Every summer I aim to go backpacking without kids at least once. This was my third adult backpacking trip and the grand finale of summer. I headed up toward Olympic National Park the most beautiful place on earth on a Wed night. After three attempts at campsites and discovering that the BLM campsites took only Discover passes in lieu of payment, I made the long late drive to the Hoh Rain forest where I had a cozy night in the back of my car.
The next morning I had a chance to explore the Hall of Mosses trail before heading out on my backpacking adventure. It was excellent to enjoy the early morning among the big trees.
This is one place that was not on fire and still green. The Hoh rain forest is lovely.
I finished the hike around soaking in all that the lush green rainforest had to offer.
So much beautiful moss.
I really liked this nurse stump. On my long drive out toward Sol Duc I made my camping coffee with some hot water from the gas station.
I arrived at the Sol Duc trailhood to find an eager group of five other hikers from the Seattle area. The first day was spent enjoying the Sol Duc forests. We hiked a half mile to Sol Duc Falls.
The falls were powerful and lovely. Sol Duc is like coming home. I lived at the hot springs resort for the summer and would run the trail to this very waterfall many days. While driving up the road I reflected on my first overnight in the woods of the North Fork of the Sol Duc river in early summer with many downed trees.
I fell in love with backpacking here as a 19 year old. Here I am reuniting with my memories of my 19 year old self.
We hiked a short 4 miles to Deer Lake which was our Thursday night campsite.
I really enjoyed the reflection and how beautiful the lake was.
We took a side trip toward Leech Lake that ended up being around 5 miles round trip. We discovered a little meadow.
This adventure had SO MANY delicious blueberries at every turn. I invested in a bear can big enough to take my oldest hiking here next summer. I LOVE Olympic National Park!!!
After a yummy blueberry full breakfast, we headed toward the seven lakes basin.
I started to feel like I was on top of the world.
I love hiking down ridge trails. The sunshine and high meadows made for an amazing day.
The blueberry bushes were starting to turn red.
Climbing up into the high places was amazing.
We started hiking down into the lake basin to round out a short 4.5 mile day.
We arrived at beautiful lunch lake and soaked in the view of the lake surrounded by the high places.
The water was sparkling! In the evening when I went down to filter I saw a black bear on the other side of the lake. There were also signs about goat herds following people waiting for them to pee but that did not seem to be an issue this year.
My hiking companions and I all took some time to relax and soak in the lake, sunshine, and high places as well as eat plenty more huckleberries.
Unfortunately, due to only having one permit, the ranger forced us to combine into one campsite. Here is our tetris of six tents to a campsite. Everyone had a peaceful night with some great memories of everything we had seen on days one and two...
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