep, apparently there is a point system and rankings for trees! I didn’t know this… I thought to be a record tree you had to be the biggest, but the American Forests Association thinks otherwise. The more you know!

Quinault’s record sitka spruce is thought to be 1000 years old, and stands 191 feet tall and is 17.7 feet in diameter. Standing next to it, I can confirm this is one HUGE tree. Fun and short detour!

Next up were some adventures to check things off in our national park travel journals, nab passport stamps, and it wouldn’t be an adventure without Eric miscalculating how much gas his truck had left before head into a remote aspect of the park (thank goodness for Queets!). First up was quickly checking out Second Beach, which is accessed through a short walk through the rainforest to the beach.

After a detour back to Queets for gas, we continued onto the Hoh Rainforest, which is located in the interior of Olympic National Park. Receiving 140 inches of rain a year, this temperate rainforest is one of four found on the Olympic Peninsula. And I’m not even going to apologize… I took a TON of photos! I’m from a high altitude desert essentially, so a rainforest, even a temperate one, is so foreign to me I was eating up all the green and the moss!

And now for a gazillion photos of the Hall of Mosses

Talk about sensory overload with all the green! Despite the light rain, it was a great little visit and teaser to what Hoh Rainforest has to offer. It is obvious why UNESCO has designed the Hoh Rainforest a World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve.

The final adventure before setting up camp for the night would be the hike out to Hole in the Wall on Rialto Beach for sunset. Bellies full of delicious BBQ, we set out on the roughly 1.5 mile trip out to Hole in the Wall. Which is literally just a big hole in a rock wall on the beach. There is no established trail, you just head north from the parking lot. The tide was out when we headed out, which is something important to pay attention to (now that is something I’m bad at… tide charts.)

Darkness came fast after we got back to the truck. Initially we planned on trying to make it up to Cape Flattery to see the northwesterly point of the Lower 48, but it was a long haul so we decided to stay closer to Highway 101. It was another night of arriving in camp after dark, but would we expect any different by now?!

(Part 2 is coming up which will wrap up the rest of my week and a half in Washington!)