A walk in the woods

Darby and I took a four day weekend and went camping out on the Pacific coast in Olympic National Park. We took the ferry over to Bainbridge island and then drove north up the Olympic peninsula past Sequim and turned left out towards the most northwest point in the Continental USA, Cape Flattery. Just before the Makah Indian reservation we took a small road southwest to Lake Ozette and the Olympic rain forest. And we're talking real rain, up to 4 meters a year... A real jungle but with cold weather! Nice park campground, everything is wet, the ground is squishy, and more rain is forecast for the weekend. We set up camp, erected our rain tarp and went for a walk. Beautiful lake shore, lots of frog eggs and birds. The lake is 7 kilometers from the beach, there are two paths out to the coast, from the lake you can hear the ocean breaking on Cape Alava to the north and Sand point to the south. From 7km away... Long ago the Makah Indians who lived here made the paths, following the sound of the huge Pacific waves crashing ashore. Where the paths passed through particularly wet and boggy areas they laid down wood planks as sort of a walkway. When white settlers came out in the 1850's they added more planks to wheel their carts full of stuff from the beach where they landed to the lake where they lived. In the 1970's the national park service finished the project, now each of the two paths is a continuous wooden walkway for 7km!! We walked out toward Cape Alava, the western most place in the Continental US. Moss and lichen covered every surface, mushrooms grew on the moss and it started raining... We kept walking, deeper into the forest, more rain, we were getting wet now. Put on all our rain gear and kept going. Strange fungus and weird moss covered everything, the walkway was slippery and treacherous, and still more rain. We were getting wet inside our raincoats! The closer we got the louder the surf sounds, the forest opened up into a sort of half prairie half bog, full of unusual plants. Water everywhere. by the time we made it out to the beach it was pouring rain and the wind was howling. We sheltered under some cedars on the beach and had a quick lunch then turned around and went back. Just in time as the rain really started to come down. 7km later we are back at camp and soaking wet. This was a real test of our gear and it was better than no raincoat but we still got very wet. A nice campfire (dry wood from home!) and all was good. The next day we took explored the lake shore and then took the second walkway out to the southern beach. Nice weather and more amazing jungle on the way. The beach had more flotsam and jetsam than any other beach I have ever been to. Fishing floats and every type of plastic junk imaginable. All the stuff I could find with lettering on it was in Chinese... On the way home we went to the Makah reservation to their excellent museum of Makah history. Strange country, all that part of the Olympic peninsula is very poor, downtrodden and bleak. Logging communities with no logging left and no mills. So different from Seattle just 150km away...