The Olympic Coast

July 1976, February 1978

My next trip west was after my last full year of college.  Again it was with three other fellow students from school.  We left Memphis early in June and arrived in Seattle about ten days later.  The stated reason for the trip was to visit another friend who had been a student in Memphis but dropped out and returned to his home town.  The end effect of the trip was to seal my fate and keep me away from Memphis. 

One of my major goals that summer was to see the Pacific Ocean.  So I went, alone because I could not interest anyone else in the trip.  After a major effort I got to the ferry dock in the northern suburb of Seattle and over to the Olympic peninsula.  I found a nice camp set up by a logging company most of the way to coast that night and by mid-morning Saturday I was at the beach.  The scene was unlike any other coastline I had ever seen.  There were sea stacks out from the coastline and multitudes of tidal pools among the rocks at the shore.  I traveled north from Rialto Beach past a couple of headlands and camped at a shelter several miles north of the trailhead.  That night I saw the sun set over the water from that piece of paradise. 

The next day I returned back the way I came.  Hiking on the beach is generally very easy, the way is flat and the footing on the wet sand is very firm.  The headlands do present a problem however.  If you cannot get over the top of them you must go around them at the water’s edge.  One headland had a steep, but short trail up and over the top.  The second one, Cape Johnson, caught me with the tide rapidly rising.  I had to scramble over the rocks with the surf at my heels.  In spite of my ignorance (or because of it) I did get through with only a major adrenaline rush to show for it.  That Sunday afternoon I hitched back to Seattle to rejoin my comrades.

I fell in love with Seattle and the surrounding environment; it was so different than my native Tennessee, and living there, so far away, would allow me to assert my independence from all that I had known “Back East”  When I left Seattle in mid August I knew I would return as soon as I could finish school.  I did return the following April.  I stayed eleven years. 

The following winter I went with a couple of new friends to another stretch of the Olympic coast at the far north end of the national park, Cape Alava.  Just inland from the beach the land is extremely boggy and the several mile trip to the beach was on a boardwalk five to ten feet over the marsh.  Once at the beach there were multitudes of camp sites in the woods just back from the beach.  Normally when one goes to the Olympic coast in the winter, one gets wet.  We went prepared to be soaked in a cold wet drizzle.  To our surprise the weather was dry, with some overcast and little wind.  We had a wonderful time beach combing and playing on the beach that Saturday and most of Sunday.  We waited until the last possible minute to leave for our return home.  As we left we went to the rocky headland that is Cape Alava and found the petroglyph carved by natives into it.  We then proceeded to the trial to return to our car.  Just before we left the beach a deer came down to within a few feet of us and we noticed a bald eagle directly overhead of us in a tree.  The combination of all of these things created a sense of awe and wonder in all of our hearts.  The car was about an hour and a half from the beach and we had made it only half way when the sun set.  At that moment we were at a clearing, Ahlstrom’s Prairie; it had been at one time a pioneer’s homestead.  As we traversed that clearing, strange, unsettling “vibes” were felt by all of us.  It was still a place of great beauty.  We did manage to stumble in the dark back to our car and safely return to Seattle.

During the return passage on the ferry across Puget Sound my friends introduced me to the “Mad Drummer” beating an impossibly wicked rhythm on the hull of the vessel. 

My point with these remembrances is twofold. One, wilderness does not have to be nearly impossible to get to and in rugged terrain.  The other is not all experiences are filled with deep significance.  Even these though refresh the soul and can give meaning in their own right.  I cherish the memories.