Olympic National Park - Cape Alava Trail

Olympic National Park is located on the Olympic Peninsula in the northwest corner of Washington State. The park has four regions: the Pacific coastline, alpine areas, the west side temperate rainforest and the forests of the drier east side. Within the park there are three distinct ecosystems which are subalpine forest and wildflower meadow, temperate forest, and the rugged Pacific coast.  President Theodore Roosevelt originally designated Mount Olympus National Monument in 1909. The monument was redesignated as a national park by Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938. In 1976, Olympic National Park was designated by UNESCO as an International Biosphere Reserve, and in 1981 as a World Heritage Site. In 1988, Congress designated 95 percent of the park as the Olympic Wilderness.  Encompassing nearly a million acres, the park protects a vast wilderness, thousands of years of human history, and several distinctly different ecosystems, including glacier-capped mountains, old-growth temperate rain forests, and over 70 miles of wild coastline.

The coastal portion of the park is a rugged, sandy beach along with a strip of adjacent forest. It is 60 miles long but just a few miles wide, with native communities at the mouths of two rivers. The Hoh River has the Hoh people and at the town of La Push at the mouth of the Quileute River live the Quileute.  The most popular piece of the coastal strip is the 9-mile Ozette Loop. From the trailhead at Ozette Lake, the Cape Alava Trail, a 3-mile leg of the Ozette Loop, is a boardwalk-enhanced path through near primal coastal cedar swamp. This area has traditionally been favored by the Makah tribe from Neah Bay, where we are staying.

Here is the trailhead sign for our hike to Cape Alava:

Cape Alava Trail was designated a National Recreation Trail in 1981.  It is the western terminus of the Pacific Northwest Trail, which is a 1200-mile hiking trail running from the Continental Divide in Montana to the Pacific Ocean on Washington’s Olympic Coast. Along the way, the PNT crosses three national parks, seven national forests, two other national scenic trails, and several mountain ranges, including the Continental Divide, Whitefish Divide, Purcells, Selkirks, Kettles, Cascades, and Olympics.

We started by crossing a moss-covered bridge, which was an introduction to the rain forest environment we would be hiking through:

Crossing the bridge, we could look up Ozette River toward the lake, which the river drains:

As with the entire area, this region was logged heavily in the early 20th Century.  Huge ghost stumps reminded us of that earlier decimation, although the forest itself appears to have completely regenerated:

There were still some really old, huge cedars along the trail, and Kathy found her favorite Ent to hug:

This was the first time we've spotted a purple mushroom!  There were lots of them in two or three different areas.  We wondered whether they were fostered by the litter from surrounding cedar trees.

Nearly the entire trail was boardwalk across wetland terrain:

We crossed a few bridges -- this one being the largest along our portion of the trail:

There were also sections of wetlands and meadow.  Below, David demonstrates the proper way to stand in a wetland:

After about 3.5 miles, we reached the beach, with haystack-type rocks and volcanic islands scattered up and down the shallows off the beach:

This was our view to the south --

-- which David enjoyed at lunchtime:

Kathy relaxed after lunch with a view north behind her:

Less than a mile to the north of us lay the Ozette Indian Village Archeological Site -- the site of a village occupied by the Ozette Makah people until a mudslide inundated the site around the year 1750.  The mudslide preserved several houses and their contents in a collapsed state until the 1970's when they were excavated by Makahs and archaeologists from Washington State University. More than 55,000 artifacts were recovered, spanning a period of occupation around 2,000 years, representing many activities of the Makahs, from whale and seal hunting to salmon and halibut fishing; from toys and games to bows and arrows. Of the artifacts recovered, roughly 30,000 were made of wood, extraordinary in that wood generally decays particularly fast.  Hundreds of knives were recovered, with blade materials ranging from mussel shell, to sharpened beaver teeth, and iron, presumed to have drifted from Asia on wrecked ships. The oral history of the Makah mentions a "great slide" which engulfed a portion of Ozette long ago.

Today, the driftwood and dead trees littered the beach.  This fellow was one of the larger and more dramatic:

We spotted these two gulls cavorting in the shallows along the shore:

As we hiked back from the beach, this huge fellow accosted us in a friendly way:

As we returned to the Ranger Station at Ozette Lake, we crossed Ozette River again and spotted this fisher as he swam, dove, caught fish and swallowed them whole.  He seemed not to notice us.

Eagle-eyed Kathy spotted a seller of preserves and fruit wines along our drive.  As we returned to Neah Bay along Hoko-Ozette Road, we turned into the small farm and asked the lady what she had that might interest us.  As it turned out, she had a lot!  Here is what was left of our blackberry wine, along with such interesting preserves as thimbleberry jelly, rhubarb jelly, salalberry preserves, pickled fiddlehead fern, and some luscious fireweed honey!

All in all, we scored some really precious samples of local flora and berries.  We can attest to you that the blackberry wine was luscious, because there is none left.