La Push to Hoh Rain Forest

It was a little overcast when I woke up, I walked around the beach for awhile before Dawn and Tyler got up.  Someone had made an interesting dream-catcher like design out of sticks, shells and rocks in the sand. There were dozens of starfish crawling on the rocks and in pools along the shore.  I gathered some more driftwood and started a fire to take the chill out of the air. When Dawn got up, we walked to the other side of the beach and back.   Dawn befriended a small dog, who then started following us around.

 It was so windy, the tent almost blew into the fire while we were breaking camp!  Dawn had emptied the tent of sleeping bags, etc.  which was not staked down due to the rocky beach.  As soon as there was nothing in the tent to weigh it down, a gust of wind took it and is started to roll towards the fire.

  Dawn grabbed it, and struggled to hold it as the wind lifted it entirely off the ground like a sail.  Tyler was breaking down his tent nearby, and started laughing at Dawns predicament.  I was returning from loading the truck at the time, and was too far away to help.  After a brief struggle, Dawn managed to save and break down  the tent, but she was pretty pissed off at Tyler for laughing instead of helping her! (to Tylers defense, there were several large tree logs between them, and I don't think he could see just how close to the fire the tent had gotten)   We managed to pack everything else up without further incident, but Dawn stayed mad at Tyler for awhile after that!   After the tent was down, we noticed that several of the round rocks that had been under the tent had sayings painted on them.   Peace signs, flowers, "Love", "Hope", etc,  were painted on the small rounded rocks and left there.  Dawn and I noticed one at the same time that had "Funkey" painted on it in purple letters.  This meant something to us, as Funkey is the name of our beloved 15 year old cat, who had passed from cancer about 3 weeks before the trip!  In fact,  we almost had to postpone the trip...we would not have left Funkey alone in his last days.  Now, this was a sign to us that he was still here with us, in spirit.  We took the "Funkey" rock, and left the others behind.  We also saw another Bald Eagle while packing up, we were told that a bunch of them nest in the cliffs nearby.

Our next stop was the Hoh rain forest, where we saw the biggest Sitka Spruce in the world.

Think of a Christmas tree on steroids! It was here in the rain forest that we saw the first steady rain of the trip. This area gets over 200 inches a year, where Seattle, on the other side of the mountains, gets only about 35 inches a year.  We walked the "Hall of Mosses" trail,  where every tree was large and covered with thick moss.  Tyler found several slugs, big yellow "bananna" slugs, and some black ones as well. It was raining steadily, but not too hard. Today was  the only day on our whole trip that we actually used umbrellas! For some reasom, dead trees take a long time to break down and decay here...so we saw several "nurse" logs, where seedlings sprout on dead logs, and grow into new trees on top of them, using the old dead trees as nutrients!   After exploring the forest for awhile,  we continued on down the road towards Mt Rainier, our next destination.