Olympic National Park

Olympic National Park is much different than Rainier Nat. Park. For one thing, it is huge and there are no roads that go through the park. So you have to drive on the outskirts of the park. There are three different parks of this park: alpine, rainforest, and ocean. We like Olympic, but overall we liked Rainier a little bit better.

We first entered the alpine portion of the park. We went on a hike called Hurrican Ridge and saw lots of marmots. Not yellow bellies marrmots like there are in Colorado. These are horay marmots.

At the end of the trail we saw a black bear. My camera is horrible so you can barely see him, but there is a dark dot in the center of the photo. That is the bear. We had fun watching him move around.

But Neil decided seeing the bear from afar was not good enough. So we hiked around the ridge to try and get a better look at him. This is where Neil is trying to sneak up on the bear. Good thing the bear wasn't there!!

We were driving along and saw another black bear with her cub. Can you spot them in this picture?? We seriously need a new camera!

Another beautiful lake...Lake Crescent.

I'm glad the city of Forks welcomes me! I saw lots of vampires. There are just too quick and I couldn't get a picture of any of them. But I know there are there!

This is the rainforest portion of the park. This was so neat how all these trees were growing over the top of a fallen tree.
There were some really big cedar and spruce trees there.

Neil wanted to climb the tree, but I told him he probably shouldn't.

Not only are the trees huge, but they are covered in moss. We saw these trees on a hike called The Trail of Mosses.
We were fascinated by the huge slug, yet no one wanted to actually pick it up!

We then drove down to the beach. Lots of different sections that you could stop at. Our favorite was Ruby beach. We climbed a rock and got a good view.

You would think that being at the beach in August would be warm, but it really wasn't. It was too foggy for the sun to get through. Now I can understand why vampires would live in this part of the US;)

We saw these trees all over. We thought they were pregnant, but apparently it is a virus.