The Olympic Coast

Hoh Head is a high, forest-topped headland where the coast rears up out of the surf. Its dark sandstone is the same old seafloor that stands offshore in the stacks, hard enough to hold against waves that have worn the softer ground away. Reaching it means a wilderness walk along the beach, timed to the tide, but it shows the fog coast at full height — forested rock with the open Pacific below.

A short trail drops from the highway through a band of forest bent and thinned by salt wind, then opens onto a broad beach. At low tide the rock shelves here hold the fog coast’s tidepool life — ochre sea stars in purple and orange, and the fat domes of giant green anemones. It is the easiest place in this note to meet the cold sea’s tidepools face to face.

This is the doorway to the Hoh, the valley that made this coast known for rain. Everything the ocean gives up as fog and storm collects here and grows into forest — evergreens tall enough to vanish into the mist, every trunk and fallen log furred with moss, sword fern and deer fern deep underfoot. Walk in a few minutes and the sound of the road is gone, replaced by dripping.

Kloochman Rock is a bare knuckle of stone standing above the forest in the Queets valley, one of the quieter rainforest drainages on this coast. The climb leaves the mossy bottomland and gains a viewpoint over a sea of treetops — the same fog-fed forest, seen from above instead of within. On a clear break you can trace how the green runs unbroken from the ridges down toward the sea.

The trail to Colonel Bob starts low in the rainforest along the coast’s southern edge before climbing hard toward the peak. The first stretch is the fog forest at its lushest — salmonberry and salal thick along the path, devil’s club guarding the wet draws. It is a place to feel how much life the cold-sea climate packs into the lowest, warmest corner of this coast.

Mount Octopus is a low, forested summit set back from the shore between the Hoh and the Queets, deep in the western foothills. Nothing here rises high enough to escape the marine air, so the same coastal forest that lines the beaches climbs right over it. It marks how far inland the coast’s climate reaches before the country begins to change.

Reade Hill is a modest rise in the low country near the coast, close enough to the shore that the fog reaches it early. Forest covers it like everything else here, but its low ground makes it an easy place to watch the marine air arrive rather than chase it into the high valleys. The land near the sea is where the fog coast begins its work each day.

Geodetic Hill is another of the low western summits, its name a nod to the surveyors who once used such high points to map the country. Like its neighbors it stands well within reach of the sea fog, cloaked in the same wet forest. The interest here is less the summit than the living floor beneath it.