This park in extreme northwest Washington state is my long-time Seattle friend's favorite park. In fact, when we met, we quickly began talking about our mutual love of the national parks and how we have visited so many of them (my personal goal is at least 100 of them). It is a huge park so the visiting for eight hours limited how much could be seen. But we sure made the best of it.

The four of us met at the Hurricane Ridge visitors center just south of the town of Port Angeles which is in the north central edge of the northwestern Washington penisula. Lisa and Betsy are quite familiar with this park having been to it many times. So they were the tour guides. We drove up to the upper visitors center of Hurricane Ridge. There was much snow on the ground and some spectacular scenery. Great place to be -- relax and look at the Mother Nature show from the balcony of the visitors center. The sky was clear with a bright sun shining on the snow everywhere except concrete and asphalt surfaces. Wow,

Then, in separate vehicles, we drove to the west entrance to see the Hoh Rain Forest. We stopped in the town of Forks (population just over 2000 and famous for being the location of a television series about vampires) and ate at a Mexican restaurant.

After lunch, we went to the visitors center of the Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park. From there we hiked two of the three main trails for about three hours. One trail followed the river. Another fantastic show by Mother Nature.

Jan and I parted company with Lisa and Betsy as they were going to spend the night in the park while Jan and I headed back to Port Angeles since we catch a ferry in the morning over to Victoria in Canada.