Olympic National Park: Hurricane Ridge and Sol Duc Valley

This week, we stayed in a just-opened RV park, RV@Olympic, just east of Port Angeles, Washington. This location gave us a good base from which to explore the northern side of Olympic National Park. The huge national park occupies most of the center of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, but there are no roads within the park connecting its various hiking and sightseeing destinations. It can take several hours of driving to get between these points on Highway 101, which rings the park. So instead, we planned to visit Hurricane Ridge, Lake Crescent, and the Sol Duc Valley from Port Angeles, and then move around the peninsula to visit other parts of the park.

Another reason we wanted to spend a few weeks on the Olympic Peninsula was because many of our RVing friends have either come off the road and moved there or are spending some of their summer in the area. We now have friends living part-time or full-time in Port Townsend, Chimacum, and Sequim.

On Friday, August 8, we drove up to Hurricane Ridge, the most readily accessed mountain area within Olympic National Park, located 17 miles south of Port Angeles. The air was clear enough to get this nice shot of Mount Baker in the North Cascades, which is about 130 miles away as the crow flies, from a pullout along Hurricane Ridge Road.

After eating our picnic lunch sitting on a wall overlooking the spectacular mountains, we took this selfie with the Bailey Range (in the middle of Olympic National Park) in the background. The flat area behind the fence was the former location of the Hurricane Ridge Day Lodge, which burned down in May 2023. The elevation of the parking lot is almost one mile above sea level.

We took a short hike on the trails that began at the Hurricane Ridge parking lot. The first part of the trail followed the rim of a glacial cirque, or bowl, to the west.

From there, we began a climb on the High Ridge Trail section to Sunrise Point.

From Sunrise Point, we could make out the town of Port Angeles and the Strait of Juan de Fuca (partially covered by morning fog) just beyond it. The land mass across the water is Victoria, British Columbia.

The spur trail from Sunrise Point descended on a ridge line, with beautiful views of the Bailey Range beyond the trail.

Another view point a bit further down the High Ridge Trail gave us a great place to admire the Bailey Range, the highest point of which is Mount Olympus, standing almost 8,000 feet tall. The parking lot and start of the road down Hurricane Ridge are below.

That evening, we met up at a restaurant in Port Angeles with fellow Escapees members and good friends Emily and Tim, who now live in Sequim, and Laura and Rob, who are staying at the SKP Evergreen Coho Co-op in Chimacum, WA.

The next day, we went on a longer drive, snaking along the shore of shimmering Lake Crescent and up the Sol Duc Valley to visit scenic Sol Duc Falls. Along the way, we stopped to walk the short Salmon Cascades Trail. The salmon weren’t running yet in the river, but David did get to hug a giant tree along the trail.

In the late 1800s, settlers found the valley’s hot springs and called them sol duc, a mispronunciation of the Indigineous Quileute word for “sparkling waters”. There didn’t seem to be any agreement even on the spelling of the words, as evidenced by the sign at the trailhead for the “Soleduck Trail”. (I kept looking for that dang lone duck, but never did find him.)

The trees along the Sol Duc Trail were just as impressive as the ones we’d seen lower in the valley. If you look carefully, you can just see David looking up at a tree on the trail, to give you a sense of the dramatic scale.

After a bit less than a mile of walking, the trail arrives at a wooden footbridge across the small canyon formed by the Sol Duc River. From here, we got our first view of Sol Duc Falls.

Another hundred yards or so on the trail brought us to a couple of overlooks, from which we could get a better look at the triple cascades that make up Sol Duc Falls.

From this viewpoint, you could see the footbridge across the canyon that we had just walked across.

It was a warm-ish and humid day–not nearly as pleasant as the weather had been the day before up in the mountains.

That evening, we met our RVing friends Larry and Robyn for dinner at a restaurant near Sequim. They had just returned from a two-month RV caravan tour in Alaska and had lots of stories to share about their adventures.

Did I mention that we had a lot of friends in the area? Cheryl, ever the organizer, arranged for almost all of them to meet up at once on Sunday afternoon at Finnriver Farm and Cidery in Chimacum. It was the warmest day of the week–the National Weather Service actually issued a heat advisory for high temperatures in the upper 80s!–but a few glasses of cider helped us stay cool. These are all folks that we met through the Escapees Hangouts program when we were its directors, and all but one of the couples had either hosted or was scheduled to host a Hangout. True Hangout groupies!

Our good friends Jason and Lisa–some of the very first RVers we met, back in January 2017 at the Xscapers Quartzsite Convergence (which would later grow into the Annual Bash)–had arrived on Sunday on a visit from their home in Lynden, Washington, to stay at RV@Olympic with us for a few days. On our last day in Port Angeles, we explored the Port Angeles Wharf, including sampling the ice cream at Welly’s. Their specialty is “New Zealand-style” ice cream, which is real fresh local fruit blended with vanilla ice cream in special machines imported from Down Under. It was a fun and refreshing treat.

As we enjoyed our ice cream, we watched the sun set over the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Port Angeles harbor.