Finally, our Canadian spring bike getaway comes to an end. Out at 0830, with just a snack, we get in line for the 1030 MV Coho sailing back to the States. After a bumpy crossing, we are starved, pick up a bagel at Olympic Bagel in Port Angeles–too many choices! We decide to take the long way home, continuing anti-clockwise around the Olympic Peninsula.

First stop, Crescent Lake. We wanted to check out the Lodge, but it is still closed for the season.

Crescent Lake is one of the most beautiful, with clear, blue-green waters and surrounded by the northernmost peaks of the Olympics. We’ve hiked the Spruce Railroad trail on the north side of the lake, many years ago when we used to spend Labor Day at Whiskey Creek Campground near Joyce, on the Strait, just a few miles to the north. This photo is looking east from the west end of the lake.

We head on west through a rain squall, over the hill into the Sol Duc River drainage, which US101 follows to Forks, a formerly quiet logging town at the confluence of the Sol Duc, Calawah, and Bogochiel Rivers that form the Quillayute River running just a few miles to the Pacific. Now, Forks is the center of the the Twilight book and movie franchise, as the setting for the tales of vampires and werewolves in the remote Pacific Northwest. As we pass through, we note little has changed in the 20 years or so since we last visited, except everything has been renamed with a “Twilight” prefix…  The gloom of rain passes and the sun comes out as we head south.

Crossing the Hoh River, we turn west toward the sea, coming to the coastal strip of the Olympic National Park at Ruby Beach, an icon for the sea stacks, rocky prominences that jut out of the sea, remnants of a drowned coast where the San Juan tectonic plate is being pushed under the Pacific plate.

A few miles to the south lies the broad, sandy Kalaloch (Clay-lock) Beach, where a hundred or so clam hunters stalk the succulent razor clam during the short spring season. Armed with “clam guns,” three-foot-long metal tubes with a vent at the closed end, or with long, thin clamming spades, the hunters watch for the siphon of a razor clam in the retreating tide, then pull or dig a core of sand, hoping to unearth one of these Pacific Northwest culinary delights. If no clam surfaces, they drop to their knees in the wet sand and dig by hand, sometimes up to their armpits, as the clam furiously digs deeper. Those lucky enough to bag their limit of legal-sized clams take home a plateful of one of the rarest seafood delicacies known. I’ve done this once, nearly 30 years ago. Today, we’re just passing through.

At the Queets River (rhymes with Keats), the highway turns inland, even backtracking northeast for a ways. We detour at Lake Quinault and drive past Quinault Lodge, one of the few old log lodges remaining, where we honeymooned 25 years ago. Alas, in semi-retirement, the room rates have outstripped our budget, so we make a U-turn and head south on US101 to Aberdeen, where we turn off at the western terminus of US12 to WA8 and WA108 back to the tail of US101 as it nearly loops back on itself around the Olympic Peninsula, arriving home just at sunset. The cat and grandkids are happy to see us, and we’re glad to be home, too, even if the trip wasn’t long enough.  There is lots more to see and do on Vancouver Island and on the Olympic Peninsula.  I guess we didn’t use it up back in the 1980s and 1990s after all.