Washington's Olympic Peninsula

My wife and I recently took advantage of our attending a summertime convention in Tacoma, Washington to add a few days in the beautiful Olympic Peninsula. Leaving Tacoma in a rental car, we decided on a brief visit in the state capital in Olympia .... and our time could not have been better spent. Olympia is a small town of 45,000 in population and we were in the capital area only seconds after leaving Interstate 5. Washington's government buildings are consolidated in a small 'campus' area so it was easy to enjoy the beautiful gardens and impressive buildings. We enjoyed an excellent and free one hour guided tour of the state capitol building which is on a knoll overlooking Capitol Lake.

Completed in 1928, the building's beautiful brick and standstone dome rises 287 feet and is one of the tallest masonry domes in the world. The building also holds the world's largest collection of decorative lighting and chandeliers made by Tiffany's in New York. The last stops in the tour were in the outer offices of the Governor and Secretary of State! We certainly learned a lot in our tour about the state's history and government and the characters who built Washington! We were disappointed, though, the adjacent Governor's Mansion is open to tours only on Wednesdays but we were impressed by the several monuments in the campus to those who fought our nation's wars and one to commemorate the sacrifice of Washington's law enforcement officers.

We drove due west from Olympia for an overnight in the very quiet beachside town of Pacific Beach, Washington. Driving north the next morning from Pacific Beach along the coast, we turned inland on a small road to merge with Highway 101 which encircles the Olympic National Park. There are no roads which fully traverse the park, east to west or north to south!

President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the Mount Olympus National Monument in 1909 and President Franklin Roosevelt declared the Olympic National Park in 1938. The park was also designated a World Heritage Park in 1981. The park includes a strip along about 60 miles of Pacific Ocean coastline from South Beach, WA, to the Makah Indian Reservation in the state's extreme northwest corner. Only five roads go from Hwy 101 into the center of the park: Graves Creek, Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center (and its 140 inches of rain annually!), Sol Duc Hot Springs Resort, Elwha and Altair observation points, and Hurricane Ridge.

Sol Duc Hot Springs Resort, deep inside the Olympic National Park, offers its three mineral hot springs pools for travelers in need of repose. The resort has rental cabins, RV sites, and a full service restaurant for those wishing an extended stay. Hurricane Ridge is a climb of 19 miles south of Port Angeles, a port city of 20,000 on the northern shore of the Olympic Peninsula. Hurricane Ridge is almost 5,800 feet above sea level and offers views of the peaks throughout the park and the Strait of San Juan du Fuca.

We drove along Lincoln Street to the main port area of Port Angeles for lunch and a little time along its waterfront. The 'City Pier' at the end of Lincoln Street contains an observation tower, small boat moorage, sandy wading beach, and the Feiro Marine Life Center. The center is operated by Peninsula College and is open Tuesday through Sunday in the summer. Volunteers assist kids and not so young kids in experiencing the 'touch tank' filled with various marine animals and fish swim through transparent tubes between two large tanks, easily watched by visitors. We were surprised on the pier to watch a family of raccoons searching for food in a fresh water stream entering the bay at the pier's base! They do wash their food!

The city's Olympic Coast Discovery Center is relatively new and has a 'wraparound' theater for films on underwater research. The films were made by staff from the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, 3,310 square miles of Pacific Ocean off the Olympic Peninsula. We visited just a few days after the city's annual 'Arts in Action' festival and the festival's prize winning sand castles were still on display beside the pier. The Callam County Courthouse is a Georgian-style brick building from 1914 with a stained glass skylight, marble steps, and clock tower. It was placed on the Washington state list of historic sites in 1971 and the national register in 1988. Strangely, a larger, solar-heated courthouse was built onto its rear in 1979!

The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center is a former home overlooking the city and offers visual arts in all media. Walkers and bicyclists can easily venture east or west from downtown. To the west is Ediz Hook, a sand 'spit' which 'hooks' from the west end of town back to the east and protects the harbor. A US Coast Guard air station is located at the end of the hook. To the east is the Olympic Discovery Trail along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When completed, the trail will run about 100 miles from Port Townsend to LaPush, Washington! Both directions looked busy to us! Finally, we had a seafood lunch in the Crab House Restaurant adjacent to the City Pier, enjoying a delicious local specialty, smoked salmon.

Port Angeles is a gateway to Victoria, British Canada, with Victoria Express ferries' making the 90 minutes crossing of the Strait of Juan de Fuca four times daily in the summer (one way $11.50/passenger , $44.00/vehicle & driver). Three hour ferry rides to Seattle are also available. With its perpetually mild temperatures, Port Angeles is also a perfect base from which to drive, bicycle, hike, or camp in the Olympic National Park; kayak in the strait, fresh water lakes, or fast running rivers; or boat and fish in the Dungeness Bay.

The northeastern corner of the peninsula is also home to several small wineries, most in and around Port Angeles, nearby Sequim (pronounced 'Squim'), and Port Townsend. My wife regretfully agreed we could only taste wine in one so she chose the Olympic Cellars, on US Hwy 101 nine miles west of Sequim. This winery is one of Washington's original 15 wineries and since 2001 has been the peninsula's only completely woman-owned and -operated winery. Visitors can taste four wines for $3.00 and we agreed the 'Working Girl White', 'Rose the Riveter', 'Go Girl Red', 'Handyman Red', and 'Gracefully Aging Red' were very good, particularly the 'Working Girl' and 'Rose the Riveter', so we departed with a bottle of each. We also registered in the winery's email notification list in the expectation we shall place an order later.

My wife very much enjoyed Sequim - the 'lavender capital of North America' and, clearly, a retirement community with many beautiful homes overlooking Dungeness Bay. The weekend-long Sequim Lavender Festival is held annually in midJuly and draws as many as 30,000 visitors. We missed the festival, however, but eight lavender farms are open to the public through the July-September lavender season and we were able to wander through the unbelievably large, colorful, and aromatic fields of two of them. Even I was impressed with the lavender! Each farm has a shop, of course, offering lavender gifts of many, unique types.

The Olympic Peninsula has it all: a grand exposure to its natural beauty and the opportunity to enjoy its people and the places in which they live.