This is one of my favorite spots at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, WA. I’m not sure why, except that you are standing on a cement runway that a huge WWI era spotlight ran on out to the edge of a cliff. There you can look (almost) straight down to the beach. I’ve taken this same photo a number of times over the years. These are two that caught my eye as I was working on selecting images for the blog this week.
The Olympic National Park opened up the Staircase Rapids Loop Trail on July 8th for the first time since the fire in 2025 devastated the area. The valley of the North Fork Skokomish was one of my favorite locations and I went to take photos of the area on the 8th. Each set of photos shows the same location before and after. Some images aren’t exact matches … but I did as well as I could with the images I had. The Staircase Loop Trail leaves from the Staircase Ranger Station, runs 1 mile (1.6 KM), crosses the river (on a bridge that was protected from the fire) and returns back to the parking lot.
One of the things I like about living in the Pacific Northwest are glacial erratics. These can sometimes be large boulders that seem to be spread around at random … which is exactly the case. During the last ice age the glaciers carried these big rocks (or little ones) sometimes for hundreds of miles … and then dropped them where they were when the ice melted. Sometimes they can be traced to their point of origin by the type of rock or chemical compostion. The fact that there were this big rocks spread around was one of the reasons I ended up with a degree in Geology.
In my last post I talked about a trip we took up the Staircase Rapids Trail along the North Fork Skokomish in Olympic National Park. This was a section of the rapids … where they are not quite so dramatic. But this spot gives a view up valley and the frost was covering the rocks along the bank (needs a close look in the photo). We hiked up to the bridge crossing the river and turned around and hiked back. The image below is taken from the middle of the bridge.
The North Fork Skokomish valley has some of my favorite hikes. The starting point is at Staircase Ranger Station and Campground at the southeast corner of Olympic National Park and access is open year round … except when the snow has closed the road. But since the elevation is less than 1000 feet (305m), that isn’t too often. The rapids are striking enough that they have built a loop trail of about two miles starting from the ranger station and crossing the river on a very nice bridge about a mile up the river. The image below shows a section of that trail.
