Seattle Part 4: Excursion to Olympic National Park

Since I had already celebrated Halloween (and eaten an insane amount of candy) on Friday, I decided to head out for an adventure on Saturday and Sunday.  The weather forecast showed rain everywhere, so rather than fight it, I opted to embrace the weather and headed to Olympic National Park, which is one of the few places officially classified as a temperate rain forest.  The area receives over 200 inches of rain a year, which averages out to more than half an inch a day!  I certainly got my inch and more during the two days I was there! 

I started off with a drive around the park, and camped my first night in the Hoh Valley Rain Forest.  I arrived there after dark and set up my tent in the pouring rain, so I didn't really get a look around until the next morning.  Here's a picture of me emerging from my tent:

Note the rubber boots.  They are essential equipment on the Olympic Peninsula, and quite handy in Seattle as well!  Also note that I'm still smiling.  My tent passed its test by keeping me as dry as one can reasonably expect to be after a night of steady, hard rain. 

Hiking through the rain forest I got an idea of just how much water falls in this area.  Trees compete for sunlight, so the forest floor is quite dark:

There are light patches wherever a tree has fallen, opening a hole in the canopy and allowing smaller trees to grow:

 

Sunlight is in short supply, but the real battle is over nutrients.  The soil is acidic from all the fallen pine needles, and most vital nutrients are locked into existing trees.  There are various strategies that plants take to gain nutrients.  Mosses and ferns coat all the trees, taking nutrients from the bark and getting access to sunlight.  Here's a close-up of one tree trunk:

And another:

 

 

Young saplings often grow on fallen trees, taking nutrients from the decaying log before it has time to become soil again.  These fallen trees are called "nurse logs" and can often have a line of younger trees growing out of them:

Years later, after the nurse log has rotted, the grown trees will still have their roots above ground, curled around each other and the phantom remains of their nurse log host:

Leaving the rain forest, I drove through the small town of Forks, WA.  I saw a group tourists, mostly teenagers, crowded around the "Welcome to Forks" sign, and soon figured out why: Forks is the setting for the popular Twilight series (I felt a little behind the times, not being up on my teenage vampire lore).  The author was looking for a good place for her vampires and werewolves to live, and settled on Forks as the town with the fewest number of sunny days in the US.  The town has embraced its sudden fame, with Twilight signs everywhere:

Leaving vampires behind I headed for the coast, with a brief stop to see the world's largest Western Red Cedar, which has a diameter of nearly twenty feet!

Then I hit the coast, which is covered with volcanic rocks sticking up everywhere.  Notice that I'm still wearing the rubber boots:

Here's a picture of the sun peaking through the clouds, shining down on the beach:

And finally, I went exploring in the tide pools:

Then I headed back to Seattle, arriving at dusk, just as kids were swarming the streets in their costumes, looking for their share of Halloween candy.