The Olympics

14-16 June 2017
The National Park and Forest, not the games. I wanted to do some camping here but in the end we decided to stay at Lake Quinault Lodge as it was more convenient for our luggages.

We went to Beach 4 along the Olympic coastline. On our way down I saw a beautiful bird; it appeared quite suddenly so my settings were all wrong. Later in Alaska, one of the guides on the Wilderness Explorer identified it as a Bohemian Waxwing, using a 'Birds of Alaska' field guide. I like how I didn't see it in Alaska but saw it here:

f/25, 1/160 s, ISO 400, 70-300@300 mm, Nikon D610

Along the path towards the beach there were trees with these huge lumps on them. I looked it up and turns out they're burls but no-one quite knows how they form:

The beach was lovely:

f/25, 1/160 s, ISO 400, 70-300@300 mm, Nikon D610

The water was grey, unlike Taiwan's Pacific coast. I wonder why:

f/5.6, 1/640 s, ISO 320, 70-300@300 mm, Nikon D610

There must be a natural reason because the water here is otherwise pristine. I looked it up and most sources point to a combination of biological and physical reasons; here's a good answer.

f/7.1, 1/640 s, ISO 320, 70-300@175 mm, Nikon D610

And I witnessed some rock weathering in action:

f/4.5, 1/640 s, ISO 320, 70-300@130 mm, Nikon D610

And here's video of the beach:

As we were returning to the car we saw a rabbit! It reminded me of Richard Adams' Watership Down:

All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner...

f/4.8, 1/100 s, ISO 320, 70-300@160 mm, Nikon D610

After lunch we made our way to Ruby Beach. I didn't take my camera with me because I fell on my way to beach 4, pouring sand all over my camera. It turned out to be all right though.

It was a nice beach:

There were lots of fish that had been washed up. I wonder what happened:

And there were lots of driftwood:

And nice clouds:

We went kayaking on the lake on a breezy morning. The winds made huge swells across the water and it was surprisingly difficult to paddle here.

We took a walk around Lake Quinault. It was raining; everything was blanketed in droplets and felt fresh and new:

 f/3.5, 1/100 s, ISO 200, 50 mm, Nikon D610

 f/3.5, 1/100 s, ISO 250, 50 mm, Nikon D610

One of the guys working at the lodge told us that water falling from the sky was only considered rain when you couldn't see across the lake. I guess it was raining, then:

Lake Quinault used to be a glacier. Now it's supplied by a number of small waterfalls. I used a portable tripod with this one. It's part of the Cascade Falls:

f/22, 3.00 s, ISO 100, 50 mm, Nikon D610

We also saw the world's largest red cedar tree which was too large for me to photograph properly in the rain. But here's a dead one:

There were also nice information boards:

Lots of nurse logs:

And nice trails in general:

On the last day of our stay we followed a forest tour run by the lodge itself. They had a van that brought us from one stop to the next so we could see more in a shorter time. It was really neat.

We saw the world's largest Sitka spruce. It was really big; I could only get the top half of it on my phone:

We saw the Merriman Falls. My portable tripod was about 30 cm long so I only got the bottom of the Falls:

f/32, 0.50 s, ISO 100, 70-300@70 mm, Nikon D610

I got a video of the whole thing though:

Then we saw two deers. I'm not sure what deers they are but they were young:

 f/5.6, 1/640 s, ISO 100, 70-300@300 mm, Nikon D610

And we saw an osprey's nest!

Would you believe that there are ospreys in Singapore? They fly all the way from the northern hemisphere to our wetlands just to escape winter.

We did a little trail in a forest, passing a stream that was a spawning ground for salmon:

And saw some baby spruce trees growing on a nurse log:

And a big ghost log:

On our way back to the lodge we saw the downstream waters of a dam created by a natural log jam:

Some time ago, some loggers tried to create artificial log jams to prevent flooding here. All they got was salmon habitat destruction.

This was of course only a small fraction of the Olympics and I really hope to come back again, do some backpacking on my own and visit the larger waterfalls in the north of the Park.