Day 13

We spent the day today, sightseeing in Olympic National Park. This park is very different than most of the other National Parks we've been to. First, not unlike many of the others, it's huge. But what's different about this park is that there are no roads that go through the park, connecting the different areas. If you want to go from one area to another at this park, you have to drive around the outer perimeter ... this makes for some VERY long drives.

The park has several very different areas, from alpine mountains, to temperate rain-forests, from river valleys to shoreline. Today, we visited the Hoh rainforest and the Mora shoreline area, specifically a place called Rialto Beach. Apparently, the Twilight movies were filmed in these areas, and there is a lot of funny stuff to be seen relative to the movies. For example, on one building, we saw a take-off on the typical forest fire danger "meter" that in this case, was measuring current "vampire threat" levels! There are also quite a few "tour companies" that will take you on Twilight tours, I guess bringing you to some of the specific areas that were used for filming.

Anyway, as far as the scenery was concerned, it was nice, but I have to say, having come from Glacier National Park and North Cascades National Park, Olympic National Park just doesn't measure up ... at least not based on what we've seen so far.

Tomorrow, we plan to visit two other areas, one called the Elwa Valley and the other called Hurricane Ridge. The Elwa Valley is an area of hydro-electric dams that are actually being dismantled in order to return this area to its original state. Supposedly, it's pretty interesting to see these areas as they are being transformed. The Hurricane Ridge area represents the alpine terrain that Olympic National Park is famous for.