North Before East

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Before we left to come back East Seth and I took a trip up to Washington to visit the Puget Sound (this time from the West side) and to see the Olympic Peninsula for the first time.  Our friend Lenny (who you'll remember from previous bloggings) has been working on a tall ship called the Adventuress this summer, which sails the Sound primarily doing educational trips, teaching kids about marine ecology, sailing, and all kinds of other good stuff.  Lenny sent me an email earlier in the summer inviting us to come for a sail on one of his "Friends and Family" days; as we've been meaning to explore the Peninsula since we moved out West, this was a great reason to make the trip now, as opposed to "soon," which is always when we say we'll go.  Our sail was on Labor Day, leaving out of Port Townsend, which was a fantastic little town to visit.  Because it's a good harbor, Port Townsend was settled fairly early, and thus has a lot of old, ornate Victorian architecture that I sometimes miss out here: brick row buildings with bay windows up top and shops and restaurants on the ground floor... all condensed into something like ten square blocks, perfect to check out in just a couple of days.  It's also a very sailing-centric town, home to two marinas and a wooden boat building school.  All of this, along with the salt in the air, infused the whole town with an old-world romance, playing against the rugged frontier feel of anything found this far West and so remote.

Seth's new board in our beautiful old hotel room

View out onto the water from our beautiful old hotel room

Lenny doing some awesomely precarious sail wrangling out on the bow 

The sail itself was superb: sunshine and plenty of wind, not to mention one of the most beautiful ships I've ever laid eyes on and a chance to hang out with a good friend that we haven't seen in a few months.  You can click here to see more photos of the Adventuress from their website, and here to read their history.  The short and sweet is this: she was built in Maine one hundred years ago this year; and since her owner was a yachtsman, the rigging is of that style, making her an interesting ship.  She was built for an Arctic voyage in search of a bowhead whale specimen, and onboard her maiden voyage was a naturalist upon whom Indiana Jones was later based.  She was later sailed to San Francisco, and as the Panama Canal was not at the time completed, the trip was made the long way, around the tip of South America.  Now she lives in the Sound, and is again getting the kind of constant maintenance that a boat like that needs.  We stayed in Port Townsend after the sail and were luckily able to grab a drink with Lenny after his duties were done for the night, and the next morning we hopped a ferry over to Whidbey Island.

Ferry crossing view out our windshield

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We camped at a small state park on the Northern part of the island; it was a little more private than the camping near the ferry terminal, which was completely filled up with fishermen in big RVs.  We hiked a trail that ran along the bluffs overlooking the beach and watched the sun set over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the northern passage into the sound.  On our way back to the mainland the next morning we stopped in Coupeville for breakfast at a bakery on the water.  Not only did it turn out that our waitress had just returned from working the early summer season on the Adventuress, she had recommended Lenny for his position based on a mutual acquaintance (of all of ours) from Astoria, who had worked at said bakery last summer!

On our third night we camped at Lake Crescent, stopping along the way in Port Angeles to have lunch, and to check out another surprisingly cool little town on the edge of nowhere (and Canada).  Like Port Townsend, Port Angeles had a surprisingly large co-op grocery store, evidence of a decades old hippie migration and continued influence.  Port Townsend is also, as the name implies, an active Port; the Adventuress does some sails from there, and it is the American terminal for the Victoria Island Ferry.  Perhaps because of this, or perhaps just because its a very cool idea, the pub we had lunch at had a chalkboard behind the bar where they kept track of drinks, bought for friends and acquaintances in absentia that could be redeemed the next time said friend happened through.  It had "For" "From" and "What" columns, so a row might read "The Adventuress Crew" "Alyssa and Seth" "12 beers."  We didn't know if/when they would be through again this season, and so it didn't read that, but we thought about it...


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Crescent Lake was beautiful, a clear, piercing blue in color and too large to fully see from the campground, though we drove along the length of it on our way there.  I was really looking forward to taking a canoe or kayak out to explore it, but we had arrived just two days too late; the camp store and boat rental closed for the season on Labor Day.  We did meet some nice guys who had a spot right on the lake edge, and who were kind enough to share their beer and fire with us.  We turned in when they decided to go for a night swim, which neither of us could be convinced sounded like an appealing idea (don't think we'd had quite as much beer as they had).  The next morning we hit the road early, both of us itching to get to some water with waves.


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Neah Bay is one of the coolest places I've been as viewed on a map (zoom out above to see what I mean).  Being there feels much as you would imagine: on the tip of the edge of the world.  We went for a hike when we first got in, through thick old growth peppered everywhere with chantrelles.  After about half a mile we could hear the ocean; the trail continued to follow the water's edge closely, although further investigation always revealed a long steep slope down to whatever little beach or cove we were plodding above.  We were hoping to find a good spot for a sit and afternoon snack, and finally we found a (comparatively) inviting pathway down that someone had roped up.  We clamored down and enjoyed our own little private view while we ate, then headed back to find the campground.

The way back up; notice the rope on the right.

Our stay was one of the most pleasant car camping experiences I've had.  Most state parks try to recapture some sense of privacy while jamming in as many spaces as possible by leaving a narrow strip of bushes or trees between the sites, usually resulting in very little actual privacy, and no communal spaces for meeting other campers.  They're the suburbs of campgrounds.  Conversely, the Hobuck Camp Ground that we stayed at was run by the Makah Indian Reservation, which encompasses the whole of that little tip of the Peninsula.  They simply had an open grassy space, dotted with fire rings and separated from the beach by a narrow strip of dunes and sometimes trees.  We were free to camp anywhere we liked, and could have chosen a secluded spot in the trees (had we not been in the van) or on the edge of the campground away from other campers.  As it was we found a nice flat spot off to one side, but still fairly near to others.

Checking the surf

I've never met so many people at a campground before.  Many people were there to surf, which sparked most of the conversations that we had.  Seth's new board got some attention, being a fairly unique shape, and he even had to chance to loan it to someone with more experience and get some feedback ("like a skateboard on the water").  We met a couple of guys who were also there with some boards they had shaped themselves, one of whom lives in Portland and should be an awesome coast carpool friend.  While we met mostly people about our age, we had an especially good time sitting around the fire and chatting with a couple of older guys who were on a long motorcycle trip: up from Vancouver, WA (just across the river from Portland) across the ferries and islands, and then inland over a pass in the North Washington Cascades to ride back down to Vancouver on the east side of the range.  It's always cool to meet people who have been doing some of the activities that we love (backpacking, surfing, climbing) for decades, and to see where their lives have lead them.  One of them had kids still in school, and we talked about the difficulty of trying to raise kids with a certain intentionality.  I'm sure it's difficult in this era, when most folks let their kids disappear into their cell phones and video games, to try to instill a healthy balance of world experiences.   Milos said that while his kids love to spend time outdoors, he's always fighting the "keeping up with the Joneses" of what gadgets his kids friends have, and what their lifestyles are like.  Hell, its even hard to cultivate this healthily balance in oneself; modernity can be damn consuming if you let it, and you forget to stop and drink in the reality that is right there in front of you, not across the world represented on a screen.  It was extremely gratifying to connect with other people on that idea, because its what we were all there for: to spend time in a reality so captivating and complete that we blissfully forgot to think about the rest of the world for a little while.

Sunset view from atop the van

We were so enamored of being there that we stayed for the whole rest of our trip; there was another surf spot that we wanted to check out, but we just stopped to take a peek on our way back down to Portland.

The "other" surf spot, something for next time