“SURE, I’LL GO HIKING,” said She Who Does Not Climb Hills. “I’ll even go camping. On two conditions.” One, a bathroom. Two—you guessed it. No climbing, ascending, or otherwise getting on gravity’s bad side.
No sweat, I said. Here’s a route that has everything except elevation. Beaches and bogs. Sea stacks and tide pools. Gloomy glades and sunny prairies. Exotic history and culture. Only thing is, it’s at the end of the world, and it takes a little while to get there. Four hours, to be precise, winding ’round the top of the Olympic Peninsula till you reach the end of the Hoko road, at the mouth of Lake Ozette and the trailhead for the Ozette Loop. It’s a push to do in one day; better to dally as we did, detouring to ogle the Olympic peaks at Hurricane Ridge (and wince at the Olympic-size crowds). Or stroll Dungeness Spit, or soak in the Elwha hot springs, and camp at the lake before setting out.
Time was you could always find a spot in the Park Service’s little lakeside campground, but we arrived to find all 15 sites taken. Luckily, private enterprise has kept Ozette safe for the soft-camping set. Fifteen years ago the Lost Resort opened up the road, offering ample (though sometimes soggy) campsites, three rustic cabins, and bonus amenities: a cafe, beer, espresso, a fireplace for those too lazy or inept to make their own campfires, toilets, and even showers. She Who Does Not was reassured.
The Ozette Loop is a near-perfect equilateral 9.3-mile triangle: two legs through deep woods and the meadows cleared a century ago by homesteading Swedish farmers and a middle leg along the ocean, from Sand Point to Cape Alava. Like most hikers we instinctively set out clockwise, along the trail the homesteaders cut to sledge supplies up from Sand Point. Much of it is boardwalked to protect hikers’ boots and the bogs below from each other. But wood rots fast out here; some sections rocked like a small boat deck on a big sea. Bring poles in autumn or winter, when Olympic drizzle slickens the walkways, and be ready to slide as much as step.
Finally the trail climbed one last coastal ridge (“You lied!” she cried, but she was enjoying the scenery too much to mind) and plunged to the beach. I’ve tramped hundreds of beaches on scores of littorals, but I don’t know any that make for better walking than the Olympic coast. Large-grained sand and ample pebbles assure firm footfalls. Big waves, winter storms, and plate tectonics make the beach a giant sea-wrack art installation, speckled with polycolored pebbles and heaped with drift logs like pick-up sticks. The macro view’s even better: a garden of unendingly varied sea stacks and inshore islands that becomes a thicket as you approach Cape Alava.
With such distractions, it’s easy to ignore your tide tables and forget the choke points where high tides cut the beach route; we had to hop lightly across rising channels at the last point. It’s there, on the dark lava of Wedding Rocks, that native carvers chose to inscribe dozens of expressive petroglyphs of whales, birds, and sun and moon faces, evidently in ritual preparation for the perilous business of whaling. Higher up they carved sailing ships, recording their first European and American contacts, which proved even more perilous.
The Ozette people lived for millennia in shoreside villages till the U.S. authorities forced their children to attend school at Neah Bay and they joined their Makah cousins there. Whales and other marine prey made the living rich at Ozette; mudslides made it dangerous, but also made for archaeological bonanzas.
In 1970 a winter storm uncovered a longhouse buried in a slide some 300 years earlier. Over the next decade archaeologists and the Makah found five more buried houses and recovered 55,000-plus artifacts—an American Pompeii. The excavation is now sealed; a modern longhouse, with mementos left to honor the dead, marks the site.
Published: November 2010
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