Until very recently in my life, the West Coast was a complete unknown. Somewhere out beyond the Rocky Mountains, a foggy land of $4 per gallon gas, surfer bros, and hippies remained outside of my sphere of consciousness. I never saw the Pacific Ocean until 2021 when I was a full 23-year-old adult.
Since then, Elizabeth and I have been slowly filling in the gaps. There was that 2021 trip to San Diego/Coronado, and the wedding in the Bay Area in May 2023, or notably our trip with my parents along the southern Oregon coast in October of 2023. But there’s nothing that quite cemented my newfound fascination with the Pacific Coast quite like our trip to Seattle in 2023 to visit Elizabeth’s cousins. https://nolanmeister.com/uncategorized/seattle-2023-day-one/
At that point only two of her cousins (Michael and Chris) had moved out there, but it was clear that they were feeling like putting roots down. And why wouldn’t you? Pike Place, mountains, accessible pro sports teams, incredible food… I didn’t have any trouble seeing why someone would love Seattle the way they did. We immediately short-listed Washington for a return trip.
It took about 2 and a half years to actually make that return trip happen because the world is just so large and there’s so many cool things to see. Meanwhile, more and more Hardings kept moving up into the area. They eventually achieved a critical mass of Seattle-area family members to start hosting Thanksgiving at Chris and Chanelle’s house annually. Elizabeth and I missed the 2024 edition while we were up in Michigan, but when we flipped family holidays in 2025 we secured an invite. Pam and Winston had gone the year before and had a lot of fun, so I for one was excited.
Elizabeth and I talked it over for a while, and we decided that we might as well get there a couple of days early and explore part of the Olympic peninsula. After coordinating with Pam and Winston, we booked flights the morning of Monday, November 24 to Seattle. I would return on Friday, November 28 so I could work the next day (a deployment to the OSU/Iowa State football game) while Elizabeth stayed with family through the weekend.
I’m not going to stick on the details too much. Nor am I going to focus too much on the Harding Thanksgiving portion of the weekend, which lasted from early Wednesday morning onward. It was a great weekend with Elizabeth’s family. We visited Blake Island again, I accidentally helped Chris go crabbing, Elizabeth found an amazing German Christmas market, and then there was a typical chaotic Thanksgiving Day with the whole family. If I have time in the next few months, I might try to blog some of the highlights. But being realistic with how much time I have to write some of these posts is also important. With that said, I do try to make a point to blog every national park visit Elizabeth and I make. So without further adieu: one day in Olympic National Park.
But first, a tribute to the most beautiful major airport approach in the United States, Seattle in the evening.
As you can tell from the picture, we arrived in Seattle just at the onset of nighttime. In late November at this latitude and with this kind of marine layer, nighttime arrives with a thud. It was completely dark by the time we’d acquired our rental car and gotten out of SeaTac. Elizabeth handled the nighttime traffic like the seasoned city-driving pro she is, even though I picked the least convenient restaurant in the entire Tacoma area for dinner. Taco Time wasn’t even anywhere near as good as Reddit promised me it would be. If we’re reaching a point where you can’t even trust Reddit restaurant recommendations, then the entire Internet might just be a failure at this point.
Since Olympic National Park lies on the far side of the Puget Sound from Seattle, it was a roundabout 2 hour drive to reach our lodging for the night. Note how I use the word “lodging”. You see, my wife had really outdone herself this time. Somewhere up in the remote water-logged village of Sequim, Washington (pronounced SQUIM, not SUH-QUIM), some bright entrepreneur had collected a bunch of old railway cars, aligned them all along the same driveway, and named the whole shebang the Olympic Railway Inn. Given that it was far, far from the peak tourism season, the Olympic Railway Inn was astoundingly affordable. Elizabeth booked the “Orient Express” for Pam and Winston, reserving the “Lavender Limited” for the two of us. Their flight from DC beat us to town by several hours, so the two of them were already hanging out in their railcar by the time Elizabeth delivered us through the pitch-black of an Olympic night to Sequim.
As you’d expect from the foot of a rain forest, it was cold and misty at this hour, which made the climb up onto a repurposed (Union Pacific!!! Great call, Elizabeth!!!) rail car a bit of a treacherous one in the dark. But we survived it, and got the chance to go visit with Pam and Winston over in the Orient Express. It was pretty neat to see theirs, though I’d argue that it wasn’t as cool as our Lavender Limited. That’s likely because their car needed to have separate beds for the two of them. In ours, there was just a queen bed for Elizabeth and myself, leaving lots of space in the back for a luxury bathub.
After a phenomenal bath to wash away the grime of a long travel day, we hit the hay and hit it hard for the night. While we slept, the clouds and mist kept a firm watch over us, refusing to yield into the next morning. At least down here near sea level it hadn’t snowed.
The locals were less bothered than us by the weather.
If there’s something I’ve learned about a Fairchild family vacation, it’s that you just have to bake in the need for coffee. It’s all-consuming for all three of them. Fortunately, Sequim – a town of 8,000 people who apparently don’t feel self-conscious of the ridiculous pronunciation of their name – boasts several coffee shops, including the cozy Cracked Bean Co on the north side of town. The four of us descended on the cramped interior for lattes, hot chocolates, and breakfast sandwiches to fuel our day. All of it was excellent in a way that made it feel a little like the beginning of the holiday season (though I, a Michigander who only saw grey skies every day in the winter growing up, may have just been feeling nostalgia for home with the cloudy day).
Olympic National Park occupies the high terrain at the center of the Olympic peninsula. US-101 forms a lariat around the park. From it, spur routes penetrate into the heart of the mountains, glaciers, rain forests, and waterfalls inside the park. Much of Olympic was closed in late November because of the onset of winter, but some of the low-elevation (read: rain forest) parts of the park remained open. To gameplan our single day, we first plotted a course for the primary park Visitor Center on the south end of Port Angeles. It took about a half hour to get there, with little glimpses of huge mountains through the thick sheet of cloud cover in the distance all the way (that apparently only Winston and myself could see. Elizabeth swore we were pranking her). If anything, it was raining harder in Port Angeles than it was further to the east. The Visitor Center (a rather humble-looking building just a few blocks away from downtown itself at the start of the Hurricane Ridge Road) took the rain in a steady patter-patter. Somebody at the NPS had come up with the brilliant idea to make a “what to do” FAQs on a chalkboard and just stick it out in front of the building.
Of course, whoever wrote that didn’t contend with Elizabeth’s all-encompassing love for the NPS. It doesn’t matter if someone puts out a cheat sheet with all of the answers to the test. If the subject is the NPS, then she’s going to go to every single office hours session that the rangers will hold. Tortured metaphor aside, we stopped into the Visitor Center to get our stamps, my pin, her magnet, and most importantly, for Winston to get a seat otter finger puppet to bring back home to his girlfriend. He named the puppet “Otto the Otter” and brought it into every picture for the rest of the day as a bonafide member of the trip. When he wasn’t posing, Otto rested in the breast pocket of Winston’s jacket like a bizzare marsupial resting in its mother’s pouch.
Elizabeth also She confirmed for us that if we needed to be back into Seattle by evening, the best thing to do would be to continue west on this road and head toward Lake Crescent and Sol Duc. I was happy to hear that given that it confirmed the battle plan I’d already outlined in my head.
One thing that I/we hadn’t known about going into the trip was an easily-accessible waterfall halfway between here and Lake Crescent known as Madison Falls. Located where the aptly named Madison Creek tumbles into the much-larger Elwha River about 400 feet above sea level, the waterfall was sure to be running at a decent volume today given the amount of rain/snow that had fallen just since we arrived. On the advice of Elizabeth’s ranger friend, we added in a quick detour down the narrow Olympic Hot Springs Road to get there. In my opinion, it was worth it for the views of the Elwha River alone.
I was really hoping to see salmon in the river beneath us. A friend of mine from Washington had said that this was the perfect time to catch one of the types of salmon in the middle of its run. Unfortunately, there was no such luck to be found here.
Turning away from the river for a second, the path to Madison Falls was brief and paved. Everything was plastered with a thick layer of moss. There was moss on all of the tree branches. There was moss on the outhouse. There was moss in the hole formed by the collapse of a rotting log, whose breakdown had no doubt been accelerated by moss.
After a walk of no more than 2 minutes, the trail came to a little gash in the constant tree cover where Madison Creek makes its getaway from the mountains above. The path terminated in a little viewing area maybe 20 feet above the water, giving a perfectly unobstructed view of the little waterfall plummeting down the hillside. I was reminded a little bit of a cross between Cascade Falls in Ouray and any number of waterfalls that dot the landscape in Iceland.
No one else was around (not surprising, on this 40-degrees-and-raining morning), which gave me a chance to scramble down the rocky ledge and find a spot to get a more unique photo: from right in the middle of the stream. There were some pros and cons to this. Pro: I think the picture came out quite nicely. Con: there was a lot more spray here and this was all clearly fresh snowmelt. Which I guess was also a pro, because it limited the amount of time I sat in the middle of the stream. That was all to the good on a limited single-day schedule.
We turned around after a couple more minutes to begin the drive to Crescent Lake. On the walk back through the big pine trees, I very briefly got a whiff of damp red cedar. My sense of smell is awful, so I’m sure the other three were drowning in olfactory stimulus. But the fact that I can never smell anything is part of what makes that scent of red cedar so invigorating, so real. That smell was an instant time machine teleportation to Blake Island in 2023 during our first Washington trip. It was a reminder of why the big trees of Washington hold such a special grip on us despite our limited time in the area.
Here’s a picture of Elizabeth under those giant trees, partially taken so I could commemorate the moment that I smelled something.
From this most delightful appetizer of Olympic NP’s rainy-day beauty, it was another 20ish minutes westward to get to Lake Crescent. A glacially-carved valley lake formed by a landslide thousands of years ago, Lake Crescent was one of Elizabeth’s fondest memories from driving in this region with Pam and Winston in August 0f 2017 before her cousin David’s wedding. She was very excited to show it to me, which I thought was nice. Showing someone a spot that you loved and you think they will too is a little like giving a Christmas present – you’re hoping and praying you know the person correctly. So when you read this Elizabeth: you knew me correctly!
It was a bit of a mountainous drive to get to the lake, also. Like I said before, it was about 40 degrees and raining down around sea level. It didn’t take a whole lot of extra elevation for that cold rain to start turning into a rain/snow mix along the road. And further up into the Olympic Range? A full-on snowstorm, no doubt.
The Lake Crescent Lodge sits on a little jut of land with a great view of the long aspect of Lake Crescent to the west and its shorter aspect to the north. I pointed out that we might want to stop here and get some lunch even though we’d just eaten breakfast not long ago because, well, this was the remote rain forest. Anywhere beyond here wasn’t going to have a whole lot to eat other than banana slugs and wet leaves. The park road leading into the Lodge was guarded by beautiful, giant mossy pines, making it feel like we were entering through a grand natural tunnel. The parking lot was no more than 1/3 full. I guess the offseason and rain had even made Lake Crescent relatively quiet. Some ducks wandered through the grassy lawn in search of either natural or human-provided food.
The interior of the lodge was cozy in a way that NPS lodges usually try and fail to be. You know the usual NPS type – the Old Faithful Inn, the Lake McDonald Lodge – big, modernized structures that still playact as though they’re rustic Swiss chalets with log A-frames everywhere. Not the Lake Crescent Lodge. Maybe it was just because of how cold outside it was an how empty inside it was, but I genuinely did not want to be torn away from the fireplace in the lobby, which was roaring. There was a solarium where Elizabeth and I sat for several minutes, looking out over the misty expanse of the lake. There was a gift shop too (so maybe it did have a little bit of that classic American charm after all), but it was tucked away and out of sight. The few families there sat by the fire and spoke in quiet tones out of reverence for the ambience. We had to wait a few minutes for the dining room to open, but the good news was the best table in the house was all ours. It was a decent meal – maybe a little better than decent if you liked seafood, but none of us left hungry.
As we were leaving I commented to Elizabeth that this would be a great spot to book for a cold winter weekend, bring my laptop and just do nothing but sit out, look over the water, and catch up on blogs. Alas, here I am months later, typing this blog post from Oklahoma. So far, that dream remains unfulfilled.
The lodge’s lawn led down to a long dock. At Winston’s request we wandered over. The atmosphere seemed to know that a group of tourists was about to gaze over the lake and its surrounding mountains, and obliged inasmuch as the cloud level lifted a couple hundred feet to show the bottom flanks of Mount Storm King and its neighbors coated in a Hallmark-movie dusting of snow.
The water was stunningly clear, which the Internet informs me is a byproduct of a lack of nitrogen inside the lake. You could see all the way to the bottom from here, but maybe not further from the shore, since Crescent Lake sits some 500+ feet deep in spots.
Most importantly, despite Pam’s concern when I peered way over the edge, nobody fell off of the dock and into the frigid water below. That would have put a bit of a damper on the day.
It was a day that was already feeling more like an Olympic National Park hors d’oeuvres tray as opposed to a real, honest-to-god visit. You need multiple days, maybe close to a week, to travel the full collar around Olympic. You need the fleeting warmer weather that comes in summer to be able to penetrate deeper into the Olympic Range than you can in late November. And most importantly, you need to visit Forks, Washington, home of the Twilight Series. (The previous sentence was sponsored by: my wife.)
Since none of that was going to be happening on this trip, the next-best way we could spend our afternoon was hiking out to Sol Duc Falls. I don’t know if Sol Duc has a funny pronunciation like Sequim, but all this time later I still think of it as “Soul Duck” in my head, and would prefer if nobody corrected me. The Sol Duc River flows under US-101 past the western end of Lake Crescent on its way toward Forks, La Push, and the Pacific Ocean. Just short of that bridge, a secondary road wends its way upstream. At the end of the road is a 2-mile round-trip path to the heretofore unknown-to-us Sol Duc Falls.
The road was a little reminiscent of the county roads that had led to my mom getting a nasty bout of carsickness on the way up to Drift Creek Falls in Oregon in 2023, only not as bad. Halfway up the road we pulled off at a sign for something entitled “Salmon Cascades”. If I was going to live out my dream of seeing the Olympic NP salmon run, this seemed like as good a spot as any to try. Winston and I scrambled down slippery granite on the riverbank to get as close as possible, but when there aren’t any salmon in sight it unfortunately doesn’t matter how close you are at all: zero equals zero. The silver lining was that we got a much closer look at the powerful Sol Duc. Mountain streams sometimes lack in volume of flow because they don’t have huge catch basins, but they make up for it with the rapid rate of fall. The Sol Duc, as far as I could tell, didn’t have an issue with that. The waters were a brilliant jade-green as the river roared by. Never seen a river that green before.
After a few more minutes, we reached the trailhead for Sol Duc Falls. It was a little busier here than elsewhere. I mean, it makes sense. There’s no way a national park like Olympic is going to be completely bereft of visitors during a holiday weekend, even if that holiday is Thanksgiving. Sol Duc was one of the most popular open areas in the park. Of course a few people would be out here! While we ran into a few people along the trail, there was no hint that any other humans remained on Earth for the entire time the four of us were at the waterfall. The loneliness added to the Lord of the Rings element.
As you can probably tell from the picture, the trail was pretty muddy. It’s hard to blame anyone for that – the Hoh Rain Forest averages about 150 inches of rain per year, which makes it my kind of place. But you do have to expect that your paths will be a relatively constant state of gumbo. I guess you could call me a lucky one, since I’d brought my trail runners for the national park day. Winston and Pam were not similarly adorned and I could feel them cringing each time their everyday shoes squelched into some of the muck. The footing was also a concern. At some point I’ll get to blogging about Austria and can recount the day that Pam and I spent several hours self-arresting off of an icy trail deep in the Alps, but that was brought to everyone’s mind by the occasional treacherous steps on the path here. Since Winston had opted out of the Korbersee hike that had proved so taxing, I chose to let him be the Sherpa of the Day for Pam today and he did as well as anyone could have wanted.
It would be incorrect to say that the trail was boring. To do so would be to imply that there is monotony in the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the Pacific Northwest’s finest ecological treats. There was fungus everywhere. Some of it looked like little bleached sea anemones stretching off of downed trunks, while others looked like mushrooms so big you could stick them in a lazy river and have people tube under them. The forest was alive with a steady drip-drip. But… the trail itself was pretty straight, and after a while despite your best efforts to appreciate God’s natural beauties, a tree just starts to look like a tree. I welcomed a creek crossing halfway toward the falls in large part because it offered something different. It was a neat little spot, though, with a footbridge and then a social path above it for those who wanted to ford the stream as their forebears would have.
But the real excitement came after about a half hour of hiking, just as the trail was beginning its final descent into the Sol Duc waterfall area. It turns out that maybe we weren’t so alone on our hike as we thought.
Cougars are of course an extremely shy and secretive species. They want absolutely nothing to do with you and will go to great lengths to avoid interactions. They might as well be members of Gen Z, now that I say it. So we probably weren’t stalked by a bloodthirsty feline over the last mile of blundering through the muck. But also, a cougar attack had just occurred near here a few months ago, so who could say for sure?
And now we made the final descent with a narrow gorge on our right. Far below in the gorge, the Sol Duc roared. There was a bridge near the head of the canyon, above which the river cheerily approached the maelstrom. And then, after a few more seconds of picking our way through puddly stairs: Sol Duc Falls.
If the river had roared below the bridge, it was fully bellowing here. Pictures rarely do a waterfall justice, especially from a complete amateur of a photographer like me who didn’t even bring their camera because they didn’t want to expose it to moisture in the rain forest. But pictures really, really did not do Sol Duc Falls justice. From this cool viewpoint above the falls, it looks like the water is splitting itself into 3 different chutes like some fun choose-your-own-adventure water park ride (note to self: that sounds awesome).
But in person, this was nearly 50 vertical feet of pure, spraying-shedding power. The four of us had to yell above the torrent to communicate that Elizabeth did in fact want someone to take our picture from the bridge.
Maybe that one comes a little closer to capturing the true magnitude of the river. As a sidenote: how did that log manage to get itself wedged into the waterfall like that, and how long did it stay that way? Constantly buffeted by spray and wind, it has to be a prime breakdown/slide threat at any moment, but those logs are also huge and sturdy. Maybe it still sits in that spot to this day.
We hung out in the area of the falls for about 15 minutes, taking in this remote piece of nature’s beauty. Someone else was walking up right when we started to leave. Walking past them was a little like giving up watch duty for some remote army. Now it was their job to stand watch over (against?) Sol Duc Falls and its little role of being part of God’s creation.
We made rather efficient time back to the rental car while Winston filled Elizabeth and me in on what he is doing for his job. I really like hearing other people talk about their jobs, hobbies, and passions, but I think I’m really bad at remembering to ask, so this stuck out as a pleasant part of the day. Maybe the details of the job weren’t pleasant – after all, Winston works for a gun safety nonprofit – but the overall experience was. Unfortunately, I could not repay everyone for the positive experience when we got back to the trailhead, as my trip to the lavatory was not particularly concise (my potty trips are like my blogs: they do not specialize in efficiency).
It seemed unbelievable, but here at 3:00 pm at this latitude the sun was already starting to sink toward the horizon. I mean, probably. The only way to really know for sure was a gradual dimming of the ever-present grey cloud deck above. Either way, we had a several-hour-long trip back into Seattle proper to begin the family Thanksgiving weekend, so with great regret it was time to say good-bye to Olympic National Park. Like I said above: less of a full visit and more of an appetizer, but I fully get the love for Olympic. The rain forest is just so dynamic and beautiful, especially for someone who has spent a decade in semi-arid central Oklahoma. Next time we go back, perhaps the weather will be better and give us a view of the mountains, the glaciers, and good weather to see some of the beaches. But maybe not. After all, the rain forest will do what the rain forest wants.
The drive back to Seattle was a long, dark one. Car ferry routes crisscross the Puget Sound, and Elizabeth kept a close eye on which one was the most practical for our drive to Alki Beach. Eventually we ended up on Bainbridge Island, where the wait station for the car ferry had cookies and hot chocolate. The ferry itself was somehow even more tricked out, with a full cafe and multiple levels to walk around instead of just sitting in your car. One could sit in the warmth of the indoors at the front of the boat and watch the lights from downtown Seattle get larger and larger. Or one could be a fool and witness this same thing 20 feet away and 20 degrees colder out on the deck.
But eventually we did make it into Seattle in time to check into our AirBNB and meet Elizabeth’s cousins for a spirited dinner/trivia night at a local bar. All was right in the world of family and friends on a holiday.
