Winter Day Tour of Hurricane Ridge of Olympic National Park

First day of Seattle trip as we visited Hurricane Ridge of Olympic National Park, a misty wonderland covered in snow.

Despite having lived in Seattle for more than half a year, my friend had never been to Olympic National Park, which was high on his destination list. So while I was content with any hiking trail as long as there’s snow around, he’s pretty enthusiastic about Hurricane Ridge in particular, the park’s highlight point for winter activities.

In winter Hurricane Ridge was only open Friday-Saturday (plus holidays), that is, if weather cooperates and the crew are willing able to plow the road. And luck seemed to be on our his side. Despite city of Seattle hadn’t seen sunshine for a month and Hurricane Ridge being closed the previous day, and we holding little expectation, we got word from Twitter that it would be open today.
Unfortunately, that’s also when I found out that I left my camera behind today. So all photos on this page were taken with my cell phone.

After word from Twitter, I rushed through a car rental store moments after it opened and raced North to Edmonds, aiming to catch a ferry to Kingston.

Ferry from Edmonds to Kingston

Unfortunately, in line with me missing light rail by seconds the previous day we missed the 8:50 ferry by a minute, resulting in 40 minutes of boredom before we were able to hop on to the next one.

By the way, a note of this 20-minute ferry, which was priced at $15.75 per vehicle (cheaper for stuff like Honda Fit that’s under 14 feet) with $8.65 per additional passenger. This seemed like a money grab in comparison with last summer at Outer Banks, where a 2.5-hour ferry was $15 regardless of number of passengers.
To defend for this, one could argue that this ferry would save 100 miles of driving, and ferries farther South down Puget Sound were cheaper (as they didn’t seem to be charging per-person rate). But it’s just not the best thing on one’s mind after missing seemingly everything by seconds.
And it’s a larger vessel. The liberals would argue it’s more luxurious by having an (empty) food court and an exhibition/education zone with models of Puget Sound onboard.

It was a cold winter morning, I braved myself in the wind for only a few photos before heading back inside.

Once off the ferry, we spared no time racing to Port Angeles, gateway to Olympic National Park. Unfortunately most of the trip was on 2-lane country roads, meaning one was bound to be stuck behind slow-moving traffic.
Weather was fine throughout the way as the sun intermittently peeked from the clouds, giving us false hope that things would be as pleasant in the park.

Olympic National Park

We made it to the park’s entrance at 11:25am. Despite the park’s requirement of all vehicles carrying tire chains in winter, we didn’t see any cars actually wearing them.
The road up Hurricane Ridge was plowed pretty well, but very occasionally there might be patches of ice on the road (that didn’t seem to affect vehicle traction). At the same time, falling snow from the mountains was a bigger concern for drivers as they could block parts of the road unexpectedly, probably why the park kept plowing the road during the day.

We stopped at one (of only two) plowed overlooks on our climb, and admired the mountainous landscape in front of us.

However, things on top of Hurricane Ridge was a different story. To begin, it was raining intermittently throughout the day, and even when it’s not, occasional high winds would blow snow from the trees, as if the rain continued. Not to mention the thick fog all around, with the mesmerizing effect of feeling teleported to a different world.

Skiing and snowshoeing were the two major activities at Hurricane Ridge. After scouting out the location, my friends decided to go skiing at its only slope (in addition to a tiny beginner/kids area). However, I was terrible at skiing, even in video games. So I decided to hike around some surrounding areas.

It seemed that in winter, the only hiking trail that’s somehow doable without snowshoes was “Hurricane Hill via Hurricane Ridge” (starting at visitor center due to road construction). For all other trails, snow was too soft to support the weight of a human, that meant I was stepping into the snow as deep as my knees, followed by digging myself out and doing this again with another step. Even crawling on the snow didn’t seem to help.

So half a miserable hour later, I was back at Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center (thank God they were open), dried myself up while studying the maps, before heading out onto the right trail.

Despite that, walking in the snow was much slower than expected. Since park regulations required people to pack up and leave Hurricane Ridge at 4pm, I turned back after a mere 15 minutes and 500 meters.

On our way downhill, we stopped at the other roadside overlook that’s open. This one came with views of forests downhill with distant seas beyond which it’s Canada.

Port of Angeles

Once we were out of Olympic National Park, we decided to pay a visit to the nearby town of Port Angeles before heading back to Seattle. It’s a quiet little town with cottages spanning about a dozen blocks. For us at 5pm on a Sunday afternoon, the only attraction was its city pier.

And once night fell, it was like a charming Northern Europe town that’s brought to life by the hearty colors of streetlights among patches of snow.

Three hours later, we were back at Seattle. Under suggestions from my friends, we scouted “University Way NE” outside UW campus for dinner, aka “Food Street” by the locals.

Who could foretell it were to be the go-to place for dinner throughout my entire visit.
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Winter Day Tour of Hurricane Ridge of Olympic National Park by Huang's Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.