Olympic June
Apologies for the delay as this adventure was actually the first weekend of June. We made another day trip to the peninsula as soon as we heard that the Hood Canal Bridge was reopened.
Our first stop was the visitor center atop hurricane ridge. To our delight, a new surprise awaited us at this oft-visited spot. The clouds only rose to around 5000 feet, and as we broke through the thick rainy cloud bank (the visitors center/trails are at around 5300 feet), a brilliantly bright perfect sunny day greeted us.
As you scan the horizon, you see prominent peaks piercing the tempestuous stew of clouds, which hundreds of miles away flows into the blue sky.
Unfortunately, the trailhead parking was snowed out, so we had to add a few extra miles on our hike. It was worth it – I’ve never seen the Hurricane Hill trail so empty. We only saw a handful of other folks. We felt as though the majestic views were all for us alone.
Afterwards, we visited some new spots: Lake Mills, Elwha River, Madison falls, and some new scenic driving.
At work the next week, many wondered how I got sunburnt from a rainy Northwest weekend. You can imagine my grin as I explained how my weekend was perfectly sunny - above the clouds.
The delay of posting is that our aging camera couldn’t handle the beauty of it all. The brightness of the sky/clouds contrasting with the mountain tops and forests was too much for it and yielded us a slew of under/over-exposed images. The brights are too bright, and the darks are too dark - evidence of the weak dynamic range. So, I employed my amateur photo editing skillz and tried my best to fix them. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. I didn’t add anything that was not there; I just messed with brightness/contrast/saturation/color balance/levels.
Before
After
More pictures here. They are all similar – clouds, blue sky, deep valleys, towering mountains, forests – but how could you ever bore of those? And if you don’t think the mountains are actually that blue, come visit and I’ll prove it to you.


