Lake Quinault, a drive around the lake

October, 2020.

My friend Jan and I didn’t drive very far away from the resort/campground today; we stayed closer to “home”. But still we went for a good long drive. We decided to explore the road that runs around Lake Quinault, 30 miles. Because we stopped often and explored, the drive took us most of the day. Part of the road is a country, paved two-lane road, but part is smaller, and narrower, a more rustic road that you’ll see here in a bit.

We were blessed with a perfect day and a perfect outing. Again, it was a delightfully sunny, warm day. Amazing weather for October. Because it was a weekday, there was almost no other vehicle traffic on the road. We pretty much had the place to ourselves. We left in the morning, taking our lunches so we could stop and eat along the way, and we arrived back at the resort/campground in late afternoon.

Here are just a few of things we saw and enjoyed.

First off, at the very northeast end of Lake Quinault, where the Quinault River feeds into the lake, there are acres and acres of small farms on all of that flat land, that rich river bottom land. Three farm owners here were taking advantage of the popularity of this area among RVers and had opened up their land to boondocking … camping without access to electricty or water.

Elk Meadows was the only one of the three that restricted their land to campers/RVers who were 55+ in age.

 

The photo above shows only about 1/3 of the land that Elk Meadows used for campers. They also nicely enforced a rule that each camper must be a minimum of 40 feet from their nearest neighbor. You could park in among the trees, or right out in the open. Since my trailer is self-contained (has its own on-board heat and water and toilet and cooking and refrigertor, etc), this was a mighty attractive option for a future visit.

Just a couple of miles up the road, after all this flat land, the terrain got rocky … really rocky!

Look at the rock wall, solid rock wall, right next to the big white truck.

 

Hi Jan … thanks for the nice wave. 🙂

We explored here a bit, but we couldn’t really go far because the rock wall on one side went straight up, and the rock wall on the other side went straight down.

So we drove on up the road a bit, and shortly pulled off to the side of the road again. In the photo below, you can see a bit of a wooden barrier along the bottom of the photo … it was a short bridge across a waterway. There was no sign, no reason really to stop, but it seemed the right thing to do to stop and see what the bridge in front of us was all about.

We both walked onto the bridge and looked to the right, into that solid wall of trees, not really thinking we’d see much of anything except trees and more trees and maybe a little streamlet.

Well, look at this! It wasn’t Niagara Falls, but it was wonderful. What a great surprise.

 

Here’s a little video of the falls. As mentioned, there were no signs, so there was no name given for the falls or the creek. Click the small rectangle in the lower right hand corner of the video to enlarge it.

That’s no streamlet! That’s a lot of water. The volume of water in this one unnamed creek gives us some idea of how much water there is in this area … rain water and snow melt … hence so much moss!

On up the road a bit more and we came to a choice.

South Shore Road (to Hwy 101) was the road we had driven to get here from the resort, along the south shore of Lake Quinault. We now had a choice of heading up into the hills to Graves Creek Ranger Station and Campground (6 miles on a small, narrow dirt road) … or we could cross the Quinault River right here and then head back along the more rustic North Shore Road along the north shore of Lake Quinault.

We drove in on the road to Graves Creek just a short way, until this sign appeared.

Well! Hmmm. I knew my big white truck could handle the road, but I also knew I would never be using this area for camping. So we backed out, and turned around, and headed across the newly rebuilt bridge that spans the Quinault River.

 

What glorious country this is.

Just after the bridge crossed the Quinault River, then the roadway narrowed and became a gravel/dirt road. It was well maintained, but still it was rustic. In truth, that made the road and the drive all the more wonderful.

 

We started looking for a wide spot in the road to pull off so we could stop and have our lunches. We figured we’d be parked right along side this road, not really off of it, but that was ok. It took a few miles to find a wide spot. But when we did find one, it was spectacular.

Around one bend in the road there appeared this small “roadway” leading off to one side. It was only about 40 feet long, but it led almost to the river’s edge. We had the best lunch spot we could have imagined. We set our chairs up so we had a front row view of the river and the hills. We listened to the birds and the water. It was so quiet and so peaceful that it seemed we could hear the plants grow. Ah me. sigh.

 

Little Towhee had come along with us of course. Not surprisingly, she too hopped down from the truck and sat on her basket perch. She loved looking up at the hills and mountains across the river. She wondered what it would be like to live up there, what other birds would be there, what they ate, and where they slept at night.

For we two humans, however, our focus was more on our lunch. But then we started paying attention and looking around. The moss (and ferns) growing on the trees was every bit as thick as what we had seen in the Hoh Rain Forest. All of the plant life was so luscious and rich and green.

 

 

Even the sky and the clouds were miraculous. Look at the clouds in the last two photos below. What makes clouds do that? What makes them act that way and look like that? I really don’t know and would love to have one of you readers tell us what’s happening. My readers are the best, after all. 🙂