Hello Everyone.
I hope you are all having a wonderful September out there. September and October are probably my favorite months of the year, with fall colors and moderate temperatures and when the days are still long enough to get a lot out of. I’ve spent all of this past week since my last newsletter in and around Olympic National Park. I’m headed back into the backcountry tomorrow, so I wanted to get this post done before I take off down the trail. It’s been a spectacular week in the scenery department and I will definitely have plenty of photo editing to do next week, but I’ll give you a preview of those photos along with this post.
When I wrote last week, I was on my way into Olympic and made my first stop at Lake Quinault on the southern end of the park. I enjoyed a couple of lovely short hikes in the rainforest there and a delicious dinner at the Lake Quinault Lodge. The lodge is a classic old park lodge designed by the same architect who did the Inn at Old Faithful in Yellowstone, and while I couldn’t afford to stay there, I could definitely afford dinner and a beer on the veranda. I had a lovely filet of King Salmon in the Roosevelt Dining Room and after the sun went down I sat reading my book by the fire until it was time to fade out into the night.
The following day I headed around the lake to the Wilderness Information Center to chat with the ranger there about my upcoming hikes and to have them print out my backcountry permits for me. They were great and very helpful and had a lovely ranger station in a field in the rainforest. I took a short stroll out to the old Kestler Homestead site nearby before making my way back to the highway and north to the Kalaloch campground along the coast. There I was able to get my backpacking gear out from where I store it under my bed, blow off the dust from not using it for a few years and get it packed and ready for the morning. The only issue I faced was the need to pack a warmer and bulkier sleeping bag than I would have liked which took up a lot of space in my backpack, but it was needed and definitely appreciated during the cold nights on the trail…
