Quick note: I’m still sharing a few blog posts from “Part 1” of our trip, i.e., our travels before we flew back to Minnesota for a week to celebrate a friend’s wedding on June 21st. I thought I might have time during our week at home to catch up on writing, but we prioritized fast and furious catch ups with family and friends instead. What a blur this entire trip and summer has been so far…in the best way.
For our remaining five days on the road before flying back to Minnesota, we drove north to explore the vast expanse of Washington’s Olympic National Park.
Nearly one million acres of the Olympic Peninsula are protected as wilderness — between the national park, national forest areas, and 600-plus islands designated as national wildlife refuges — but no roads actually pass through the heart of the park, so we traced the perimeter clockwise, before looping back down towards Seattle.
The whole time that we skirted and dipped into different areas of the park, we couldn’t get over how wildly different the landscape looked from hour to hour. The park’s web page describes that particular nuance far better than I could:
With its incredible range of precipitation and elevation, diversity is the hallmark of Olympic National Park. Encompassing nearly a million acres, the park protects a vast wilderness, thousands of years of human history, and several distinctly different ecosystems, including glacier-capped mountains, old-growth temperate rain forests, and over 70 miles of wild coastline.
We spent our first day right at the southwest tip of Olympic National Park exploring Lake Quinault and the Quinault Valley, snagging an open spot at the Falls Creek Campground and going for a quick hike on the Cascade Falls Loop.
Right near the shores of the lake, we also took a quick jaunt to look at the world’s largest Sitka Spruce (with a circumference of 58 feet, diameter of 18 feet, and 191 feet tall!) and tried our hardest not to be tree snobs, after spending nearly a week amidst the mighty redwoods of northern California.
On our hike around the park, and also over the past few weeks, we had been spotting what we imagined were salmon berries, but weren’t 100% positive. I really really wanted to try them, but also didn’t want a tiny berry to take me down (at least before we finished our trip, lol) so I had been holding off.
Side note: this trip has confirmed for me that, in earlier eras, I definitely would have been an evolutionary casualty, since I have a strong impulse to taste every brightly colored berry that I see. BUT I KNOW BETTER. But it’s still tempting.
With the affirmation of a PNW foraging guide-book, we were finally able to confirm the identification of the salmon berries…and thus taste test safely. I loved their radiant golden-raspberry color and tartness and wanted to fill my pockets with them to make into some sort of camp dessert, but the ones we sampled were still a little bitter (Taylor was not a fan), so we just gobbled a few down and continued our hike.
Back at the campsite, we made a quick meal over our camp stove and Taylor built a roaring fire. We actually haven’t had more than one or two campfires on our trip so far — between widespread burn bans and not wanting to saturate our clothes in smoke before retiring to a small tent and enclosed truck — but Taylor built up a toasty bed of coals this night with the express purpose of making a from-scratch cherry crisp.
We had thrown a tiny ziplock of brown sugar in our food stores all the way back at Taylor’s mom’s house in Scottsdale, and more recently picked up a small bag of flour, few sticks of butter, and bag of local Washington cherries at a nearby co-op. Using these ingredients plus a few “cinnamon and spice” oatmeal packets from our breakfast rations, we were able to build a pretty delicious cherry crisp base.
Without a recipe (or cell/internet access), we were baking by feel:
Washing and pitting the cherries.
Reducing the cherries down in our carbon steel pan over the fire with a small pad of butter, then deglazing the pan with a splash of boxed white wine for good measure.
Mixing roughly 1 c. flour with 2 oatmeal packets and 1/4 cup of brown sugar in a camp mug, then pouring the dry mixture over the jammy cherries.
Topping the dry mix with 1/2 stick of salted butter cut into small pieces.
Covering the pan with tin foil, moving the campfire grate up slightly (further from the hot coals), and letting the whole mess bake until the flour was no longer raw/white and the cherry juice was bubbling up around the golden-brown oats.
The mix of campfire smoke, caramelizing cherries, and cinnamon brown sugar smelled unbelievable, and the pièce de résistance was the pint of Tillamook vanilla bean ice cream that we’d picked up earlier and saved for the occasion.
After we filled our camp mugs with dessert, we walked around the campground and offered the extras to our camp neighbors, but unbelievably, everyone was already calling it a night and decided to pass. We were definitely not mad to have extras, and finished them off for breakfast the next morning.
The following day, we drove out to the coast and spent hours lazily wandering around Kalaloch and Ruby Beach: beachcombing, skipping rocks, chasing the tide, climbing enormous mounds of driftwood that covered miles of beachfront, and taking in the spectacular salty sea-spray views.
So far, in our first taste of Olympic, we’ve already experienced old-growth forests, fern-filled hikes, and coastal tide pools. Next up: dense rainforests, glacial-fed rivers, alpine lakes, and dramatic mountain scapes!