These are a couple images that I took from a trip across to Victoria from Port Angeles on the Coho ferry. The top one is looking east to Mt Baker and the one below is looking south to the Olympic Mountains … the area just south of Port Angeles in the Hurricane Ridge area.
There are a lot of clouds in the Olympic Mountains … it takes all those clouds to give you the rain forest valleys. And even if the valley is on the downwind side of the peninsula, you still have the clouds. You just end up with less rain coming down from them. Having spent so much time in the Olympics, I guess it’s not surprising that I’m attracted to cloudy ridgelines. This one was taken up the valley of the Dosewallips. The sun had just disappeared into the bright area in the upper left and it started to sprinkle shortly later. Never very hard, but enough to get things (and people) damp.
The dead trees are a result of a forest fire several years before … one that made a mess of the Lake Constance trail … already one of the more difficult hikes in the Olympics, now even more difficult due to so many trees having fallen across the trail. It is still used quite a bit, though, as it is one of the popular approaches to climb Mt Constance (the highest Olympic peak visible on the Seattle skyline).
This was an early winter storm that came in while I was out walking the valley. The top of the ridge with the lowest snow is just over 3000 feet (about 915 meters). The snow stuck around on the high ground, but it was gone the next day on the trees. Mt Ellinor – Mt Washington are the southeastern most corner of the Olympic Mountains (not in Olympic National Park). There is a low point between the two summits that is obscured with clouds in this image … Ellinor is lower by several hundred feet and is on the left.
The trail up Mt Ellinor in the SE corner of the Olympic Mountains (outside of the National Park) is one of the most heavily used in the Olympics. It’s a reasonable hike up to a spectacular view. There are three trailheads … One at the bottom at Big Creek Campground (a 6 mile hike with lots of additional elevation gain), one at the “mid-point” (a 3.1 mile hike) and the upper trailhead (a 1.6 mile hike) — all mileages one way. Those choosing the upper trailhead to shorten the hike miss some wonderful forest, including this bench-rock location. The boulder covered with lichen and moss is worth spending time with … and the matching benches are a nice feature … although when you’re hiking by yourself, they seem excessive.
The northeast corner of the Olympic Mountains make a wonderful backdrop for the marina and the Port Townsend Paper Mill.