Walking the roads in Fort Worden, you can often find yourself sharing the roads with deer. In the image below, the young deer (a yearling) is experiencing its first snow. It’s mother is off the road to the right … the teen-fawn seemed a little uncertain about this cold white stuff. And I imaged it was wondering if mom was going to order out dinner.
This is another shot from a recent trip up to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. On my return to the parking lot up the Hurricane Hill road (closed to traffic in winter), the snow picked up from a gentle dusting to a little more serious effort. I liked the way the trees looked with the new snow. But I also liked the way the flakes coming down against the background of the sky made it so that I didn’t have to bother checking for sensor spots.
I have a routine of walking the length of downtown Port Townsend … a round trip is about 1/2 mile (so I usually do several laps). Just after a shower, there was a clearing and the sun off of the wet sidewalk was pretty dramatic.
My friend Gary and I rode our bikes up the Olympic Hot Springs Road (also known as the Elwha River Road) … these days this entails a .7 mile bypass trail around a washed out section of the road. After the bypass, there is about 6 miles of road to get to the trailhead … the hot springs are another 2.2 miles of hiking … which we didn’t hike that day.
I have hiked through this area numbers of times over the last 40 years … but this was the first visit up the road since the washout happened several years ago. It brought back memories. The additional distance has had a dramatic impact on the number of people using the area.
The next post will concentrate on the river.
Recently my friend Gary and I rode our eBikes up the Dosewallips Road past the washouts and up to the Dosewallips Campground … a distance of about 6.5 miles (each way). We had great weather and were just doing a day trip … although regular readers may note that another friend and I have made several trips up the road backpacking.
I carried my camera and the day was a great success, based on how much fun we had. During the bouncy ride, I lost my lens cap, but that’s why they sell extras, isn’t it?
