Camping in Olympic Park

Here are some pictures from our camping trip on the July long weekend. We went to Mora Campground on the southwest side of the Olympic Peninsula in Olympic National Park. The Park is 922,561 acres, 95% of which is designated as Wilderness. The Wilderness designation basically protects the land from any development. Because we had Olive with us we were not able to go into any Wilderness areas - it's cougar country and dogs can attract them.


Mora has 94 campsites available on a first-come-first-served basis and when we arrived at about 2 am on Friday night there was only one site left. We parked the car, booked the site for the weekend and set up our tent at the base of a huge tree. Sabbath morning we walked down to Rialto Beach which allows pets up to the Wilderness line. It is covered in driftwood and is one of the most popular beaches on the Olympic Peninsula because of its sea stacks and tide pools. We brought a picnic lunch and spent a couple hours there. Sabbath evening we went to a presentation by one of the park rangers on Olympic National Park.












Sunday morning we were awakened nice and early by the sound of a puking dog (luckily we were able to shove her out the door in time). Since we were up we decided to go down to Rialto beach for a tide pool presentation. It was raining a bit in our campsite, so we put on the rain gear we brought with us and drove down to the beach. The tide pool is just past the wilderness line so we left Olive in the car with her breakfast and started walking down the beach. What had been a light rain in our campsite was being blown by strong winds down by the ocean and by the time we got to the tide pools the front of Lindsay pants were soaked (Tim had the rain pants). We were the only ones to show up for the tide pool presentation. The guide took us around, showing us the different creatures living there and we all tried not to fall on the slippery rocks. We walked back to our car, now thoroughly drenched, drove back to the campsite and found that there had been a mass exodus of the park while we were gone. After changing and noticing that we were running out of dry clothes and the tent was beginning to leak we decided to call it quits too and returned home a day early.












On our way to the park we had taken the long way around, through the cities, to avoid the ferry, but since we were driving in the day this time we decided to take the shorter route. This also meant that we got to drive around the north side of the peninsula, which had some lovely views.

There are more pictures in our picasa album.