Jeff Billimek’s Journal

When I woke up this morning I stepped outside on the deck and used my tripod to take this photograph of the sunrise over the bay:

Jen and I made plans to go over to Olympic National Park today. It’s a bit of a drive to get there and we need to take a ferry to get off the island.

We left the house pretty early and drove over to the Keystone ferry on Whidbey Island and took the ferry over to Port Townsend. It took almost two hours to get from there to Port Angeles which is near one of the entrances to Olympic National Park.

The weather today was a little nicer than the previous two days. I saw some patches of blue skies and sunshine. This made me pretty happy. We drove to the main visitors center and got some maps and information. I talked with a very friendly park ranger girl who gave advice on where to hike and what to do.

Jen’s Aunt Sandy and Uncle Chuck strongly suggested that we go to ‘Hurricane Ridge‘ area. Sadly, the road into that is closed due to snow. Instead we followed the ranger-girl advice and drove towards the Hurricane Ridge area but stopped at where the road closed and took a hiking trail to Lake Angeles from the ‘Heart-O-The Hills’ area where we parked.

The trail is 5.1 miles total and has an elevation gain of 4,150 feet. The conditions today were pretty cool so we saw some drastic changes. As we started out on the trail it was misting an slightly rainy as water fell from the tall pine trees overhead.

(The beginning of the trail was mostly wet with little-to-no snow.

As we progressed along the trail, the water dropping from the pine trees began to taper off and it grew a little colder. Eventually the water turned into snow and ice.

(More snow and ice began to appear the higher in elevation we went)

Jen was wearing her cool new hiking boots and some denim jeans. As we progressed through some snowy patches of the trail, she wasn’t having as much fun as earlier and began to complain a little.

(Jennifer waving from a cool-looking snow-covered bridge)

We pressed on and continued along the trail. I liked how much it changed. Eventually the snow got pretty thick and we passed a lot of people who gave up and turned around. Not us. We continued on and eventually came to Lake Angeles.

(blistering-cold Lake Angeles)

By the time we reached the lake it was overcast and snowing pretty hard. It was also quite cold so we didn’t stick around for very long. I think Jen was annoyed that we hiked such a long distance.

As we hiked back to the car, we talked about food. We were both pretty hungry because it was well past lunchtime by the time we made it back to the car.

Next we drove back into Port Angeles and looked for a place to eat. We drove around a little while looking mainly for a seafood place but ended up deciding on an Indian restaurant of all places. Jen and I were both in the mood for Indian food.

We had a nice (late) lunch and took our time. Our legs were a bit sore from all of the hiking today. The sun seems to go down pretty early in this part of the country so we were running out of daylight. I originally wanted to drive to another part of the park but there just wasn’t enough light anymore. Instead we decided to head back to Aunt Sandy & Uncle Chuck’s place.

I got turned around on our way out of Port Angeles so it took us a little while to get back on the main road to the ferry.

Along the way back Jen and I decided that it would be fun to pick up a bottle of wine for Chuck and Sandy. We stopped at a Costco along the way and Jen picked out (at random) a bottle of merlot.

We made out way back across the ferry and eventually to the house. It was fairly late when we got in and Sandy had some food waiting for us. We opened up the bottle of merlot to have with Sandy and Chuck. It was really good. We had a nice time talking before eventually heading to bed.