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o Price $390,000 |
| The 3-mile trail from the top of Lake Ozette to the Pacific
Ocean at Lake Alava leads through coastal forest that is a fitting preface
to exploring the larger rain forests to the south. The Olympic Rain
Forest, Jean Kirk wrote in her book by that title, "is perhaps the most
awesome part of the remnant forest in America. Nowhere is there another
forest like it."
![]() More gigantic trees of more different species grow here than anywhere else. The forest also is home to diverse species of bird and wildlife including some 2,500 head of Roosevelt Elk, so named because President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 named 600,000 acres of the forest a National Monument, primarily to save the endangered elk that, by the way, serve as the forest's natural 'landscape gardeners." 'After a hard rain," wrote the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a frequent hiker in the forest, "the trees will drip for days. On a bright day, shafts of sunlight fill the rain forest with a soft green light. Rain or shine, this forest has a quiet that is deep and profound. The quiet and the light induces a mood of reverence. This is not a place to run, to shout. This is a cathedral, draped in lichens and made of gigantic trees that are among the great wonders of creation:" |
"The wildest, the most remote and, I think, the most
picturesque beach area of our whole coastline lies under a pounding surf
along the Pacific Ocean in the State of Washington. It is marked as Cape
Alava on the north and the Quillayute River on the south. It is a piece of
haunting beauty, of deep solitude ... to be whole and harmonious, man must
know the music of the beaches and the woods. He must find the thing of
which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it . . ."
(from My Wilderness by the late William O. Douglas)
In August, 1958, justice Douglas led 67 conservationists along 22 miles of wilderness beach from Cape Alava to Rialto Beach. The hike made national headlines and squashed a proposal to build a road along the coastline.
![]() Looking much the same as it did when first seen by white men, the unique wilderness shore stretching from ShiShi Beach to the mouth of the Hoh River is the longest road less coastline remaining in the contiguous United States |
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Artifacts from the archaeological dig believed by scientists at Washington State University to date back 2000 years. 1592 1775 1778 1792 1845 1885 to 1890 1897 1906 1938 1953 1981 |
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