Above is the Elwha River Road (Olympic National Park) … a section that is past the barricade due to a washout. Below is one of the roads in Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend … one that is open only to pedestrians and bicyclists (and service vehicles). In both cases, vehicles on the road would have left tire tracks in the frost or the needles blown down during a wind storm.
I have been going through old photos and running them through my current editing software. It makes an amazing difference. Both of these are taken in Geyser Valley which is now about 6 miles from the end of the (washed out) Elwha River Road in the Olympic National Park. The one above is one I merged into a panorama from images I took on New Years Eve 2001. Below is one I took a hundred yards (meters) or so from the top photo in the summer. The undergrowth (below) is mostly vanilla leaf.
Happy Hollow Shelter is located 26.3 miles (42.3 km) from the Whiskey Bend trailhead of the Elwha River trail (it is the last shelter along the Elwha trail). You can see from the overgrown condition of the trail that this area of the Olympic National Park doesn’t get a lot of traffic. The shelters are provided for emergency use only … and one should expect to share any shelter in the Olympics with a large population of mice.
Below is the Happy Hollow outhouse. I don’t think I need to provide any additional comments, except maybe privacy is not guaranteed.
The previous post showed the smoke from the Bear Gulch fire being blown into the Hurricane Ridge area of the Olympic National Park where we were hiking. Before the smoke got dense, there were some interesting shots available showing atmospheric effects from lesser amounts of smoke. The image above is looking east across the Elwha River valley to the Bailey Range and just the very top of Mt Olympus. Below is from the same time/location but looking south down the valley of the Elwha.
Recently we went for a hike up in the Hurricane Ridge area of Olympic National Park, which is at the opposite end of the park from the Bear Gulch fire area. The wind was blowing from the south, however and over the course of the couple hours we hiked the smoke blew in up the Elwha Valley (image center). On the return trip, I was stunned at how the smoke had built up (we had been hiking in the woods where there was no view to the south). Below is a photo from the same location, about an hour and a half later than the top image.
