ten national parks, one national monument, many state parks, many miles of hikes, all in three months…
So our three month tour of the United States has come to an end after a flight from Seattle to Dublin via Newark airport.
Back in Ireland now and enjoying the cooler weather and rain.
Final photos from Olympic National Park and our trips to Hoh Rainforest, Mora Beach and Ruby Beach.
We’re still alive, just not being able to get online much over here. So we have been to North Cascades, Mt Rainier and Mt St Helens in the past week, been busy.
Very cool and all well. Will get some more photos up soon once we get to a hotel next weekend and hopefully some wifi.
Very remote the majority of the park beyond highway 20 is wilderness and only accessible by hiking. The highway itself isn’t in the national park as it is too developed including three hydroelectric dams which helps power Seattle, so the road area is a National Recreation area, and the park begins to the North and South. This means that there is no entrance station that you find in all other parks. The park itself boosts more glaciers then Glacier NP and is not busy at all, the lakes too are even more turquoise blue.
After all the go of Glacier we decided to rest here and didn’t do much, only here for 3 nights too so time was limited. The 13 hour drive from Glacier took a lot out of us too, very long!
There is a great visitor centre here and the North Cascades Learning Centre is really worth a visit and also boosts some cool programs if you book in advance. The building is really cool and has internet access in the Library too which they allowed us to use for a few minutes.
We also went to the Global Warming ranger talk which was the most disappointing ranger programme we went to of the trip. The ranger was obviously conscience that he didn’t want to offend anyone or the administration who still think it’s a myth, and didn’t communicate global warming as fact more as a theory!