Weekend at Lake Ozette

Barrett and I decided rather spontaneously to get out of town for the weekend and do an easy-ish hike. Washington state is a great place to do this! We chose the 9 mile hike at Lake Ozette, which is a triangular hike that starts at Ozette, meanders along a 3 mile plank boardwalk through the forest to Cape Alava, runs 3 or so miles along the beach to Sand Point, & then the last 3 miles on forest boardwalk again to the starting point--see this map in the upper left corner for the hike.

We left on Saturday and arrived in Forks, WA close to 4pm. The weather at that time was beautiful and the scenery just loverly:
Since it was later in the day, we put off the Lake Ozette hike for Sunday and went to the Hoh Rainforest at that time. We walked about 3 miles on various trails in the Hoh, enjoying the ginormous moss-covered trees and abundance of giant slugs:
This is possibly my favorite photo of me of all time. For now:
You've heard the saying, "Don't mess with Mother Nature?" Take that, Ma!
Dude, here's some hawt tree-on-tree action! Yowza!

Then we had pizza at a redneckified pizza parlor in Forks and went to bed. On Sunday, the Lake Ozette hike. The weather started out gorgeous:
But by the time we got to the beach portion of the hike, it started turning cloudy:
One of the fun aspects of the beach are the petroglyphs that still remain made by the Makah Indian tribe many centuries ago. They're just there, for anyone to look at and touch. We only saw a few but later found out there are about 30, if you have the time and patience to seek them out. Here was the first one we saw, two figures with elaborate headdresses (click on photos for better detail):
According to a website, this one is probably a whaling canoe; it's hard to see it clearly:
The same website says that this is possibly a weeping priest but Barrett & I were wondering if it was a fake, as it didn't have the same deeply-carved lines as the rest:
An orca carved on a long, flat rock:
By the time we spotted the final (and most famous) petroglyphs of orcas and faces, we were so bored with the whole thing. 300 year old carvings, YAWN!
I kid, of course! This photo was taken about 10 minutes before it started raining. We still had a mile to go on this portion of the hike and then the last 3 miles in the forest again. Yep, we hiked 4 miles in the rain. It wasn't so bad, really, and the forest cover helped considerably. Still, we were pretty soaked by the time we reached the car. Oh, one really cool thing--about halfway on the beach leg, around where my head is in the photo above, we saw a black bear eating a fish on the beach! Since our heads were down due to the rain, we only saw it when it was running away back into the forest. The funny thing is, Barrett had earlier said that in all the hikes he's done in the past 20 years, he's never seen a bear before, and voila! Other animals spotted this weekend: river otter, grouse, winter wren, evening grosbeak, rabbit, deer, and rednecks. We need to do this more often. And yes, my legs were sore the next day!