The autumn brings a quieter experience to many trails and parks. The summer crowds are gone and one can find relative solitude even in parks that are heavily used.
Walking the Service Road
Downtown Port Townsend
This is downtown Port Townsend’s main intersection. The traffic light is set to blink red in all directions … but because the lights are mounted on the street corners instead of hanging in the middle of the road, there are a lot of drivers (especially visitors) that miss the lights and run the intersection. Fortunately, the speed limit is 20 mph and traffic is slow.
Road and Deer
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.
Snowy Roadway
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.
Olympic Hot Springs Road Bike Trip
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.
