Sorry, but this one is out of order. This should be after "The Ultimate Hike" and before "O Canada!"
After a pretty rough night of sleeping, I was feeling a little sick in the morning. I really didn’t want that to happen, but it’s not like the past 3.5 weeks have been easy on my body. I attributed it to just a poor nights sleeping after a long hike. No time to stop and worry though, so on with the hike. Today seemed like it was going to be a joke, but it was still 9 miles back to the car. I had never done a point-to-point hike like this before, but I think I liked it. Hiking towards your car and seeing that beacon of hope at the end of the trail is a very cool way to end a hike. I know Scott and Steve were a little banged up from the hike the day before; I’m not going to lie, I was as well. I still wanted to knock out these 9 miles as quickly as we could. It was all downhill and there was no reason we couldn’t do it in 3 hours. A little ambitious, but I was confident we could do it.
The hike wasn’t too bad; it mostly just followed the Skokomish River most of the way. This river was not as impressive as the Duckabush, but it actually had much larger banks that made it ideal to see some bears. We were pretty much guaranteed to see bears on this hike. A previous trail report said that a group had 13 bear sightings while doing this hike. We assumed that today was our big day. As we hiked along, we would stop and scope the banks of the river for any sign of bear. Scott came up with a pretty decent term “bear-ittory.” I could see that being something that may stick around.
We were moving at an awesome pace, probably right around 3 mph. There were only a couple tricky stream crossings, but nothing like what we faced the previous day. Scott was keeping track of the time and as we were nearing the end, he wanted to get under that 3-hour mark. Once we finally saw the end of the trail we broke into a trail run just to be dramatic. We missed the 3-hour mark by 4 minutes, but when we got to the trail head it said that our hike was actually 10 miles, ULTRA. We crushed that hike, got to Old Blue, toasted and crushed an ULTRA (which went right to my head) and headed off to Rialto Beach.
Now even though the park is ~60 miles wide, there are no roads that go through, instead everything loops around. From the Skokomish TH to Rialto Beach was ~4.5 hours whether we went north or south. We decided to stay north because it was along the water. Our first mission out of the woods was to find a Mexican restaurant. Luckily, the first “major” town that we hit on the north shore had a sign for the Mexican restaurant on the highway. We all got margaritas (Scott tried to be frugal and got the house instead of the Cuervo for $1 less; this may have been the origin of Stingy Scott.) We all thought the food was the best we had ever had, but it may have been due to the fact that we had only eaten dehydrated meals for the past 3 days.
Back on the road we went through Port Angeles, which was actually a city where I was considering doing an externship. It was actually a lot more built-up than I thought it would be and had the mountains to the south and the bay to the north. After we got through the town, we dipped back into Olympic NP. The road followed right along this gorgeous lake that was surrounded by mountains. Once we got past the lake, we only had a short drive until we got to the beach. We stopped at the ranger station to pick up a bear canister for our food, and the ranger barely knew how to work it. Trust me, they aren’t that complicated, but he was definitely struggling. As we approached the beach, I saw that cursed marine layer peaking over the trees. I was pissed. There is no way that this “phenomenon” was going to ruin this experience. Once we got to the beach, the clouds were over us and it was cold and windy. I was not happy. But either way, I knew it was going to be an awesome experience. We loaded up our gear (for the 2nd time today) and headed off for our grueling 1.5 mile hike up the beach.
This beach was absolutely amazing. There were small islands all along the coastline and the beach was littered with entire trees of bleached driftwood. Not to mention there was a dense evergreen forest coming right up to the beach. As we made our way to the campsite, I saw the Hole-in-the-Wall. Now for some reason the song “Can’t You See” by the Marshall Tucker Band became meaningful to me within the past few months. One of the lyrics talks about a hole in the wall, so this was like my mecca. We got closer to the hole and then decided to hike inland a little to get to the other side. The wall was literally a wall that projected out from the forest and just blocked the entire beach. We went up and around the hole and then plopped our bags down to go find a decent campsite. Scott and I walked around a little and found the perfect site. We set up, and still had a few hours of sunlight left. At this point, I was a giddy as a 5 year old. This was the most picturesque place I think I had ever been to and at this point the marine layer had drastically receded and the sun was shining bright.
I went off on a couple rogue missions to get some pictures and then came back to chill with my bros and bask in our glory. We sipped on some Sweet Tea Vodka, cooked up some s’mores and just took in the sunset followed by an amazingly starry sky. We started up a camp fire and by the time we were happy with it, we had a log about 12 inches in diameter on there. The drift wood was burning perfectly and we were loving it. Scott and I went to bed to leave Steve to put out the fire because he is more qualified than any of us for the job (due to his days in Boy Scouts.) We got a good chuckle at seeing Steve make at least 5 visits to the water to put out the fire, then he was just wandering around aimlessly. He claims he was hiding the bear canister, but this went on for like 6 minutes. He finally crashed in the tent and we all fell asleep to the sound of the Pacific Ocean less than 40 feet from our tent. ULTRA day 23/39: COMPLETE
JM
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