Ozette: Visiting the Outer Olympic Peninsula

Last week we went on a four day camping trip to Lake Ozette on the outer coast of the Olympic Peninsula. This is one of those places I've long wanted to visit but hadn't ever been to until now. It's only about 180 miles from Friday Harbor, but with two ferry rides and lots of winding roads it took about seven hours to get there, which is part of the reason why it hadn't happened until now!

The town of Sekiu along the Strait of Juan de Fuca - namesake for one of our whales (K22)

The big draw for me to Ozette was the nine mile Ozette loop hike I've read about. While we didn't have the best weather for our trip (what do you expect for camping in a rainforest?), conditions did cooperate pretty well for our hike. It was overcast but not windy or rainy. The trail is an equilateral triangle with two sides being mostly boardwalks through the woods and one side being along the beach.

The boardwalk trail to Cape Alava

Foxglove

Bunchberry, or dwarf dogwood, against a backdrop of multicolored moss

About two miles out the boardwalk takes you through a clearing, the site of a historic homestead slowly being reclaimed by the forest:

"Ahlstroms Prairie"

Then, not too long after, our first glimpse of the rugged coastline. This part of Washington is the most uninhabited shoreline in the Lower 48, feeling more like Alaska than the rest of the United States. There's no road access here, or hardly anywhere along this part of the coast - this particular stretch goes over 20 miles with no driving access or development of any kind. Even the "trail" itself is really just the beach, which means the going is pretty slow! Stretches of gravel beach are interspersed with rocky shorelines that you just traverse any way you can.

It's a refreshing sight to take in: a beach in a fairly pristine state. Seaweed covered rocks, thriving tidepools, offshore roosts for pelagic birds, foraging bald eagles, and crashing waves. Nothing else. In fact, during our hike we saw just as many eagles (11) as other people.

We came across a gray whale skull not too far down the beach.

Keith pays his respects

Another highlight was locating some petroglyphs from the Makah tribe that predate European arrival to the Pacific Northwest. Pretty cool to see some killer whales etched into the rocks:

The true highlight, though, was the geology: all the sea stacks make for a very impressive landscape.

In some places, the headlands are only passable at low tides. There are overland trails you can take if you arrive at high tide, but I was glad we snuck through before the water got too high. This overland "trail" looked more like a rock climbing wall - notice the rope and near-vertical incline to the left of the sign. I would have been a bit scared to tackle that!

Of course, no where is truly pristine anymore, least of all the ocean. There was a fair amount of large garbage/debris that washed up, including lots of buoys, canisters, and derelict fishing gear. Several items appeared to be of Asian origin:

When we got to Sand Point, where the trail heads back inland, I was looking at some seals through binoculars and I was surprised to see a sea otter pop up! I really shouldn't have been surprised - when people identify our Salish Sea river otters as sea otters I often tell them how since the hunting era when sea otters were locally extirpated, they haven't returned to Washington's inland waters but are thriving on the outer coast where they have been reintroduced. Still, I wasn't expecting to see one! We actually ended up seeing about ten or so. I wasn't carrying my telephoto lens so unfortunately this is the only picture you get to see of one:

The hike was well worth the trip, but of course I was keeping my eyes open for wildlife all the time. In addition to the Swainson's thrush (170), warbling vireo (171), black-headed grosbeak (172), and cedar waxwing (173) that I added to the year list in recent weeks, on this trip I added purple martin (174 - in Friday Harbor while waiting for the ferry!), common nighthawk (175), and red crossbill (176). The most entertaining birds were the ones that visited camp, however - the normally skittish Steller's jays were quite the camp robbers:

Notice the blue "eye spots" indicative of the coastal morph of the Steller's jay - inland birds have white eye spots.

One of my all-time favorite birds, the Steller's jays are a Pacific Northwest icon conspicuously absent from San Juan Island. They don't like to fly over water - but have made it over the shorter waterways to nearby Orcas and Shaw Islands. As I mentioned, on this trip these guys were always hanging around looking to swoop in for food scraps. When we were packing up, with doors and the trunk open, I was surprised to see one fly out of my car!

There were also lots of fledglings being fed, particularly robins, chestnut-backed chickadees, and golden-crowned kinglets. Here's a young kinglet begging for food from its parent - it was amazing to see how many insects the kinglets could round up in a very short period of time! I guess you have to keep pretty busy to keep a hungry baby satiated.

Finally, no camping trip is complete without a couple of campfires - that's one of the best parts!

And a few roasted marshmallows, too....oops, burned this one!

An Evening on the West Side

We've had some incredible weather over the last 24 hours, with lightning and thunderstorms that are pretty uncharacteristic for this area. This afternoon right when I got off work, however, the sun came out, the rain stopped, and I was drawn to the west side after reports of orcas around earlier in the day. When I got to Lime Kiln, the clouds were dramatic and the water was flat calm. The spotting conditions were great, but there were no whales in sight, though it didn't take long to see harbor porpoise, harbor seal, and even a California sea lion.

I joined several other hopeful whale-watchers along the shoreline, where someone had been busy stacking rocks. This was an impressive tower!

The tide was flooding pretty strongly, but this harbor seal was holding onto his haul out as long as possible:

A couple purse seiners came by, super close to shore as they always seem to do:

It's no wonder they were out there today, because there were salmon all over the place. A couple of times a group of them started jumping like crazy, giving me a chance to get my first-ever salmon "double breach" and almost a quadruple breach!

It was so pretty I was content to just sit and take it all in - this shot was from Land Bank:

I was actually just getting ready to leave when I heard a loud trumpeting sound coming from out in the water. I thought I had heard something similar a few minutes before, but I thought it was probably some noise from the freighter that was passing by. This time, however, I spotted the long, low back of a humpback whale! Surprise! Right after I spotted him this guy got really active, breaching and spyhopping several times as he made his way north.

Humpback whale exhaling while spyhopping

Humpback breach!

The whale seemed to be getting closer to shore as it moved north, so I decided to stop at County Park on my way home to see if I could spot it again. It rounded the point just shortly after I got there, and while it wasn't much closer to shore, I got to point it out to some campers who were thrilled to see it. Here's the whale arching to go down on a deep dive just past Low Island:

It was a beautiful September evening, and an awesome way to end the work day!

Canyonlands National Park

The stars at night near Moab were spectacular. Even when there were some clouds during the day, the skies seemed to mostly clear every night. The Milky Way Galaxy was clearly visible, as shown here in this 25 second exposure I took one night:

Early Thursday morning my dad and I went back to Arches for a sunrise, and we decided to watch from the Delicate Arch view point. It actually took quite a while from when the sun came up until it hit the arch, but it was still pleasant to sit quietly and watch the landscape change colors during the 90 minutes before and after sunrise. I even heard a canyon wren during that time! Here's the view from the upper viewpoint after the sun illuminated the arch:

Delicate Arch, as seen from the upper viewpoint

After breakfast we drove to Canyonlands National Park. We only had time to visit the Island in the Sky region on this trip, but we had time to do several short hikes there and see all the major viewpoints. You enter the park on the top of a mesa, named the Island in the Sky because it is only connected to the surrounding land by a narrow strip known as "The Neck", and on all other sides drop the canyons into the Colorado and Green River valleys. 

It's hard to imagine this land was once a flat plain; it is now divided into three different levels, each separated by about 1000 feet in elevation. We stood on the Island in the Sky, the next step down was the White Rim, and then below that the river gorges. The top level is the most moderate in climate, the middle level the driest and most desert-like, and the bottom level the most lush in terms of flora and fauna:

View from the Green River Overlook

One of the highlights of Island in the Sky is Upheaval Dome, which actually looks like a big crater with a mound (the dome) in the center. Both the rock structure and the erosion here are different than elsewhere in the Park, leading to several different theories as to its formation. Under one theory, the crater was formed by a salt dome, wherein salt buried from a former marine environment pushes its way to the surface. The second theory, which has been further bolstered by the most recent studies done in the area, is that it's actually an impact crater formed by a meteorite collision.

Upheaval Dome

We also took the short loop hike to see Mesa Arch, which was probably my favorite vista in the Park. There's a 500 foot drop off right below the arch, providing stunning panoramic views under the arch down into the surrounding canyons:

Under Mesa Arch

We got another look at the three tiers of Canyonlands from Grand View Point. I got a great book on the geology of Southern Utah at the Park visitor's center, so I'll probably do a couple of follow-up posts after reading that describing more how some of the amazing geological features we saw were formed. For now, do what I did, and just enjoy the view:

Looking down from Grand View Point

On our way out of the National Park we stopped at nearby Deadhorse Point State Park. The point here is also connected to the "mainland" only by a narrow neck, this one only 30 yards wide. This was actually our favorite canyon overlook of the day, looking down onto the winding Colorado River. We didn't get too lucky with the light at Canyonlands in terms of photography, and dark clouds continued to build while we were at Deadhorse Point. One ray of sunlight shone down onto the river, however:

Deadhorse Point

And a wildlife update! The coolest sighting at Canyonlands National Park was neither mammal nor bird, but insectoid. It was a *blue* larva, a surprising find in what's mostly a brown, orange, red, and tan environment. I've done some searching online and cannot turn up anything that matches to tell me what it might be, other than a comment on a photo on one site saying its probably not a caterpillar but the larva of some other insect. Does anyone have any ideas?

The bird sightings continued to be sparse, but I did add a couple of year birds, too! I realized I never mentioned seeing some red-necked phalaropes (213) in the San Juans in late August, so the loggerhead shrike I saw at Arches National Park was year bird #214. Then, at the end of the Little Wild Horse Canyon hike, we saw a rock wren (215) in the wash, making that the species to bring me to my year goal of 215!

Little Wild Horse Canyon and Goblin Valley

Consensus among the family is that the highlight hike of the trip was Little Wild Horse Canyon, a slot canyon hike in the San Rafael Swell area. According to one site, the region is considered one of the "undiscovered" natural wonders of the American west, and it was easy to see why. Here's the empty road on the approach the canyon trailhead:

The hike starts out by taking you a half-mile up a wash, where a few trees were showing some pretty fall colors:

You then climb up a dryfall, and shortly thereafter reach a fork leading to the entrances to Little Wild Horse and Bell Canyons. You can make an eight-mile loop out of the two canyons, but we chose to go part way up Little Wild Horse through the narrowest sections and then turn around and come back out the same way. You didn't have to walk too far until you were in between towering walls about a hundred feet high:

In some places the trail was about 10 feet wide, and in others in was less than shoulder width between the two canyon walls. Here's my mom to provide sense of scale - most of the trail was about like this:

In several areas some pieces of the wall had eroded creating an obstacle course to continue up the trail. There were lots of passable regions that took some creativity to navigate, like this one pictured below. It's amazing to me that the trail hasn't become impassable at some point by a huge rock falling down into it!

The walls contained lots of interesting geologic formations, like this:

It was a warm day, but the after entering the narrows the canyon was pleasantly cool. Still, there was very little wildlife or plant growth (at one point a raven soared by overhead), so I couldn't believe my eyes when a little bit of movement caught my eye and it turned out to be a red spotted toad (Anaxyrus punctatus):

This one must have been an immature because it was smaller than my ID pamphlet for the region listed it, meaning there must have been water somewhere nearby for these toads to breed this summer despite reports from the locals that they haven't had a drop of rain since July. These guys pass their days in rock crevices before becoming active at dusk, and can tolerate an amazing 40% loss of body water and still be active. They're also great climbers, which you had better be if you live in a rocky canyon and need to search for water!

The photos really hardly do the slot canyon justice, as it's something you have to experience to fully appreciate. But here's another one that tries, showing a more open section of the trail:

At one point I let everyone else walk ahead, taking a moment to run my hands over the cool, grainy sandstone and try to understand the time and natural forces that it takes to shape such an amazing place. It's hard to fathom.

Nearby Little Wild Horse was Goblin Valley State Park, and though we were tired we had to drive through to take a look. Am I ever glad we did!

It was initially named Mushroom Valley by Arthur Chaffin, the first European to find the valley in the late 1920s. I think this was a better name for it, since the formations look much more like mushrooms than goblins, but it was later re-named by the state of Utah. The bizarre formations are formed in a geological layer known as Entrada sandstone, the same rock level that forms the upper part of the arches in Arches National Park (the arches stand on a lower layer of rock known as the Carmel Formation, and fractures between the two layers lead to the beginning of arch formation). Here in Goblin Valley, fractures still create weaknesses within the Entrada sandstone. Where the fractures intersect, corners are created where erosion starts to occur. The edges continue to weather away faster than the remaining flat plains, eventually leading to the spherical mushroom shapes seen in the valley.

It's amazing how subtle differences in geology lead to such dramatically different formations. Specific conditions resulted to make so many arches in one location in the national park, and so many goblins here in one series of valleys in the state park. Here's a row of goblins that really shows their mushroom shape well:

It was another spectacular day in Southern Utah! But there was even more to come....