Posts Tagged ‘Day Hiking Olympic Peninsula’
Escape to the Sun: Five Great Northwest Rainshadow Hikes
Fair weather hikers rejoice! You don’t need to hang up your hiking boots during the rainy season thanks to our rain shadows. What’s a rainshadow? It’s an effect caused by mountains capturing rain clouds on their windward slopes; then wringing them out leaving the leeward slopes dry. It can be quite dramatic like on the…
Read MoreNorthwest Lighthouse Hikes –Spotlighting three family-friendly coastal hikes
Consider lighthouses the coastal equivalent of fire lookout towers. Utilitarian in their function and design, yet they possess a simple and eloquent beauty as well. Guiding lights through rough and stormy waters, we oft forget about their purpose and become more enamored by their settings. And like their fire spotting brethren, many a lighthouse has…
Read MoreFive Great Washington Rail Trails Part 2 –Great trails to train on!
I love rail trails and some of my favorite running and hiking routes throughout Washington are on rail trails. Rail trails offer safe traffic free running routes. They’re gently graded. They can be found all over the state from major urban areas to the state’s remotest regions. Many rail trails begin, end and connect excellent…
Read MoreDay Hiking Olympic Peninsula
Day Hiking Olympic Peninsula Author: Craig Romano | Publisher: Mountaineers Books | Price: $18.95 Olympic National Park is a national treasure and here’s a guidebook to the best hiking you can find there More than 100 day hikes, with options for linking them to longer routes Compact, easy-carry size Two color maps, charts and elevation…
Read MoreThe Loneliest Ridge and Valley Trails in the Olympics
Image hiking for 22.5 miles—all but one of those miles on maintained trails—in one of the country’s most popular national parks—and encountering only 2 people—and that was at the beginning of the trip. My intrepid Olympic exploring friend Evan and I just finished an incredible one day journey across some of the park’s loneliest terrain—and…
Read MoreA Royal Difference in snow cover
So that’s what the small tarn in the upper Royal Basin looks like–and wow is it beautiful! Last week I returned to the Royal Basin in Olympic National Park. It had been 9 years since I had hiked to this rugged beautiful hanging valley in the northeast corner of the Olympics. In 2006 I made…
Read MoreThe Hardest, Nastiest, Meanest Trail in the Olympics
What is wrong with me? What the heck was I thinking? I swore to myself back in July of 2006 never to ever do this trail again. I hated it. It was pure misery. I swore more times on it than I did watching (fill in your favorite team or politician) lose. It was back…
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