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Chimacum and the Olympic PeninsulaAug 3, 2009
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Mountain Tour Road
Hey! This is Uphill!
Hurry Up You Guys!
On Friday we finally escaped the heat of Vancouver and drove north on I-5 and then took highway 101 onto the Olympic Peninsula and up the west coast of Puget Sound to the small community of Chimacum. There is an Escapee park there called the Evergreen Coho RV Park. You can’t make reservations at SKP parks but they always have a space for you. So we dry camped for two nights until a full hookup space became available and now plan to stay here until next Monday.
Today we went on a short tour of the Eastern Olympic Mountains. We found a guided tour that started in Quilcene, about 25 miles south of Chimacum, and followed a route along dirt roads through the green countryside to emerge near Sequim (pronounced “Squim”) about 25 miles west of Chimacum. It turned out that the descriptive CD that we got at the ranger station in Quilcene was about fifteen years old and much of what they described had changed in the intervening years. But there were still some interesting things to learn about the attempts that have been made to harvest and manage the forests of the peninsula.
There were fourteen stops along the tour. Stop number seven gave us a chance for some vigorous hiking. Located there was the trailhead for the Mount Zion Trail. Although the round trip was only 3.6 miles, the trail gained 1300 feet in elevation so that getting to the summit was a challenge. The weather was warm too.
Arnie handles hills better than we do, so he wanted to move faster than we did. But we struggled along and finally reached the summit and shared a high five. It wasn’t a great day for views because it was misty in the distance. But we were able to see a little snow in the distant peaks of the Olympics and Puget Sound to the east was barely visible. We made it to the top with a lunch break along the way and then back down in about three hours.
We finished the tour and when we got back to pavement we drove into Sequim for a quick look and a Dairy Queen before heading back to Chimacum in time for dinner in the See Ya. We should sleep well tonight.
