Four day, three night backpack trip to Blue Glacier with one night at Lewis Meadow, one night at Elk Lake and one night at Olympus Guard Station. Started the trip on Thursday, July 10 with a 4.5 hour drive from the Bellevue area to the Hoh Rainforest visitor center. Although we had gotten up early, but it was not early enough and we arrived at the Ranger kiosk at 10 am to a 2 hour wait to get into the park. Since we had thrown all our backpacking gear into the car and driven off, we used the waiting time to load up the backpacks and eat lunch. There is a "hiker" parking area but as the ranger told us, it's a free for all with parking and no rules if you can find a spot.
Started on the trail at around 12:45 pm. The Hoh River trail is flat with excellent tread and the views of the first growth giants, moss draped trees and large ferns are awe-inspiring. I kept thinking a dinosaur may pop out at any time. We were forewarned by a ranger that a cougar and bobcat had been spotted near the trail so we kept scanning our environment to prevent any surprises.
A bit before Olympus Guard station, there are two fords across the Clide Creek tributary to the Hoh River. The first ford can be forded or if you go to your left (north), there is large tree across the creek that you can use keep dry. Since we knew there was another ford, we elected to just ford the first water crossing. The water went to just below the knee and was cold but felt good on weary feet. Keeping water shoes on, the next ford was about 0.25 miles further. Arrived to the Lewis Meadow campsite and found a lovely spot near the river.
The next day, we headed to Elk Lake campsite. The trail starts out flat for about a mile before starting to climb moderately. Morning temperatures were cool but the humidity and increasing heat from the sun had us sweating by the time we reached Martin Creek and falls. This is a wonderful spot to filter water and dip your feet into the water. Saw lots of tiny little frogs along the trail about the size of a quarter. Asked at the ranger station later about the frogs but they didn't know much about them. A fellow backpacker told us they were some sort of coastal frogs that were endangered but I couldn't find it with a google search later.
Arrived at Elk Lake, found a campsite, put up the tent then spent the next hour trying to hang our bear bag. There were many very heavy food sacks on the wire and we found it difficult to pull the bags up with the slick wire, even with gloves on. Eventually we used carabiners and some rope that we had to put together a system that gave more leverage to pull up the food bags onto the bear wire. Grateful that we had brought these supplies!
Headed out to the Blue Glacier with day packs at 3 pm...so much easier to hike! Views started to open up and we could see Mount Olympus and the Blue Glacier along a section of the trail which was reminiscent of Kendall Katwalk. Needed to take care when hikers coming from the other direction passed us. We arrived at the infamous washout and ladder. Our timing was perfect since a large group of teenagers had just come up the ladder and we only had to wait for one person to come up before going down. The ladder is in good condition and is much less scary to use than it looks. At the base of the washout, there is a steep climb up with lots of scree and dusty footing to get to Glacier Meadow. Once you get to the top of this incline, the trail levels out with pine-needle carpeted trail to the Glacier Meadow campsite. Onward to Blue Glacier. We elected to skip the terminus and head up steeply to the lateral moraine. This is a rocky, steep climb with absolutely no indication of where the glacier is until you get to the top, turn the corner then oh my! The lateral moraine is reminiscent of Railroad Grade trail at Mount Baker with the sides steeply dropping on either side but plenty wide. We had a late lunch and had the moraine all to ourselves for 30 minutes before heading back to our campsite at Elk Lake where it turned out that the large group of teenagers were camped near us at the group campsite. Mosquitos were starting to bite and there were black flies that liked to take a chunk of your flesh buzzing around.
Slept in the following day since we only had to go to Olympus Guard Station. In retrospect, we should have started earlier in the cool of the morning. We were the last to pack up at 11 am to the increasing heat and humidity of the day. Even with a mostly downhill hike, we were pretty sweaty by the time we arrived at Olympus Guard Station. Found a gorgeous site next to the river and splashed around to cool off. Note: several of the sites have yellow jacket nests near them (we could see them buzzing around) but we stayed as far away from them as we could. They seemed to prefer buzzing around during the day but calmed down in the evening, although they came over to investigate our meal by the river.
The hike back to the car the next day was uneventful but we hit the weekend day hiker deluge as we neared the visitor center. Luckily we had 3 days of serenity but going back to civilization hordes was a little jarring.
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