Tidepools and Rainforest: Scenes from the Olympic Peninsula

 This is a collection of fragments from my diary about our trip to Portland way back in August. We camped at Kalaloch Beach on the Olympic Peninsula, and spent three days exploring the tidepools and temperate rainforest of Olympic National Park.

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On our first morning there, I woke up to early sunlight and a crow yelling in the pine tree above our tent. I slogged out of the tent, grabbed a water bottle, and headed down to the beach under the cloudy sky. The shore was wide and muted and deserted, with thin lines of white foam bubbling up to the beach in rhythm. A flock of seagulls scattered overhead, soaring in a cloud toward another part of the beach.

I headed for the rocks we'd passed yesterday, happy to see that the tide was low. It took a while to walk to them, and I wasn't in a particular hurry. I listened to the hushed roar of the ocean, felt the clammy wind on my skin, and left sneaker prints behind me alongside the crab shells.

At last I reached the tidepools, and I was not disappointed! The tide was even lower than I thought, revealing volcanic rock completely covered in sea creatures of all kinds:

Chitons, which look like three-inch-long pillbugs glued to the rock.

Huge acorn barnacles, surrounded by a ring of shell, guarding a parrot-like beak on a neck (when you touch them, the beak opens and closed, and a wall of rock covered in goose barnacles sounds like a fizzy drink popping and sizzling).

Black-shelled mussels clustered together.

Ochre sea stars, which range in color from Magic-Marker purple to deep plum to bright orange.

Tiny goose barnacles clinging to every available surface.

Sea anemones, both green and pink, tightly rolled into themselves to wait for the ocean water to come back. The big ones sagged from the rocks like elderly green breasts.

Tiny whelks cruising along the sandy bottoms of the tide pools. 

Prawns jet-propelling themselves to safety.

Tiny fish darting around.

Little crabs scuttling to the edges and ducking into the rocks.

It was life piled upon life, the densest cluster of animals— these alien, incomprehensible animals— I've ever seen. They stuck to the walls of rock, glistening in the sun, not a plant to be seen. 

On the walk back, I saw a sand dollar half-buried in the gray sand, and picked it up. To my surprise, it wasn't clean bone but was covered in a thin layer of softer fibers, almost like crushed velvet. Then I realized that the fibers were moving. I had picked up a live sand dollar! "Sorry," I squawked, and set them down in the sand again. The dollar burrowed deeper. I could swear they looked miffed.

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Later that day we hiked in the Hoh Rainforest at Olympic National Park. The massive conifers reached so far up that you could barely see their canopies… but what really got me were the big-leafed maples. Maples in general are more familiar to me, but these are maples on a scale such as the Midwest couldn't imagine. When Lewis and Clark arrived, they marveled over the foot-wide leaves and ten-foot-thick trunks and thought that the shape was similar to a maple, but clearly maple trees couldn't grow this big, so they must not be. Yard-long swags of moss hung from the branches like beards.

We hiked five miles in and five miles back, winding through the moss-swathed woods, through sunshine twinkling through the fir needles, smelling the warm sun on pine needles, winding past groves of cedars and clumps of ferns into a savannah where we could see the peaks of Mount Olympus and the clattering river running by. 

Other than a wren and the occasional ten-inch-long slug, we saw very few animals. Like the tidepools, the woods were heavy with life, but this time plant life, rooting and photosynthesizing and growing so large that I couldn't see the tops no matter how far back I craned my neck. The ecosystems felt radically different, but also oddly similar, and seeing them both in one day made me feel hushed in the presence of so much life.

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One night, Zach and I walked onto the beach at night and looked up, through rags of clouds blowing through, at the stars. The Milky Way stretched in a bright band above our heads. The ocean and cold salt air roared by us. 

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Our final day there, we did one last beach walk. We walked in a world of gray; the mist obscured the horizon, fading from gray sand to mirror-gray water to fog-gray sky. The outgoing tide left vast swaths of sand covered in a film of water, which mirrored the gray, and then the blue as the fog started to burn off. Occasionally a seagull flew through or a jogger jogged by, but we were lost in the mist, where sand and sea and horizon and sky were all a suggestion, a blurred line, a dream.

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