My efforts to plan a great four-day trip to Olympic National Park left a little to be desired. In hindsight, I totally give myself a pass because this park is complicated, and without ever having visited before, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the huge number of places to visit, trails to hike, and completely different experiences to try out. You can be in a rainforest one morning, on a glacier the next afternoon, and wading through tidepools the next day. Ridiculous! Awesome, but ridiculous.
One thing we knew we wanted to do from the very beginning, though, was camp on a beach. My efforts to reserve a beach campsite at Redwood State & National Parks fell through, but the number of beach sites available at Olympic is nearly infinite.
We chose Third Beach because it would be an easy hike in, after maybe having to hike out of a previous night’s backcountry site. If we still had energy, we could continue on as far down the beach toward Toleak (toe-lee-ack, not “to leak” – helpful tip to save you some embarrassment that we 100% probably did not cause ourselves) Point.
The 1.4-mile hike in from the Third Beach Trailhead was a gorgeous stroll through the forest. We were a little nervous when we got to the trailhead because the parking lot was packed. Granted, we didn’t arrive until around 5 in the evening, but… that many cars had to mean about a billion people on the beach, right?
In fact, we saw no one else along the entire length of the trail until we got to the beach itself, where we crossed paths with a family about to return from a day hike. The two adults and four kids were wrestling tires out of a pile of driftwood.
“Our good deed for the day,” the mother told us with a grin as a child who couldn’t have been older than 6 yanked on a stuck tire as big as he was. “Two tires is probably a good enough deed,” she observed, then encouraged the little boy to help his sister with a tire she’d already pried loose.
Once on the beach, we could see all those other cars worth of people, but the thing about Third Beach is, it is long. There’s a lot of beach, and a lot of space for people to spread out. The concentration of tents seemed to be north of where the trail came down, so we headed south to look for our campsite.
We cozied up in a nook between several rather immense drift-logs, with our rain fly mostly off and our toes pointed toward the ocean.
I am a mountain girl at heart, but I love sleeping next to the ocean. It took me some time to learn how to accept crashing waves as a soothing sound, but ever since I worked that out a couple years ago, I can just wrap myself up in their constant and inconstant roar and drift right off. Not to mention that sand makes lovely bedding (as long as you keep it OUT of your bedding). We had a great night’s sleep.
In the morning, we struck camp and found a good place to nestle our packs while we did a little exploring. We had a five-mile hike to look forward to later in the day, so we didn’t want to go too far, but we’d seen some photos of the tricky trails required to get around impassible beach heads, and we wanted to try them out.
It’s a little hard to tell from the photo how steep this slope is or how necessary the rope is to a successful ascent. The answer is that we absolutely could have scrambled up and down it without the rope, but it wouldn’t have been pretty. If we’d been wearing our packs, it would have been very difficult, so thank you for the ropes!
“This must be Taylor Point,” we mused as we finally came out on the edge of the cliff at the south of Third Beach. (Wrong. Taylor point was a lot farther south, but with all the kooky scrambling, it felt like we’d come a lot farther than we really had.) The view was excellent, though, and the scrambling had been worth it.
We didn’t go much farther, in deference to the afternoon’s scheduled hike, but this is one place I’d definitely like to come back to and get more of.
Thither & Yon 