Road Trip: Olympic National Park

“Our national parks are blood.  They are more than scenery, they are portals and thresholds of wonder. . . Whenever I go to a national park, I meet the miraculous.”
— Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land

We ascended the road to Hurricane Ridge in a cloud.

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness?  Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
— G. M. Hopkins, from “Inversnaid”

Sign at the Hurricane Ridge Visitors’ Center

We began our tour of the national parks with a 3-day loop drive around Olympic National Park in Washington State.  This is a most amazing park because of the diversity of its landscapes — from snow-capped mountains to temperate rain forests to Pacific ocean beaches.

Our first destination was Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic Mountains.  Clouds had settled at the higher elevations.  There was little opportunity for sightseeing, as we looked out on nothing but white!

Our view of the Olympic peaks was a bust!

This wet and gloomy weather is one of the hallmarks of our Pacific Northwest.  When you vacation here, you have to surrender to the elements.  We soldiered on to our next destination, the Hoh Rain Forest, thinking that rain in a rain forest might make a more authentic experience.  But, of course, it was not raining when we got there!

Still, the effects of rain were evident everywhere — moss-drapped trees, green green streams, nurse logs nourishing new growth, filtered light.  We walked the Hall of Mosses Trail and the Spruce Loop Trail.  The tall trees were awesome.

Driving into the Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park

Tall, tall trees

Along the Hall of Mosses Trail

Nurse log, a fallen tree that nourishes new, young trees

Green stream bed

Spruce Loop Trail

Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way
by Mary Oliver, from Felicity

If you’re John Muir you want trees to
live among.  If you’re Emily, a garden
will do.
Try to find the right place for yourself.
If you can’t find it, at least dream of it.

When one is alone and lonely, the body
gladly lingers in the wind or the rain,
or splashes into the cold river, or
pushes through the ice-crusted snow.

Anything that touches.

God, or the gods, are invisible, quite
understandable.  But holiness is visible,
entirely.

Some words will never leave God’s mouth,
no matter how hard you listen.

In all the works of Beethoven, you will
not find a single lie.

All important ideas must include the trees,
the mountains, and the rivers.

To understand many things you must reach out
of your own condition.

For how many years did I wander slowly
through the forest.  What wonder and
glory I would have missed had I ever been
in a hurry!

Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still
it explains nothing.

The point is, you’re you, and that’s for keeps.

 

 

 

Prairie Sunrise

“The prairie landscape embraces the whole of the sky.”
— Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year

Sunrise over corn field

“The sun rose.  It popped up abruptly as it always does along distant horizons on the prairie or at sea.”
— Paul Gruchow, The Necessity of Empty Places

Here are some photos of a Minnesota summer sunrise at the old family farm:

Dawning day

Sunrise over corn field

 

 

The North Shore of Lake Superior: Split Rock Lighthouse

Split Rock Lighthouse State Park along Lake Superior

One of my favorite places along the North Shore is Split Rock Lighthouse State Park.  This place is often featured on Minnesota calendars.  Our visit was enhanced by the amazingly dramatic clouds over Lake Superior.  Rain showers threatened, but held off while we walked the trails in this park.

As you view these pictures, I think you will agree with the sentiment in this quote by Minnesota author Paul Gruchow:  “All the prairie world is in summer but a screen to show off the glorious sky.”

Quintessential North Shore scenery

Clouds over Lake Superior

 

From the shore at Split Rock Lighthouse State Park

Craggy, rocky shoreline

Split Rock Lighthouse

Lighthouse keepers’ quarters

The skies grew darker

Sheets of rain falling in the distance

Split Rock Lighthouse

And here are two more pages from my Minnesota travel journal:

 

 

Sunrise Over Big Turtle Lake

“With every dawn, every place on earth is a new place.”
— Paul Gruchow, Journey of a Prairie Year

View of the dawning day from the dock on Big Turtle Lake

“Red and pink light began to stream from a place below the horizon in the east like the notes of a silent fanfare.  For a long time the sun lingered just below the horizon, like a performer behind a curtain. . . . Suddenly the sun burst into view and the whole world was radiant. . . It began to climb, taking command of the day.”
— Paul Gruchow, The Necessity of Empty Places

On this trip to Minnesota, more than ever before, I was constantly amazed by the drama in the skies.  The clouds were ever-changing and in perceptible motion across the spacious skies.  Look how this sunrise unfolds:

Boat dock on Big Turtle Lake in northern Minnesota

Looking west at sunrise

Looking east at dawn

Same view, later in the day

Same view, nearing sunset

 

 

 

Summer at the Beach: Day Trip to Westport, WA

Westport, Washington

What is summer without at least a few days at a beach?  My husband and I took a day trip from Seattle to Westport, Washington.  The Pacific Coast is about a 3-hour drive from our home in the city.  Hours at the beach and nothing to do but watch the waves and clouds, settle down with a good book, enjoy the parade of families and dogs and surfers frolicking in the water, listen to the rhythmic pounding of the breakers and waves lapping at the shore — quintessential summer.  My husband brought back enough fish for supper.  I brought back a few patches of sunburn (yes, I burn even under cloudy skies) and a few good photos.

I do love our ocean beaches.

A patch of blue

Bluff overlooking the beach at Westport

Dune path

Seagull

You never know what you’ll find washed up on the beach.

Sand dollar

Some views from the jetty:

Surfers, Westport, WA

 

 

Wordless Wednesdays: 12 Views of a Sunset from 6 Miles High through an Airplane Window

 

Little Daily Miracles

“What is the meaning of life? . . . a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years.  The great revelation had never come.  The great revelation perhaps never did come.  Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”  —  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Clouds are always a miracle.

Clouds: Poetic, Provoking, Prophetic

Sunrise at Green Lake

“Clouds are wonderful in so many ways:  they are beautiful in both form and colour; they are poetic — their shapes suggesting other things, provoking the imagination; they are prophetic, bringing warnings and promises of what is to come; they are created by complex and various processes, which physics can explain; they have beautiful names, both scientific and vernacular — cumulonimbus, altocumulus, castellanus, cirrus, lenticularis, mares’ tails, thunderheads, mackerel skies; above all they come, day after day inexhaustible, never two quite alike, appearing over the horizon and marching in long, solemn or playful procession across the sky.  They are yet another of the silent forces around us, announcing in  their passage that silence does have meaning, does have shape and purpose and something to teach me.”
— Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence

Tied to the Sky

“Sun came out today, which raised my spirits to a considerable degree.  How our bodies and minds are tied to the sky!”
— Molly Gloss, Wild Life

Nearing sunset on the Olympic Peninsula

Those of us who live in the Pacific Northwest suffer from sun deprivation especially in winter.  These sunny summer days are noted and appreciated because we know gray skies will return.  Although I like clear, sunny days and blue skies, I think it is passing clouds that make sky-watching a rewarding pastime.  Nature gave us a dramatic presentation as we approached sunset on our drive home from the Olympic Peninsula.

Through the car window

Over the Hood Canal Bridge

 

Neither Young Nor Old, But Simply New

Morning clouds

Morning clouds over Green Lake, Seattle

“The clouds, the clouds, she thought.  Piled and beautiful, they were both indifferent and inviting.  They had that paradox of nature you saw also in the sea, a thing appearing eternal even as it changed every second.”
— Susan Minot, from Thirty Girls

VII
by Wendell Berry

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don’t think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforseen debilities.  Time is neither
young nor old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse.  And the clouds
— no mere measure or geometry, no cubism,
can account for clouds or, satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new — who has known it
before? — and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
over this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
it forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man.  And you, who are as old
almost as I am, I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.