Olympic National Park !

This last long weekend again gave me a chance to get back to my hiking trips ... It had been quite some time since I had done an outing and as my friends had told me, this is probably the best time to go out & see some natural beauty of Seattle as Summer is about to be over ! so, yours truly called up three other friends and decided on a one day hiking trip to Olympic National Park ... The park (or forest is a better name) is so huge that you probably need a couple of days to visit it to satisfaction but we didnt want to camp out and stuff as the plan was a very last minute thing ... we just picked up one trail called the 'hurricane ridge' ...

Four of us left early morning around 8.30 ... The total travel to the Olympic national park was about 3 hours including the 30 minutes travel by the ferry... The best thing about this travel by ferry was that you could load your car on the ferry and then unload it at the other end ... I love ferries and I love travelling on water ! The deep blue color of the water is just amazing ! Again, pics speak much much more than words ... here they are ...

On the Ferry ! (Vaibhav, Mukti and Me)

Deep blue sea ! ;)

So the plan was to drive out of the ferry to a place called Port Angeles... Have lunch here and then start the hike on the Hurriane ridge .. So around 12 noon,we reached Port Angeles ..

Port Angeles !

we found a place 'Secret Garden Buffet' .. now Indian mentality told us that buffet is the best place and the name sounded like a chinese buffet ! Everyone was more than happy to hog on some chinese food !! But we entered, paid for 4 dishes and to our surprise, it was all american food ... Our apetite suddenly dropped to zero :( ... But we had no other choice ! We had to eat that since a 3.2 mile hike was waiting for us and mroe than that, we had already paid up !!

So, anyway after that fiasco, we started driving towards the real attraction and really hoped that this hurriane ridge does not turn out to be like this !! But soon we realized that the park is beyond our expectations ... the drive through the park itself was filled with breath-taking scenery all around ... we stopped at almost each halting point, took snaps, filled all the beauty into our eyes as much as we could and only then moved forward ...

one of my fav snaps .. amazin isnt it ? notice, we are all in air !
Doesnt this look like a 'Dil Chahta Hai' Snap ? ;)

After we reached the hike location, we took only the essential stuff with us and started the hike ... It was a HOT afternoon and we were sweating but still the hike was fun !! We started singing and soon we all four of us were singing pretty loudly ! Many of our american fellow hikers gave us complements for cool group singing !! :) .. It was fun !! Snaps, songs, scenery, jokes etc made the hike a worthwhile one ...

The successful ranger team ! :)

A view from the top !

Once we reached the top, to our surprise, we also found some snow !! There was scorching heat on our head and we were standing on snow !! another one of those natural wonders !!


we played snow-fight for sometime, took some snaps and started out decend by about 4 pm .... coming back down was easy and hence, the song volume was louder ! :)

beautiful sunset !

On the way back ...

But by the time, we reached down, everyone was pretty tired ... It was because of the heat and also the steep uphills ... but it was totally worth it ... We drove back on the ferry and back home ... tired and sleepy :) ... a day well spent !!