Dosewallips, day 3, afternoon

September, 2017

Yep, we’re still only on day three.

Exploration of the Interrorem Cabin and a hike along the Ranger Hole Trail this morning was followed by lunch back at the trailer and a little nap in my anti-gravity chair.

I used to say “…and then I read for a bit after lunch.”  But I had to stop saying that when friends of mine snapped a photo of me “reading” … the book was on the floor and my chin was on my chest and I was sound asleep.  So now I just admit that I had a nap. 🙂

Refreshed from today’s nap, I jumped in the big white truck and this time headed north on Highway 101.  The highway turns inland and runs through the beautifully forested and rocky foothills of the Olympic Mountains.

Photo above is Highway 101 not too far south of the town of Quilcene.

My first destination this afternoon was the US Forest Service Ranger Station at Quilcene.  Rumor had it they had maps that were not available online and I found out that’s true!  I collected everything I could get about the area.  Everything was free except one map (the best one) which was a whole whopping $5.  I walked out of there with a bundle of great information.  I also learned lots of interesting stuff from the Ranger herself.

On my way north heading towards Quilcene, I had seen a sign pointing to Point Whitney Tidelands and Lagoon.  So on my way back south, I followed that sign down that side road and discovered a lovely gravel, saltwater, beach right on the edge of Hood Canal.

The sign above out at the beach was quite confusing to me at first.  I kept thinking the blue area was water.  Silly me!  Actually, the blue area is land … and the white area is water.  Sigh, what troubled mind would color the land blue?

The beach was public and was full of clams and oysters (some info here).  Just a few yards from the beach was a research center and shellfish “seed” plant run by the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe.  The physical plant had been built by the Washington (State) Department of Fish and Wildlife but had been abandoned by the state in about 2002.  The facilities were legally taken over by the S’Kallams and continue to be run by them.

For readers who are not familiar with shellfish of the Pacific Northwest, here’s a VIDEO about the Geoduck Clams that are harvested here.  They are not the largest clams on earth, but they are huge!  They are found all around Puget Sound and up and down the west coast of the USA, Canada, and Mexico.  The woman narrating the video talks about “goo-ee-ducks”.  She isn’t discussing ducks.  The word is spelled “geoduck”, but it is pronounced “goo-ee-duck”.  The pronunciation comes from the original native Lushootseed word for this clam, gʷidəq.  The original pronunciation is closer to “gwee-dek”.  How we mashed it around in order to spell it “geoduck” is beyond me.

And, just FYI for folks not familiar with clams here in the Pacific Northwest, there are several varieties of clams here … geoduck clams, razor clams, manila littleneck clams, native littleneck clams, butter clams, varnish clams, cockle clams, macoma clams, horse clams, eastern softshell clams.  Have I missed any?  🙂

The Interpretive Center was closed so it’s on my list for a visit some other time.  You readers with a sharp eye will see the reflection of me in my truck in the building’s window in the photo above.

Next door, this State of Washington WDFW (Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife) building was sizable but I saw no activity there even though it was the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday.  The only vehicle on site was that blue pickup truck with a flat tire.  I wondered if the state had abandoned this building as well as the research/seed facilities.

But let’s get out on the beach!

I enjoyed a nice long beach walk since the day was so gorgeous.

 

The photo above and the one below are looking NE (above) and straight north (below), at the southern end of Bolton Peninsula.  I have been here in my boat on two different cruises down Hood Canal so it was fascinating to see the area from land too.  What a pretty corner of the world!

And then it was late afternoon and time to head back to Dosewallips State Park and my trailer.  I was thinking I would like to just sit a spell and read my book before dinner, think of that!

But that was not to be ….

I got distracted again ….

Just a hundred yards or so north of the turn into the State Park, a sign beside the road mentioned a helicopter landing area and access to a clam beach.  How could I pass that up?  There was a huge grassy area that a helicopter could land in during emergencies, probably mostly medical emergencies I would suppose.

 

The geese, however, must have figured that humans created that open space just for them.  It was a “landing” zone after all.  Is that goose with the yellow beak a gray goose?  Does anyone know?  It seemed there was only one of them there that day.

There was a small parking area in the far corner of the helicopter landing zone with these signs (above).  One pickup truck with a slide-in camper was already there.  I parked and headed on foot out the very wide, nicely kept path towards the beach.

 

The beach was actually a LONG walk out.  This wildlife viewing platform appeared first.  The two people from that pickup camper were up there.  They waved to me and said hi so I climbed the stairs and joined them.

Turns out they were on their way home, north to Victoria, BC, Canada, having been camping for a month along the coast in California and Oregon.  They had one extra day so decided to stop at Dosewallips State Park for one night and then take the ferry from Port Angeles, WA, to Victoria, BC, tomorrow.  They had heard about Elk sometimes being in the area but figured they wouldn’t see any.  Ha!  Did we see Elk!  AGAIN!

The Elk were all over the grasslands between the viewing platform and the beach.  We counted them as best we could and came up with 48 Elk which meant two herds were there.

Turn your speakers on and turn the sound up before you start the video below.  The alpha bull bugles!  It’s a higher pitched sound than I thought it would be.

The bull was about 20 feet from the viewing platform, on the opposite side of the platform from the path thank goodness.  You’ll also hear what I call “mewing” sounds in the video — those are the cows.

 

After the bugling and mewing, the cows headed in from the grassland.  They didn’t move quickly, but they were definitely on the move in the direction of that alpha bull.

The three of us humans on the viewing platform were so engrossed by the alpha bull and the cows that we did not pay any attention to what was going on near the path behind us.  But the woman from Canada eventually turned around to look at the path back to our vehicles and said “oh-oh”.  In Tagalog (in the Philippines), o-o means “yes”.  In english here in the US, oh-oh means “oh crap we’re in trouble”.

Her husband and I then turned around to see what was going on … we all saw two more bulls (not the alpha bull, but two more), each one about six feet from the path on one side of the path, and two cows, each about ten feet from the path on the other side of the path.  We were boxed in!

 

The two photos above were not of the alpha bull, but it was a bull nonetheless right beside the ONLY path out to our trucks.  Another bull was behind him … and two females were closeby on the other side of the foot path.  We would have had to walk in between them, and that would have been absolutely foolish.  In fact, we could have been killed.

The three of us talked about how to get back to our vehicles and decided we didn’t dare try to get back until the Elk had moved through, which could take hours.  Each of us checked our cell phones … no coverage.  We really were stuck and it was after 6pm and getting colder.

I’ve joked about being in a predicament in past posts in this blog.  Those have all been written with a wee bit of humor.

This, however, was no joke.  We stood (and sat and stood and sat) on that viewing platform for over an hour.  The man from Canada did walk down the steps of the platform once and walked not even five feet from the platform but the alpha bull immediately came around from the opposite side of the viewing platform and headed straight towards the man from Canada … the bull Elk with head in the air and nostrils flaring.  The Canadian fellow took the stairs two at a time back up to the platform!

What saved our bacon eventually were four more humans.  We could hear them coming along the path through the trees and tried to think of a way to warn them.  When they appeared out in the open, in front of them, on a leash, was a dog.  The Elk here are very much afraid of dogs, since dogs smell like wolves to them.  When the Elk saw and/or caught wind of that dog, those Elk scattered!  And the three of us hurried off that platform and scurried back in through the woods to our trucks.

We got back to the campground just a few minutes before 8pm.  My dinner was a little later than it usually is that evening, but I sure was happy to be back at the trailer safe and sound.

Another great adventure, eh?  More than I thought I would have this day.  And more Elk sightings and encounters too.  And more wonderful people.  And a long walk on a perfect, quintessential, pacific northwest beach at that fishery/research plant.  And a great trip to the Ranger Station in Quilcene.  I suppose I could just sit outside my trailer and read, but where would the excitement be in that?