Hello Everyone! This newsletter is going to be a short one this week as I am going to be out in the wilderness of Olympic National Park for several days and away from my computer. I hope it’s a wonderful adventure out there, but I don’t want to forget about what I’ve been up to this week so I thought I’d just go ahead and get this done before I head out.
When I left you guys last week, I was on my way to tiny South Bend, Washington on the Willapa River. South Bend is a cute little town with a couple of oyster farms and a nice brewery and I availed myself of both while I was there. When I got to town, I popped into a tiny little hole-in-the-wall spot called the Chester Club for a cold beer and some oysters. If I stumbled into this place in Nebraska or Vegas I would order anything but oysters, but with the oyster fleet in view out the window and the World’s Largest Oyster just a block away, I knew they had to be good. And they were – probably some of the best fried oysters I’ve ever had. With my belly very happy, I moved up the road to the Willapa Brewing Company which is a part of one of my travel resources, Harvest Hosts, which hooks travelers up with businesses for overnight stays. I get a spot in their parking lot for the night and in return I buy a few beers. It works out well for everyone. It was a busy night there as the road crew who is doing construction on the highway was having a party, but it was fun to be there and enjoy some of their tasty brews.
I was up and off in the morning and headed out and around the Grayland Peninsula on my way to Aberdeen. My first stop was at the Nelson Crab Company in Tokeland where I enjoyed a nice Dungeness crab cocktail and also some wonderful crab dip. Then I continued around the peninsula to Grayland and the Cranberry Museum where I learned a lot about the local cranberry harvest. This area grows about 5% of the Ocean Spray cranberry crop, and it is all on small family farms. They are mostly dry harvesting the berries which requires something called a Furford Picker, a machine developed by a local farmer. It’s basically a big comb on the end of a lawnmower-sized device which gently plucks the berries off of the vines and carts them up and into a waiting crate. The lady at the museum told me all about the local cranberries and about the harvest which is coming in the next week or two. When I was done at the museum, she directed me out to the nearby farms so I could go and see the cranberry fields and they are definitely red and ripe and ready for picking. From there I stopped into the little port town of Westport to visit their lighthouse and harbor before continuing on to Aberdeen.
Aberdeen is an old logging town and you can tell when you pull in that it has definitely seen better days. Of particular interest to me, it is the hometown of musician Kurt Cobain, whose band Nirvana helped define the grunge era of my high school years. Since I was getting into town late, I headed straight to The Music Project, a newish museum in town which is there to tell the story of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain and the music of Washington. I opted for the $20 guided tour which was absolutely excellent and filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge. My guide was great and I learned a lot. Between my drive into town and my time in the museum, it was easy to see where the sadness and melancholy of their music comes from. I honestly can’t imagine growing up in Aberdeen and what that would be like and I think I would do just about anything to escape. I don’t think Cobain could really escape the darkness inside of him though, which is why he ended up taking his own life at what was the peak of his fame in 1994. Leaving the museum, I stopped by his boyhood home and the nearby park where he spent a lot of his time, now dedicated to his memory. After all of that, I definitely needed a beer, so I stopped in at an interesting upstairs bar called Messy Jessy’s where I caught the end of my Washington Commanders’ game and then had a quick one at Steam Donkey Brewery before heading back out of town for the night. It’s not the kind of town I would spend the night in if I could avoid it, which I could. I will say though that everyone I met there was friendly and kind, which is often my experience in towns like Aberdeen. And every homeless person I walked by waved and said hello which made me wonder if they were all friendly or if they were mistaking me for someone else. My point being that it wasn’t the people that made me think that, just the general state of the town.
I got a great night’s sleep and the next morning I had a nice long wander around downtown Aberdeen. It’s just a strange place in general, but one thing I found particularly unusual was a downtown art project called The Rare and Endangered Species of Grays Harbor. This project featured local artists creating fictional creatures, placed around downtown in cages with full descriptions on a nearby plaque. It just seemed so dark and weird for a town which is already struggling but maybe that’s just Aberdeen. I spent most of the rest of the morning at the Polson Museum in neighboring Hoquiam. This was a beautifully curated museum inside an old timber baron’s stately home. There was a lot of information about the logging industry in the area and also a lot about the home itself and how it was set up when the Polson family lived there. I thought it was interesting that they had an elevator installed and wondered how often they used it as opposed to just walking up the steps (the museum clearly stated that nobody in the family had mobility issues). The staff was also refreshing an old locomotive out in the barn and coming along nicely with that project. Leaving the museum, I spent some time wandering around downtown Hoquiam and along the waterfront and they seem to be doing considerably better than Aberdeen which is less than 10 minutes down the road.
There wasn’t much keeping me in Hoquiam, so I headed down the highway and made my way out to Ocean Shores, another resort community on the coast. I got there in time for the sunset, but the fog and clouds closed in and the sun got swallowed up before it hit the horizon. It was still nice to be on the beach and by the ocean. As I was driving back through town, I heard some live music playing and stopped in at The Garage which just happened to be celebrating their one year anniversary that night. The band playing was called The Deer Swervers and they were clearly a local favorite. They were really high energy and seemed to be enjoying the night as much as the crowd, playing mostly covers from the 90s, which was a lot of fun. I was also in the youngest 20% of the people in the crowd which is always good and makes me feel younger than I am. Everyone there was friendly and having a good time and it was just a great night all around.
I had a ton of photos I wanted to get edited and published, so I spent the whole day on Saturday at the library. It was a nice, quiet workspace and the internet was really good, so I got a lot accomplished. I also got my wilderness permits sorted for my upcoming hikes into Olympic National Park, which I’m really looking forward to. I finished up for the day right as they were closing for the night at 5 and decided I wanted some seafood. For a beach town, the options weren’t great and I settled for some underwhelming fried frozen seafood at a local pub which I almost immediately regretted. It was fine for what it was, but it wasn’t at all what I had in mind. It was starting to rain when I walked out so I wasn’t going to get a sunset that night either. I stopped into the little Irish pub in town which was beautifully appointed and felt very cozy and welcoming. I had a pint of Guinness and enjoyed the live music, but the guy playing was particularly melancholic, and since it was already raining it didn’t do much to elevate my mood. I did have a nice conversation with a lady there who had recently retired and moved to Ocean Shores from Indianapolis. She told me she had always wanted to live by the coast and there was no time like the present, and I admired her for taking such a leap. I cruised over to a place called Hot Mama’s which had a great blues band playing which was much more to my liking. I enjoyed them for a while, but was pretty tired so I decided I would call it an early night. I pulled out to the nearby casino which is usually a pretty dependable place to spend a night unbothered, but security came knocking after midnight and told me I couldn’t stay. He was friendly enough and I’m sure that’s not his favorite part of the job, but I headed back into town and stayed where I had the previous night. It’s always a bit jarring to get “the knock”, but everyone in this lifestyle gets it now and again. It was hard to get back to sleep, but I eventually drifted off and slept well and uninterrupted until morning.
And that leaves me here in Ocean Shores on a Sunday morning. I’m not sure what the internet situation will be like for the next few days, so I’m going to go ahead and wind up this post for the week here. I’m going to cruise up the coast to Pacific Beach today and then head inland to Lake Quinault at the southern end of Olympic National Park. Quinault is the least visited of Olympic’s rainforests and I’m looking forward to a short hike while I’m there. Tomorrow I’ll be at Kalaloch Campground along the beach in the park where I will get my gear out and get ready to set off early on Tuesday morning. I’m headed up the Hoh River Trail towards Mount Olympus and will be out in the backcountry for 4 days and 3 nights and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll be doing about 30 miles of hiking and hopefully will get some good weather and even better views. Either way, it’s going to be great to get away from the hustle and bustle for a few days and get some fresh air and exercise. I’ll still be deep in the park on Wednesday when I would normally write this newsletter, so be sure you check back next week to see how it went. Fingers crossed for good weather. Have a great week out there and I hope to see you right back here next week. Thank you, as always, for reading.
-Mike