Olympic Peninsula

The Olympic National Park has strips of land along the Pacific coast, separate from the main body of the Park. These coast-strips are quite narrow, mostly just a mile or few wide. But we don’t notice that they’re skinny, since we’re on routes that hug the beaches.

There are only a small number of official, developed locations at which to access this Wilderness Coast. And there are long, isolated runs of coastline, between these few points.

But if you were to claw through the brush away from the water – at virtually any point along the coast – before traveling very far you would find yourself in … logging-country. Timberland. Inland from the Park coast-strips are relatively vast commercial forests. With logging roads, everywhere.

Locals have long gotten to specific wilderness sites on the ocean, by driving out along certain logging roads to parking-spots from which they can follow an informal route or path through the Park-strip, down to the beach. (Some of these routes & sites, will actually predate the Park.) Instead of having to walk all day along the beaches, they drive in on the logging roads and then walk half an hour through the brush – to get to the same place.

Walking through this brush is – cough – easier said than done … if you don’t have a trail. In the absence of an existing path, foreknowledge of the route, and real experience in these coastal jungles, that naive mile through the brush might as well be 100. Fighting just a short ways through this undergrowth & windfall & swamp, can make walking a darn long ways up the beach seem like a strikingly good choice.

The very popular Park trails out to the beach & back on the Ozette Loop include many stretches of picturesque Board Walk, to cope with the muck & swamp. Imagine having to travel parallel to these elevated wooden (plastic) foot-roads.

Still, the fact remains that logging roads cover all the inland forest resource. Generally, no part of the timberland is as much as half a mile from the closest road. Such a road system does get to be quite the maze … but it is a logical & efficient maze. You need the road maps; the roads are all numbered, on the map, but roadside signage is often sparse or absent … so you need a GPS too. Or very good maze-skills. Different government agencies & corporations own different parts of the forest … but nowadays every county has a good online mapserver.

Truthfully, finding a shortcut to a spot on the Park beach to have a picnic or an evening party is pretty far down the list of good reasons to undertake learning the logging roads and how to access the inland side of these coastal Park strips. The narrow band of mostly or near-virgin & oldgrowth forest-habit just inland of the beach is the best goal of this kind of project. Learning the commercial forests will be value #2, but it may gradually mount a credible challenge to #1.

It is much easier to make a modest penetration of these primal Park forsts … and retrace your steps (or use the GPS), than to follow all the way through with completely descending through the fierce thickets that blanket the final slopes down to the shoreline.

And too, plenty of this coastline is bounded by outright sheer cliffs.

Forest agencies & companies commonly offer permits – and privileges – to users such as hunters, fishers, firewood cutters, those seeking to gather forest-byproducts (mushrooms, ferns, et), or simply interested members of the public. By working with these systems, one can learn & stay informed about times & patterns of logging road access.