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Day Hike Washington: Olympic Peninsula, 5th Edition

More than 70 Trails You Can Hike in a Day

Part of Day Hike!

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Paperback
$21.95 US
5.06"W x 6.99"H x 0.68"D   | 14 oz | 36 per carton
On sale Apr 25, 2023 | 304 Pages | 9781632174659
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Explore the best of the Olympic Peninsula with 73 incredible hikes in and around Olympic National Park, including Hurricane Ridge, the Elwha River, the Hoh Rain Forest, and Hood Canal. Featuring the lush rainforests, mountain vistas, waterfalls, and wild ocean beaches, each trail is rated from easy to extreme, giving first-time or veteran hikers the variety they want, as well as topographical maps, trail descriptions, and more. Includes complete information for 73 great day hikes, including:

• Dungeness Spit
• Elwha Loop
• Green Mountain
• Lena Lake
• Marmot Pass
• Olympic Hot Springs
• Kalaloch Beach
• Three Forks
• and more!

The Day Hike! series of full-color hiking guides was written for people who want to spend their days in the mountains and their nights at home. Other titles in the Day Hike! series include:

Day Hike! Central Cascades
Day Hike! North Cascades
Day Hike! Mount Rainier
Day Hike! Inland Northwest: Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, and Sandpoint
"[Most guidebooks are by] backpackers who occasionally day hike. But most people are day-hikers, who occasionally backpack. And that's the key difference to this series."
—Ron C. Judd

"The series...earns points for rating each individual trip on a five-scale and for providing a comparative overview of all hikes in each book's introductory pages. For those of us who like to cherry-pick trails, ratings simplify our task."
—Seattle Times

"The presentation of basic facts (distance, elevation gain, maps, permits, etc.) is excellent and easy to follow. In addition to helpful topographical maps, the guides feature elevation profiles - an inspired addition!"
—The Olympian

"The Day Hike! series, published by Sasquatch Books is my favorite resource for finding a great hike to do with my girlfriends or family. The hikes are listed by location, with an overall rating, a rating for difficulty, the elevation gain, hike distance, best season and approximate hiking time. With colorful pictures and fun maps, even my six year old son loves looking at these books"
—Northwest Healthy Mama
SEABURY BLAIR JR. spent many years as the outdoor columnist for The Bremerton Sun, where one of his most popular features was the “Hike o’ the Month.” He is an avid backcountry skier and hiker, and lives in Spokane, WA.

He is also the author of Wild Roads Washington; the Creaky Knees Guide series of easy hiking books (titles cover Washington, Oregon, and Pacific Northwest National Parks and Monuments); the Day Hike! series of easy hikes that you can do in a day (titles cover the Central Cascades, the North Cascades, Mount Rainier, the Olympic Peninsula, the Columbia Gorge, and Spokane/Coeur d'Alene).
 

 
Introduction

Herb Crisler. Chris Morgenroth. Minnie Peterson. They were the lucky ones, the ones who pioneered on the land that is now Olympic National Park and Olympic National Forest.

There were earlier explorers: James Christie and Charles Barnes. They were among the first to see the blue ice of Olympic glaciers; the massive cedar, fir, and spruce cloaking the valleys; the roiling rivers filled with fish. Their tracks were made a scant eighty-five to one-hundred-fifty years ago, and as far as anyone knows, they were the first human tracks in the interior of the Olympic Mountains.

You may have heard of some of them. Herb Crisler filmed the 1952 The Olympic Elk for Walt Disney and in 1930—eight years before Congress created Olympic National Park—won a $500 bet he could spend 30 days in the Olympics carrying only a pocketknife, 75 pounds of camera gear and three carrier pigeons for what we might today call "real time" reports.

When he returned from that adventure, Crisler told a reporter in 1977, "I fell in love with the animals, and I vowed that if I ever got out alive, I wasn't going to hunt anymore, only photograph them. The more I photographed, the more I fell in love." Crisler's name and tireless work to establish a national park on the Olympic Peninsula is largely absent from park history.

Chris Morgenroth—some spelled his name "Morganroth"—was a pioneering forest ranger who homesteaded on the Bogachiel River in 1890. Minnie Peterson was a guide and packer in the Olympics for five decades whose family settled on the Hoh River in 1888.

James Christie was the leader of the 1889-1890 Seattle Press Expedition of the Olympic Mountains and Charles Barnes was one of those first explorers who braved one of the worst winters in Olympic history to forge a trail up the Elwha River and out the North Fork of the Quinault, mapping such places as the Bailey Range, which still has no developed trails. In recounting the adventure in the July 16, 1890 edition of the Press, entitled "Found in the Olympics: A Resume of the Natural Resources of the Explored Region," he recorded wildlife the expedition members had seen. There were elk, deer, and bear, he said, and concluded his report by writing: "One goat was seen by the party."

That was about a quarter-century before Port Angeles hunters imported a dozen mountain goats to the Olympic Mountains, and a half-century before Congress created the national park. Barnes' journal entry and the Press article is largely discounted by Olympic National Park officials, who maintain mountain goats are not native to the Olympic Mountains.

Imagine what it must have been like to be the first person to walk beside the Elwha River, or clamber across the Catwalk between Cat Peak and Mount Carrie. You'll find trails, both developed and boot-stomped at those spots today. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a single square inch of Olympic National Forest or Olympic National Park that hasn't been stepped upon by a human being. Still, the park and wilderness areas of the forest are as wild as any place you can find in the Lower 48.

When I first hiked to Moose Lake from Obstruction Point in 1969, I saw two other hikers on the trail. Hundreds make that trek on weekends today, campsites are reserved and park rangers patrol to enforce backcountry rules. During summers, park visitors must often wait in their cars at the Heart O' the Hills entrance station for up to 45 minutes before they are permitted to drive to Hurricane Ridge. Unless you have reserved a site ahead of time at Sol Duc or Kalaloch Campgrounds, you are likely to be sent elsewhere.

Thanks to protections provided by Congress, change walks slowly on this treasured land. However, a million more people visited Olympic National Park in 2019 than five decades before. Despite several notable exceptions in Olympic National Forest, those extra million crowd the same trails that were available 50 years ago. For the most part, the only additional trail miles have been added by roads closed by nature or policy.

Since the park was created in 1938, dozens of miles of roads have disappeared on the Skokomish, North Fork Skokomish, Hamma Hamma, Duckabush, Dosewallips, Elwha, and Quinault Rivers. Day hikes once considered to be of average difficulty, like Boulder Lake in the Elwha drainage or Diamond Meadows on the Dosewallips, have become strenuous for the average hiker to walk in a day. In 1975, you'd climb about seven miles, out and back, to Boulder; today, it's twelve—twenty-four, if the Olympic Hot Springs Road isn't fixed yet. Diamond Meadows was a thirteen-mile walk before the Dose Road washed away twenty years ago; now, it's twenty-five.

I believe the road closures will be good in the long term, once those in my pre-glacial generation have forgotten what it was like to drive to Olympic Hot Springs Campground, hike ten miles to Appleton Pass and back before soaking those sore muscles in the hot pools. The five-mile trek to and from today's trailhead is no longer on paved road and may someday not be recognizable as a former auto route. Nature may reclaim more roads in the Olympics, particularly where they are necessary only to serve hikers—roads such as those leading to Obstruction Point or Deer Park, North or South Forks of the Quinault.

Whatever the future holds for these roiling rivers, cloud-clawing peaks and ancient forests, the certainty is that as long as they remain protected, they'll be there for you and your children. In that sense, you're as lucky as Charles Barnes and the rest.
 
 
THE OLYMPIC PENINSULA
All but two hikes outlined in this guide are on a lumpy, green, decidedly wet spot of earth called the Olympic Peninsula. It is a unique place of great beauty, a day hiker’s dream.

You can walk a pristine ocean beach one day and on the next, stroll to the edge of a living glacier. You can watch orcas playing in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and, with a pair of good binoculars, see them from the tops of 6,000-foot peaks.

Few places anywhere in the Lower 48 are so crowded with wildlife: from seals and gray whales off the Pacific beaches to Roosevelt elk and Columbia blacktail deer of the high country; and from Obstruction Point’s radiator hose–chewing marmots to the killer raccoons of Ozette. Rare mountain goats, otters, eagles, ospreys, ravens—critters of every size and shape call the Olympic Peninsula home. There are so many varieties of slugs on the Olympic Peninsula that the whole place turns to slime during  big rains. (You can check my research on that point if you want.)

And don’t get me started on trees and plants. Take nearly any one of the hikes in this book and you’re certain to see some Really Big Trees. In fact, seven of them are documented, world heavyweight champions. Wildflowers and green things are everywhere, from rare orchids to multiple varieties of ferns.

As interesting as the variety of Olympic plants and animals is the amazing weather dichotomy. The Olympic Mountains, at the heart of the Peninsula, generate their own weather. As storm clouds sweep off the Pacific Ocean, holding more water than a whole brewpub full of patrons waiting for a single stall, they dump all over the south and west sides of the mountains. Mount Olympus, the highest peak, gets more than 240 inches of precipitation every year. As a result, the clouds don’t have much left by the time they pass over the north and east sides of the mountains. Up there, fewer than 30 miles from Olympus, it rains only about 17 inches a year. A day hiker in search of sunshine, then, is more likely to find it on the trails in this so-called “rain shadow”: the Dungeness or Gray Wolf Rivers or the peaks and valleys of the eastern Olympics.

Yet as strange as it may seem, some wilderness pedestrians appear to enjoy, or at least tolerate, that wet stuff from the sky, especially in the rain forests where day hiking without moisture just doesn’t seem, well, proper.
CONTENTS
Overview Map
Hikes at a Glance
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
The Olympic Peninsula
Using This Guide
Be Careful


Kitsap Peninsula

   1. Green Mountain via Wildcat Trail
   2. Green Mountain via Gold Creek Trail

Skokomish Rivers

   1. Lower Skokomish River
   2. Big Creek Loop
   3. Dry Creek Trail
   4. Mount Ellinor
   5. Mount Rose
   6. Silver Snag Hill, Wagonwheel Lake
   7. Spike Camp
   8. Four Stream
Hamma Hamma River

   1. Lena Lake
   2. Lake of the Angels
   3. Mildred Lakes
Duckabush River

   1. Jupiter Ridge
   2. Big Hump
Dosewallips River

   1. Tunnel Creek, Dosewallips
   2. Lake Constance
   3. Dosewallips Campground
Quilcene River

   1. Mount Walker
   2. Tunnel Creek, Quilcene
   3. Lower Big Quilcene Trail
   4. Marmot Pass
   5. Mount Townsend
   6. Silver Lakes
Dungeness River

   1. Gray Wolf Trail
   2. Tubal Cain Mine
   3. Camp Handy
   4. Royal Lake
   5. Maynard Burn
   6. Lower Dungeness Trail
   7. Dungeness Spit
The High Country

   1. Roaring Winds, Deer Park
   2. Three Forks
   3. Heather Park–Lake Angeles Loop
   4. Klahhane Ridge
   5. Mount Angeles Saddle
   6. Hurricane Hill
   7. PJ Lake
   8. Moose Lake
   9. Roaring Winds, Obstruction Point
Elwha River

   1. Olympic Discovery Trail
   2. Mills Lakebed
   3. Wolf Creek
   4. Elwha Loop
   5. Lillian River
   6. Aldwell Lakebed
   7. Happy Lake
   8. Olympic Hot Springs
   9. Boulder Lake
   10. Boulder Falls
Lake Crescent

   1. Spruce Railroad Trail
   2. Pyramid Mountain
   3. Storm King
Sol Duc River

   1. North Fork Sol Duc
   2. Mink Lake Meadows
   3. Little Divide Loop
   4. Potholes Meadows
   5. Upper Sol Duc Campsite
   6. High Divide Loop
Coastal Rivers

   1. Bogachiel Ranger Station
   2. Happy Four Shelter
   3. Big Flat
Olympic Beaches

   1. Cape Alava Loop
   2. Hole-in-the-Wall
   3. Second Beach
   4. Third Beach
   5. Kalaloch North
   6. Kalaloch South
Quinault River

   1. Colonel Bob
   2. Big Creek
   3. Halfway House
   4. Pony Bridge
   5. Low Divide–Elwha
Beyond the Trails
Index

Photos

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About

Explore the best of the Olympic Peninsula with 73 incredible hikes in and around Olympic National Park, including Hurricane Ridge, the Elwha River, the Hoh Rain Forest, and Hood Canal. Featuring the lush rainforests, mountain vistas, waterfalls, and wild ocean beaches, each trail is rated from easy to extreme, giving first-time or veteran hikers the variety they want, as well as topographical maps, trail descriptions, and more. Includes complete information for 73 great day hikes, including:

• Dungeness Spit
• Elwha Loop
• Green Mountain
• Lena Lake
• Marmot Pass
• Olympic Hot Springs
• Kalaloch Beach
• Three Forks
• and more!

The Day Hike! series of full-color hiking guides was written for people who want to spend their days in the mountains and their nights at home. Other titles in the Day Hike! series include:

Day Hike! Central Cascades
Day Hike! North Cascades
Day Hike! Mount Rainier
Day Hike! Inland Northwest: Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, and Sandpoint

Praise

"[Most guidebooks are by] backpackers who occasionally day hike. But most people are day-hikers, who occasionally backpack. And that's the key difference to this series."
—Ron C. Judd

"The series...earns points for rating each individual trip on a five-scale and for providing a comparative overview of all hikes in each book's introductory pages. For those of us who like to cherry-pick trails, ratings simplify our task."
—Seattle Times

"The presentation of basic facts (distance, elevation gain, maps, permits, etc.) is excellent and easy to follow. In addition to helpful topographical maps, the guides feature elevation profiles - an inspired addition!"
—The Olympian

"The Day Hike! series, published by Sasquatch Books is my favorite resource for finding a great hike to do with my girlfriends or family. The hikes are listed by location, with an overall rating, a rating for difficulty, the elevation gain, hike distance, best season and approximate hiking time. With colorful pictures and fun maps, even my six year old son loves looking at these books"
—Northwest Healthy Mama

Author

SEABURY BLAIR JR. spent many years as the outdoor columnist for The Bremerton Sun, where one of his most popular features was the “Hike o’ the Month.” He is an avid backcountry skier and hiker, and lives in Spokane, WA.

He is also the author of Wild Roads Washington; the Creaky Knees Guide series of easy hiking books (titles cover Washington, Oregon, and Pacific Northwest National Parks and Monuments); the Day Hike! series of easy hikes that you can do in a day (titles cover the Central Cascades, the North Cascades, Mount Rainier, the Olympic Peninsula, the Columbia Gorge, and Spokane/Coeur d'Alene).
 

 

Excerpt

Introduction

Herb Crisler. Chris Morgenroth. Minnie Peterson. They were the lucky ones, the ones who pioneered on the land that is now Olympic National Park and Olympic National Forest.

There were earlier explorers: James Christie and Charles Barnes. They were among the first to see the blue ice of Olympic glaciers; the massive cedar, fir, and spruce cloaking the valleys; the roiling rivers filled with fish. Their tracks were made a scant eighty-five to one-hundred-fifty years ago, and as far as anyone knows, they were the first human tracks in the interior of the Olympic Mountains.

You may have heard of some of them. Herb Crisler filmed the 1952 The Olympic Elk for Walt Disney and in 1930—eight years before Congress created Olympic National Park—won a $500 bet he could spend 30 days in the Olympics carrying only a pocketknife, 75 pounds of camera gear and three carrier pigeons for what we might today call "real time" reports.

When he returned from that adventure, Crisler told a reporter in 1977, "I fell in love with the animals, and I vowed that if I ever got out alive, I wasn't going to hunt anymore, only photograph them. The more I photographed, the more I fell in love." Crisler's name and tireless work to establish a national park on the Olympic Peninsula is largely absent from park history.

Chris Morgenroth—some spelled his name "Morganroth"—was a pioneering forest ranger who homesteaded on the Bogachiel River in 1890. Minnie Peterson was a guide and packer in the Olympics for five decades whose family settled on the Hoh River in 1888.

James Christie was the leader of the 1889-1890 Seattle Press Expedition of the Olympic Mountains and Charles Barnes was one of those first explorers who braved one of the worst winters in Olympic history to forge a trail up the Elwha River and out the North Fork of the Quinault, mapping such places as the Bailey Range, which still has no developed trails. In recounting the adventure in the July 16, 1890 edition of the Press, entitled "Found in the Olympics: A Resume of the Natural Resources of the Explored Region," he recorded wildlife the expedition members had seen. There were elk, deer, and bear, he said, and concluded his report by writing: "One goat was seen by the party."

That was about a quarter-century before Port Angeles hunters imported a dozen mountain goats to the Olympic Mountains, and a half-century before Congress created the national park. Barnes' journal entry and the Press article is largely discounted by Olympic National Park officials, who maintain mountain goats are not native to the Olympic Mountains.

Imagine what it must have been like to be the first person to walk beside the Elwha River, or clamber across the Catwalk between Cat Peak and Mount Carrie. You'll find trails, both developed and boot-stomped at those spots today. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a single square inch of Olympic National Forest or Olympic National Park that hasn't been stepped upon by a human being. Still, the park and wilderness areas of the forest are as wild as any place you can find in the Lower 48.

When I first hiked to Moose Lake from Obstruction Point in 1969, I saw two other hikers on the trail. Hundreds make that trek on weekends today, campsites are reserved and park rangers patrol to enforce backcountry rules. During summers, park visitors must often wait in their cars at the Heart O' the Hills entrance station for up to 45 minutes before they are permitted to drive to Hurricane Ridge. Unless you have reserved a site ahead of time at Sol Duc or Kalaloch Campgrounds, you are likely to be sent elsewhere.

Thanks to protections provided by Congress, change walks slowly on this treasured land. However, a million more people visited Olympic National Park in 2019 than five decades before. Despite several notable exceptions in Olympic National Forest, those extra million crowd the same trails that were available 50 years ago. For the most part, the only additional trail miles have been added by roads closed by nature or policy.

Since the park was created in 1938, dozens of miles of roads have disappeared on the Skokomish, North Fork Skokomish, Hamma Hamma, Duckabush, Dosewallips, Elwha, and Quinault Rivers. Day hikes once considered to be of average difficulty, like Boulder Lake in the Elwha drainage or Diamond Meadows on the Dosewallips, have become strenuous for the average hiker to walk in a day. In 1975, you'd climb about seven miles, out and back, to Boulder; today, it's twelve—twenty-four, if the Olympic Hot Springs Road isn't fixed yet. Diamond Meadows was a thirteen-mile walk before the Dose Road washed away twenty years ago; now, it's twenty-five.

I believe the road closures will be good in the long term, once those in my pre-glacial generation have forgotten what it was like to drive to Olympic Hot Springs Campground, hike ten miles to Appleton Pass and back before soaking those sore muscles in the hot pools. The five-mile trek to and from today's trailhead is no longer on paved road and may someday not be recognizable as a former auto route. Nature may reclaim more roads in the Olympics, particularly where they are necessary only to serve hikers—roads such as those leading to Obstruction Point or Deer Park, North or South Forks of the Quinault.

Whatever the future holds for these roiling rivers, cloud-clawing peaks and ancient forests, the certainty is that as long as they remain protected, they'll be there for you and your children. In that sense, you're as lucky as Charles Barnes and the rest.
 
 
THE OLYMPIC PENINSULA
All but two hikes outlined in this guide are on a lumpy, green, decidedly wet spot of earth called the Olympic Peninsula. It is a unique place of great beauty, a day hiker’s dream.

You can walk a pristine ocean beach one day and on the next, stroll to the edge of a living glacier. You can watch orcas playing in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and, with a pair of good binoculars, see them from the tops of 6,000-foot peaks.

Few places anywhere in the Lower 48 are so crowded with wildlife: from seals and gray whales off the Pacific beaches to Roosevelt elk and Columbia blacktail deer of the high country; and from Obstruction Point’s radiator hose–chewing marmots to the killer raccoons of Ozette. Rare mountain goats, otters, eagles, ospreys, ravens—critters of every size and shape call the Olympic Peninsula home. There are so many varieties of slugs on the Olympic Peninsula that the whole place turns to slime during  big rains. (You can check my research on that point if you want.)

And don’t get me started on trees and plants. Take nearly any one of the hikes in this book and you’re certain to see some Really Big Trees. In fact, seven of them are documented, world heavyweight champions. Wildflowers and green things are everywhere, from rare orchids to multiple varieties of ferns.

As interesting as the variety of Olympic plants and animals is the amazing weather dichotomy. The Olympic Mountains, at the heart of the Peninsula, generate their own weather. As storm clouds sweep off the Pacific Ocean, holding more water than a whole brewpub full of patrons waiting for a single stall, they dump all over the south and west sides of the mountains. Mount Olympus, the highest peak, gets more than 240 inches of precipitation every year. As a result, the clouds don’t have much left by the time they pass over the north and east sides of the mountains. Up there, fewer than 30 miles from Olympus, it rains only about 17 inches a year. A day hiker in search of sunshine, then, is more likely to find it on the trails in this so-called “rain shadow”: the Dungeness or Gray Wolf Rivers or the peaks and valleys of the eastern Olympics.

Yet as strange as it may seem, some wilderness pedestrians appear to enjoy, or at least tolerate, that wet stuff from the sky, especially in the rain forests where day hiking without moisture just doesn’t seem, well, proper.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
Overview Map
Hikes at a Glance
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
The Olympic Peninsula
Using This Guide
Be Careful


Kitsap Peninsula

   1. Green Mountain via Wildcat Trail
   2. Green Mountain via Gold Creek Trail

Skokomish Rivers

   1. Lower Skokomish River
   2. Big Creek Loop
   3. Dry Creek Trail
   4. Mount Ellinor
   5. Mount Rose
   6. Silver Snag Hill, Wagonwheel Lake
   7. Spike Camp
   8. Four Stream
Hamma Hamma River

   1. Lena Lake
   2. Lake of the Angels
   3. Mildred Lakes
Duckabush River

   1. Jupiter Ridge
   2. Big Hump
Dosewallips River

   1. Tunnel Creek, Dosewallips
   2. Lake Constance
   3. Dosewallips Campground
Quilcene River

   1. Mount Walker
   2. Tunnel Creek, Quilcene
   3. Lower Big Quilcene Trail
   4. Marmot Pass
   5. Mount Townsend
   6. Silver Lakes
Dungeness River

   1. Gray Wolf Trail
   2. Tubal Cain Mine
   3. Camp Handy
   4. Royal Lake
   5. Maynard Burn
   6. Lower Dungeness Trail
   7. Dungeness Spit
The High Country

   1. Roaring Winds, Deer Park
   2. Three Forks
   3. Heather Park–Lake Angeles Loop
   4. Klahhane Ridge
   5. Mount Angeles Saddle
   6. Hurricane Hill
   7. PJ Lake
   8. Moose Lake
   9. Roaring Winds, Obstruction Point
Elwha River

   1. Olympic Discovery Trail
   2. Mills Lakebed
   3. Wolf Creek
   4. Elwha Loop
   5. Lillian River
   6. Aldwell Lakebed
   7. Happy Lake
   8. Olympic Hot Springs
   9. Boulder Lake
   10. Boulder Falls
Lake Crescent

   1. Spruce Railroad Trail
   2. Pyramid Mountain
   3. Storm King
Sol Duc River

   1. North Fork Sol Duc
   2. Mink Lake Meadows
   3. Little Divide Loop
   4. Potholes Meadows
   5. Upper Sol Duc Campsite
   6. High Divide Loop
Coastal Rivers

   1. Bogachiel Ranger Station
   2. Happy Four Shelter
   3. Big Flat
Olympic Beaches

   1. Cape Alava Loop
   2. Hole-in-the-Wall
   3. Second Beach
   4. Third Beach
   5. Kalaloch North
   6. Kalaloch South
Quinault River

   1. Colonel Bob
   2. Big Creek
   3. Halfway House
   4. Pony Bridge
   5. Low Divide–Elwha
Beyond the Trails
Index