Hiking : Hurricane Hill

To get to Hurricane Ridge, you drive from the town of Port Angeles into the mountains and go up and up and up until you've gone 17 miles and are suddenly on top of the world in the middle of the mountains. You can basically drive up there, take a photo, go to the gift shop, and leave, but we wanted to do something slightly more memorable, so we went on a hike! We wanted do it back in April, but we would have needed snowshoes to do it then (and apparently it can stay snowy through July!). Luckily, we didn't have those problems in early September, although it was pretty chilly when we started our hike in the morning! 

The trail basically follows a ridge out to a high point, where you can get an even better view of the mountains than at the visitor center. For that reason, it's only 3 miles roundtrip but 950' in elevation gain - so basically straight up from the parking lot. Our hiking book warned us of crowds of tourists, so we started out as early as we could and didn't see many hikers on the way out. We did have plenty of views, though, and they were incredible! All along one side of the ridge were the huge Olympic mountains (including Mount Olympus itself). On the other side was the town of Port Angeles, the strait of Juan de Fuca, Vancouver Island, and mainland British Columbia. The picture below pretty accurately sums it up - - - 

Not bad, huh? 

Well, we huffed and puffed our way to the top (it wasn't that bad...and I blame the 6,000' elevation for any puffing!) and were rewarded with a panoramic view of everything all at once. We walked close enough to some deer to pet them - and heard the calls of the Olympic marmot! It was a little exciting, since before moving here, I didn't even know what a marmot was.

We had a snack at the top, noticed that the deer family had followed us up, stared at the mountains until we couldn't stare anymore, and headed back down. The throngs of people our book had warned us about were coming the other way - so we were happy we set out earlier! (See the tiny tiny dots of people on the left in the above picture? That's because we're so much higher than them, even though it looks flat!) It was a perfect hike and we were so happy we did it - we got to experience being in the mountains without being super knowledgable backpackers. Someday, we might try that, but for now it was nice to do something more accessible. 

Here's one last photo, a panorama I put together in Photoshop - - - click on it to see it full size!