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Travel

Land of hot tubs and cool forests

A visit to the amazing Olympic National Park in Washington shows why it is considered one of the world's best.

By REID BRAMBLETT
Published February 26, 2006

Editor's note: Reid Bramblett, author of the new St. Petersburg Times column the Intrepid Traveler, has written 10 guidebooks on destinations as diverse as Tuscany and New York City. He is a contributing editor to Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel magazine, where he was formerly associate editor. The monthly Intrepid Traveler column will tell readers how to take that extra step away from their comfort zone. Readers can find more of his columns in the Times' free weekly, tbt*, available throughout Pinellas and Hillsborough counties.

When I glimpsed the naked hippies through the trees, I knew I was on the right track. I'd been walking about an hour, steadily uphill from the end of Boulder Creek Road, 2.5 miles back, when I started smelling the sulfur.

Past the happy nudists and a gaggle of older Japanese women chattering away, I found my spot: several shallow pools of slate gray water, stair-stepping down the hillside.

As I climbed, I found that the pungent water in each pool got progressively hotter. In the topmost one I scalded my testing toe, so I settled into the pool below that. Submerging myself to my chin, I gazed out across the endless forest of Douglas firs under a blue-sky dome.

The suckers at the Sol Duc resort, one valley over, were paying $10.25 to soak in concrete pools filled with these same hot spring waters. But with an easy stroll in the woods, I'd snagged my own private, natural hot tub, surrounded by nature in Olympic National Park.

Riding Hurricane Ridge

At the northwesternmost tip of the Lower 48, Washington's Route 101 neatly loops around the Olympic Peninsula, linking the handful of short roads that allow travelers to pop in and out of the park.

Declared one of the world's top 100 parks by the United Nations, Olympic is home to the largest old-growth coniferous forest in the contiguous United States, as well as 70 species of mammals, 200 types of birds and some of America's largest trees.

From the gateway of Port Angeles, Wash., a road heads south 19 miles into this near-virgin wilderness to Hurricane Ridge Visitors Center. I ambled up Hurricane Ridge trail, an easy 1.5 miles with an elevation gain of slightly more than 600 feet and one of the most scenic short hikes I've ever taken.

Along the trail, marmots rooted around fields of wildflowers, vistas opened up over the Straight of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island, and I passed more black-tailed deer than people: deer grazing by the trail, scampering up the path in front of me or just posing majestically on rocky spurs against a mountainous backdrop.

The trail ended at wind-whipped Hurricane Hill, a 5,757-foot aerie from which it seemed I could see

across the park's entire 908,720 acres of wilderness: a sea of mountains prickly with fir trees and laced with low fog banks.

Rain forest to Ruby Beach

Then I unexpectedly entered a rain forest. The jungle-dense Hoh Valley, a long cleft on the park's western flank, gets 12 to 14 feet of rain annually.

Gargantuan Sitka spruces and western hemlocks, some of them 300 feet tall and 23 feet around, were upholstered in moss. The thick ground cover of ferns seemed to absorb even the sound of my footsteps, and the light filtering through the canopy was a green that didn't seem natural.

From the turnoff for Hoh, Route 101 jagged westward to hit the Pacific at Ruby Beach, at the southern end of the park's coastal strip. There, the geologic columns called sea stacks rose from the sands near the shore.

As I watched a child dash back and forth, playing chicken with the waves, the setting sun tossed colors across the cloud-streaked sky, threw the sea stacks into dramatic shadow and lit the wet sand with an incandescent glow. It was a sunset you might see only once.

Reid Bramblett is founder of ReidsGuides.com.

[Last modified March 1, 2006, 11:03:05]