Olympic NP Vacation Day 1: Early Morning Hike and the Beach

Early morning overlooking the lake

After a good night sleep, we woke up around 5:00AM PST, but the lodge doesn’t start serving breakfast till 7:30 AM PST so we went for an early morning hike near the lodge.  Our first hike was 1.6 miles in the wood across from the lodge. It started out flat then started a climb upward, we heard a couple waterfall along the path but there were not good viewing locations along the trail to get pictures of the falls. The whole hike took us about hour and half to complete.  After splitting breakfast, which was eggs, bacon, potatoes, and a biscuit, we did a second hike.  The second hike was 3.5 miles long.  This hike took us along lake Quinault, over to the Rain Forest Loop, through the Cedar Bog, and back down to the lodge. This was an up and down trail with a few even spots. These trails are not for those who cannot handle hills and are considered a moderate level hikes.    We started the trail around 8:00AM and got back to the lodge around 10:30 AM.   We then took a quick break before deciding to head out to beaches since the tide was at going to be at its lowest point.

The first beach we stopped at was behind Kalaloch Lodge, which is about a 45-minutes away from our lodge.  This beach is a sand beach and had a lot of dead crabs on it.  I mean a lot of dead crabs and crab shells.  Overall, not very interesting.  Since we got to Kalaloch a bit before lunch we walked the beach then got lunch there.  The restaurant there was take out only, so we got chicken wraps and ate them in the car before heading up to Ruby Beach which was about 10 more miles up 101 from Kalaloch.  Ruby Beach is popular because it has sea stacks.  A sea stack is a rock feature in the middle of the beach near the shore.  To get to the beach you park in the parking lot then walk down a hill, to the beach where you then crawl across some large driftwood, more like drift logs to get to the rocky beach.  This beach is not sandy and is covered in large smooth round stones. They are not too difficult to walk on.   We walk along this beach for a bit to get some picture of the sea stacks, we will be going back around sunrise later in the week to get more interesting pictures.  Once we finished walking on the beach, we started the journey back to Quinault Lodge. 

Sea Stack at Ruby Beach

Sea Stack at Ruby Beach

On the way back to the lodge we stopped to see the “Big Cedar” which is a large cedar tree.  It was a very short walk to the tree and is a nice simple diversion.   We plan on seeing the tallest Sitka spruce later in the week. This basically concluded our day.  We didn’t want to over do it on hiking the first day, especially since Jim is still breaking in a pair of books.  Tomorrow, I think we will go over to the Hoh Rain Forest and do some hiking there and stop at Rialto Beach.