Travel Day. That pretty much sums it up. It was incredibly difficult to leave Seattle this morning. The day dawned bright and clear, and the lake mirrored the surrounding trees. But our time was up and Olympic National Park was awaiting us.
We re-traced our steps from yesterday as far as Tacoma and then continued south until we hit the 101. Although it was a picturesque highway paralleling the Hood Canal, the 101 was also narrow and very slow. It took us 5 hours to drive the 200 miles to Elwha Dam RV Park. And 1 1/2 hours of that was driving 60 MPH. That tells you how slow the section along the Hood Canal was.
We arrived at the Elwha Dam RV Park about 3:00. We have a nice shady site that was very easy to get into. That's always appreciated after a stressful drive. We ate lunch and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon.
This evening, we drove up to Hurricane Ridge
to check out the wildflowers and watch the sunset. As soon as we rounded the final curve
before the parking lot, we saw two young bucks feeding along the road. We quickly parked and spent the next hour shooting the deer as
they ate their way around the meadows. They were extraordinarily tame. One couple was sitting in chairs next to their car when the deer
walked right by them and stood on the ridge in front of them. He was posing and showing off. Later, he walked up to a couple eating salads
in hopes that they would share.
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Sunset was a dud, and we were very disappointed by the wildflowers at the top of Hurricane Ridge. Outside of the harebells, there were very few groupings of wildflowers. We saw some good wildflower patches along the road on the way to Hurricane Ridge, so we'll concentrate on them tomorrow. There will be no wildflower fields stretching down the meadows of Hurricane Ridge toward Mt. Olympus on this trip.
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