While the low country has mostly melted out, the high country in the Olympic National Park is still carrying a lot of snow. The snowpack is above average, so hiking in the high country is not going to be accessible early in the summer (many areas probably not until mid-July).
These photos are from the same day as my last post (River Bends). Nice day for a spring hike on the North Fork Skokomish trail in the Olympic National Park. The underbrush is still in winter mode… so you have more visibility at ground level. This section of the trail was originally a road until it was washed out about 50 years ago.
These photos are all of the section of the N Fork Skokomish River above the Staircase Camp area in the Olympic National Park. I took them on a recent day hike up to one of my favorite sitting spots on a big rock overlooking the area around the first photo. After I finished processing the images, I realized that I had a series of river bend images. River bends are a major source of changing valley characteristics.
Some spots in the high country are easier to get to than others. The ones that are easy to get to tend to be crowded. The ones that are harder to get to are … well, harder to get to. The result is that there typically are a lot fewer folks and the impact is less. That also means the trails tend to be rougher … or sometimes look nothing like a trail so much as a track through the meadows. Martin’s Park is one of those … it sits in a remote portion of the Olympic National Park with a minimum of a 16 mile hike to get there (and that’s the short route). There are quite a few folks that hike close to it … it sits near the Low Divide, on one of the main routes for those wishing to traverse the Olympic Park. The crossing now runs just about 50 miles … so those doing the hike tend to not have a lot of extra time for side trips. It’s beautiful country, though.
If you read my last post, you likely already guessed that this is only a day hike after you have backpacked for a considerable distance into the Olympic National Park. Anderson Pass is located between the West Fork Dosewallips (AKA West Fork Dose … pronounced “Doh’-see”). Jeff and I were camped at Honeymoon Meadows and hiked up to the pass and slightly beyond as a day hike. Since this was taken, the Dose road has washed out and the distance to the trailhead increased by over 6 miles. The Enchanted Valley is over 13 miles up the East Fork Quinault trail.
