Just eat of Olympia on I-5 is the Billy Frank Jr Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. Excellent for bird watching and nature photography. The twin barns are iconic. The area was a dairy farm in the early years.
I hiked there for years until the dikes were breached to improve salmon habitat by increasing the wetlands.
After a day of hiking in the rain to Sol Duc Falls (see post here), we got back to Marrowstone Island just in time for a great view of a double rainbow. This was taken with the wide angle lens on my iPhone 16 Pro Max. The water is Puget Sound and Marrowstone is southeast of Port Townsend, Washington.
On a dayhike up to Martins Park above Low Divide (between the Elwha and North Fork Quinault river valleys in the Olympic National Park), we saw this black bear browsing the fresh greens. We were a little nervous … the above photo was taken with a normal lens … not a telephoto. But we had seen black bears a number of times before and hadn’t found them aggressive. Regardless, we didn’t stay around to do any bear watching. Our nervousness increased quite dramatically when the bear followed us for a mile or so down to near where our campsite was at Low Divide. We took special care to bear proof our food that night.
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.
This was taken from Hurricane Hill, a short hike from the end of the Hurricane Ridge / Hurricane Hill road in the Olympic National Park. There is a rainbow reflection in the middle of the rain shower over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I haven’t looked down on a rainbow like this before … not sure exactly what to call it, since it isn’t really a “bow”. I wish it was more clear, but it is what it is … I played with it in Lightroom, but this was the best I could do.