No visit to Olympic National Park would be complete without checking out all the different ecosystems – the temperate rainforest, amazing tidal pools along the 70 plus mile rugged coastline, or the mountains to the sub-alpine forests and meadow.

Our guest is Lorna Miller who has hiked in over 30 national parks and countless state parks, national forests, and national monuments in her year-long road trip across the US. Find out what makes Olympic National Park so unique and learn about Lorna’s amazing travel style. As she recounts her memorable journey in this must-visit attraction, grab some travel tips and learn the value of meeting locals as you embark and explore Olympic. National Park. 

Visit Olympica National Park

No visit to Olympic National Park would be complete without checking out all the different ecosystems: visit the temperate rainforest to see HUMONGEOUS trees in the mist, look for starfish in the amazing tidal pools along the 70+ mile rugged coastline, or climb the mountains to the sub-alpine forests and meadows to see an incredible panoramic view (and then perhaps slide back down via the snow to save a few steps:)

Our guest today is Lorna, who has visited over 30 National Parks and countless state parks, national forests and national monuments in her year (plus!) long mega road trip across the US.  Lorna ranks Olympic National Park as her #3 favorite (after Teton and Glacier National Parks), so THAT’s saying something, isn’t it?!

All photos are courtesy of Lorna.

Lorna said that counterintuitively, the mountains are dryer than the misty and cool coast, so she moved up the mountains so she could dry out her camping gear.  She also talks about the extraordinary view she had on her favorite hike up Mount Eleanor, where she was blessed with perfect clear weather.  Lorna also got a chance to slid down the glacier!  Hurricane Ridge is especially popular (and busy) and offers incredible views of the Olympic mountains.  Note that this park is also great as a winter cold weather playground as well!

Prefer a Guided Hiking Tour?

Check out my affiliate Wildland Trekking!  They offer exciting guided hiking tours throughout the US, Canada and internationally!  Choose inn to inn based hikes, where you don’t have to carry all your gear, or go hardcore and backpack remote destinations.  They offer something for all hikers!  All you need to do is choose your adventure, train and then show up!

Besides the mountains, with their beautiful forest and wildflower-covered meadows, you can also explore the Hoh River Valley in the temperate rainforest with multiple gorgeous waterfalls and Jurrasic Park-looking massive trees.  This stunning area receives over 150″ of rain each year (second only to Kauai in Hawaii!), so bring your rain gear regardless of your starting weather.

There are short and long trails throughout the park, so you can tailor your adventure to your fitness level.  Be sure to stop by the helpful Visitor’s Center to get advice on trails, plus any safety considerations.  Black bears are in the park (but not very prevalent).  On our Glacier National Park page, I’ve got some helpful Bear Safety Tips.

You can easily do a self-planned trip of Olympic National Park, but if you prefer that someone else handle all the arrangements and guide you, I recommend Wildland Trekking.

With lots of rivers and the coastline, there are LOTS of  boating/rafting opportunities, too!  Plus, all varieties of salmon are found here for those who like to fish.

As one of the most diverse national parks in the US, Olympic National Park offers not only spectacular mountains and glaciers, and the jungleland temperate rain forests, but also over 70 miles of rugged coastline.

Take your photo next to the massive seastacks, especiall at Rialto Beach. The towering rock formations jutt out from the sea!  Just north of Rialto Beach is the Hole in the Wall, where the sea carved out a beautiful arch!   Most popular is the Ozette Loop (9 mile (14 km)).  Be sure to register and make a reservation!

When walking along the coast, be sure to plan well. There are areas where the water will come up to the break walls, and it may get too deep to walk in front of safely. Pick up a tide chart at the Visitor’s Center and ask them to show you how to use it, plus make note of break walls that are impassable at higer tides, then plan your walk accordingly so you don’t get stranded until the tide changes back to low tide!

This short video from National Geographic will give you a quick overview of this magnificent park and its wildlife!

When to go? Depends on what you want to see:

Wildlife April, May, Sept, Oct
Elk Early spring, breed Sept, year ’round
Bears Late April and May, berries late summer
Birds:

Migration late April/early May
Eating berries Late summer
Over Wintering Winter
Tidepools Summer
Waterfalls Spring and fall
Hiking Hurricane Ridge:

Regular hiking around April or May (you can snowshoe in winter) Road open? 360-565-3131

Driest July
High country hiking: wildlife and wildflowersJune/July/August
High country wildlife: marmots, deer. Chipmunk, hare, bear, goatsJune/July/August
Salmon Migration mid August into Sept
Rainforest Critters most active beginning October through spring (Banana slugs, mushrooms, etc)
Cool looking foliage Combo of fall brilliance with a backdrop of snow caps in fall
Solitude Winter

Visit Olympic National Park with Lorna Miller

I’m going to be interviewing a hiking buddy that I met in summer at Glacier National Park. Lorna has been to over 30 national parks and countless other state parks, national forests and national monuments. She puts our adventure to Olympic National Park in her top three of all those amazing places. We’re going to find out what makes Olympic National Park so special. Plus, we’re going to learn about Lorna’s unusual travel style. Lorna is taking road tripping to a whole new level, basically camping her way across the country and seeing this remarkable United States of America. This makes for an affordable way to see our national treasures. Lorna is one of those lucky ones that are able to work virtually. As long as she’s got Wi-Fi, she’s in business and is able to support her travels both from savings and from working part-time virtually.

We met on summer and have kept up on Facebook. I did this interview with her in spring and she’s been visiting me here in North Carolina, getting a chance to regroup, get some hardcore work in while she’s got decent Wi-Fi, which as you know in national parks, may not be the best. Also, get a fresh change of clothes and just have a nice dry roof over our head for a week. It’s been great catching up with her and I think you’re going to really love this interview. After my interview with Lorna, I’m going to tell you a little bit more about the nitty-gritty details about Olympic National Park, the wildlife, and some of the other things that you need to know. I’ve got a special surprise I want to announce. When I was up in Philadelphia for a conference, two people asked me to do something. At first, I was like, “I don’t think so,” and then the more I thought about it, I was like, “Why not?” I’ll be announcing that at the end of the show.

—

Can you please introduce yourself and explain how we met and what on earth were you doing when we did meet?

My name is Lorna and I was out traveling and seeing the world and I ran across some wonderful ladies to help me out in Glacier National Park. One day together turned into two days, turned into three days, turned into four and here we are.

At the time, you were not just at Glacier National Park, you were doing something extraordinary. What were you up to?

At that point in time, I had decided to quit my job and spend the summer or a year. I had enough money saved up that I knew I could travel for a year if I was careful with my money and camped a lot. I had left at the beginning of May and started picking national parks and I ended up seeing 25 national parks, thirteen national monuments, eleven nature recreation reserve, nationally owned areas. I drove through 34 national forests and I also visited thirteen state parks in those few months. I just went out and did a nice big loop starting in the Midwest and then down to the south, up to the north when the summer got warmer and then out to the West Coast and down the West Coast and then back home.

When did you decide it was time to come home? Can you say how long you were out and then what made you say, “I’m done?”

I was out for a few months and I was coming down through California and I got down to Joshua Tree and I stopped one day and said, “I should probably take a picture of this.” I went to another place and I was like, “I should probably take a picture of that too.” I realized that I really wasn’t enjoying the park experience anymore. I was so saturated because I’d been to so many different places in such a short amount of time. It was that point in time I was like, “If I’m not wowed when I walk into a beautiful place, I’m just saturated and I need to go home and rest my brain, recover a little bit.” That’s why I decided, “It’s time to go home and recoup a little bit and see how things go and maybe go out again later,” which I did.

Once you got back home and then you took a break and then you went back on the road again. Are you still on the road now or are you back home again?

I came home, spent the holidays with my family, working and helping out with my parents and then in February, I went on the road again. I went down south and I went through New Mexico, spent a bunch of time in Texas. I visited some friends there in Texas. I went over to Louisiana up through Arkansas to Kentucky. I went to another four national parks and a couple of other state parks and then I went overseas with one of my friends. We went to Ireland and into London for half a week and that culminated the big part of my being back out on the road trip. I’m hoping to get some breaks one summer and make some smaller loops in the Midwest and see some more of the nationals in the Midwest. I’m hoping to knock off other three or four national parks one summer.

Hopefully, you’ll someday come to the southeast so I can share my neck of the woods.

Hopefully, I got a long list of people who were like, “When are you coming to visit me?”

I’d love to have you. You’ve seen probably more national parks than most people I’ve ever met. You have quite a broad exposure of what’s available out there. The one we’re talking about now is Olympic National Park. How does that rate compare to the other parks that you saw?

I enjoyed Olympic National Park a lot because there was so much variety. It is a big area, but there’s so much variety. I came in on the southeast corner of the park and stayed in the Staircase area. I climbed Mount Ellinor and I had a beautiful day and I went up and you could look out over all the mountain ranges. It was beautiful. There are some spectacular state parks out there by the beaches. I stayed at Port Angeles at Salt Creek County Park and then I also stayed at Dungeness Recreation Area. It was an eleven-mile hike out onto the spit and you’d walk out to this lighthouse at low tide and then you come back. That was a really neat experience, but there’s just so much around. If you want mountains, you go into the mountains. If you want to go do tide pooling and see the ocean, all of that stuff is right there. I didn’t think I was going to spend very long there and I ended up spending twelve days in the area and it was not long enough.

How do you know when the tides are? You had the tidal pools and so you need to know that to go out to certain places?

You need to take the break so that you can actually appreciate parks for what they truly are. Click To Tweet

If you go anywhere in the national park, you can ask for a tide chart. I said, “I don’t know how to read the tide chart. I’m from the Midwest.” They sat down with me and they taught me how to read a tide chart. The state parks, they all had pamphlets that you could pick up that would show that months’ worth of tide charts and I figured out. I was like, “If I want to hike out to this lighthouse, I need to get up at 5:00 in the morning and start hiking by 5:30 so I can get out there and then before the tide starts coming back in, I can be on my way back.” They teach you that stuff. I use the visitor centers a lot and they were really helpful. If you get a good person at a visitor center and you’re patient and ask questions, you can find out a lot of information

You had the tidal areas. You have the alpine areas and they also have a temperate rain forest too. Did you go in there at all?

I did. The rainforest area was very nice. It’s got a lot of nice displays. It’s all very short hikes and more of if you can’t walk very far and needed a short hike, that was a great place to go. There was a nice center there. From there, the only other trails were backcountry. If you’re looking for a four-mile hike or a three-mile hike, you’re going to have to walk into the backcountry on that one trail and then come back out. There weren’t any loops to do. There was in an area called Sol Duc where they had some really nice loop trails where you could go out and make a six-mile loop, and it was fairly flat. There’s a nice waterfall out there. They see some nice big trees.

When did you go? What month were you there?

I went out right at the end of July and that first week-and-a-half of August.

In the mountainous areas, you would want to do that in spring through fall I would assume? How high up does it get?

I went up to Mount Ellinor, which is probably between 6,000 feet and 6,500 feet. I had a good day that day and then there are plenty of hikes out to do out on Hurricane Ridge too. When I was there at the beginning of August, it was just at the end of the peak flower season. There were still some flowers blooming but not a ton. If I would have been there in mid-July, I think I would’ve seen a lot more of the flowers, like what we saw in Glacier.

What we saw in Glacier was incredible.

I think that was on the late side of the flower blooms up in the mountains, but it was still very pretty.

At that time of year, was it overly hot in the rainforest or did the trees keep it cool? Was it still comfortable?

It was still very comfortable. The temperatures, once you got up in the Alpine areas, was really very comfortable. I was surprised that I’d never camped along the ocean or along beaches before and I was surprised that I would be in town for dinner and then I would drive out to the campsite that would be out along the water. In a six-mile drive, the temperature would drop ten to fifteen degrees and the beaches were colder to hike at. They were cold and wet because it’s the Northwest. After a couple of days of having your equipment being all wet, you’re like, “Let me go up to the mountains to dry out,” which seems like the opposite. That was a new thing and some new lessons for me there that it was like, “I’m tired of being cold, let me go up into the mountains.” Cold, misty and rainy along the beaches out there, but it’s beautiful.

On my beach areas in the summertime, we get a lot of mosquitoes at night. Was that an issue at all?

I didn’t have any.

That coolness is keeping the mosquitoes down, too. Up in the mountain areas, do you have any bear issues and do you have any bear stories to tell?

Out in the Olympics, I did not see any bears. I know that there was some there, but whenever I talked to a park ranger and I said, “How careful do I need to be? Have you had any sightings this year?” Every park ranger that I talked to said, “We haven’t had any sightings.”

Is that for the black bear, the grizzly bear or both?

I’m pretty sure those were black bears. I think they were the smaller black bears, if I remember correctly, but I might be wrong on that. No bear issues. I talked to a couple of different people. I took in a group of six people who were doing backcountry one night. They couldn’t find a camp spot, so I let them camp in with me. I don’t think they even had bear spray with them. Bears just aren’t a problem at Olympic like they are in places like Glacier and the Tetons.

I do have some, “How to deal with bear safety,” on the Glacier National Park episode. How did you get into all this adventure travel? It’s unusual for a single woman to go out and just go camping and hiking all over by herself. What gave you the courage to start doing that?

Growing up, I had an aunt that worked out in Grand Teton National Park every summer. Growing up, a lot of our vacations were going out and seeing her out in the Tetons and venturing out into those mountains. To me, that is still my home away from home is the Grand Teton National Park. I had asked and planned, and wanted to go do some of these big national parks and I just couldn’t find anybody to travel with. I couldn’t find people who had the time. I went up to Boundary Waters on a canoe trip and the people I was traveling with, we had planned that nine-day trip. They wanted to pull out after six days and I was like, “I’m not ready to go home.” That was my first clue of how long could I stay out camping and doing this stuff before I got homesick. It turns out it’s five months.

I’m curious to know myself what my outside boundary is on that. The longest I’ve gone is six-and-a-half weeks and I could have still stayed out more for sure.

When I got to Joshua Tree, I knew it was beautiful, but I wasn’t overwhelmed with its beauty anymore. I was like, “I’ve seen so much and I’ve done so much, my brain is just saturated that I need to take the break so that I can appreciate these parks for what they truly are. They’re each individual portion of the park that makes it beautiful and unique.”

I’ve seen pictures of Joshua Tree. They’re spectacular. If you start getting jaded, that is a good time to go home.

That’s what I was like, if I’m not wowed from every moment, I just need to take a step back, take a break and that’s what I did. I came home, spent time with my family, had some good time with my family over the holidays and then I went back out again. It gave me a better appreciation then for that southern loop that I did here this spring to see some different national parks. I was like, “This is amazing. This is beautiful.” I’m glad I took the break. It cleared my head and started from square one again to see everything with new perspectives.

Let’s go back to Olympic. Is there anything that you wish you’d known outside of positioning of where to put your tent, mountains versus the sea? What advice would you give people that are considering going there?

The popular places like Hurricane Ridge, I wish I would have been on the ball a little bit more because of those big places that everybody visits, I couldn’t find a camping spot. When you’re traveling and going to these national parks during their peak seasons, if you’re not in there looking for a campsite by 10:00 in the morning in the more popular areas, you’re not going to find a campsite. That was a pretty harsh lesson that I had pulled out of a county park. I’d been sitting in for a couple of days and I was like, “I’ll go up there and I’ll get a campsite tonight.” I got up there and I was like, “It’s noon and there are no campsites left. It’s like, “Where am I going to stay tonight?” That can be a tough thing to deal with, is figuring out when you’re doing it. I did everything on the fly. I didn’t make any reservations for any campsites. I literally just drove someplace and hoped to find someplace. You learned that lesson of like, “If I don’t go early, I’m not going to get a campsite.”

Are you able to book in advance?

You can, there are many of these campsites that you can book in advance. I chose to make my trip very fly by the seat of my pants. If I get to someplace and I really like it and I want to spend an extra day, I don’t want to feel forced to move onto a different area because I’ve got a reservation somewhere.

When I’m not making a group trip, I’ll book my first three nights so I can get my bearings and after that then I’ll do whatever I want.

I’m the opposite. I’m like, “I’m just going to show up and see what I find and if that campsite is full, I’m going to look for another campsite.” There were a couple of times that I ended up driving a little more than I wanted to in a day. Olympic National Park is up on this peninsula and there are the mountain areas. There are the beach areas, and then there are some really beautiful also state and county parks, you can find camping. It might not be in the park, it will be adjacent to the park, but it will work out.

Are there advantages to staying in the park versus staying outside of the park as we did at Glacier? Would you have preferred being in the park?

If you don't talk to a stranger, you're not going to know what the best hikes are and the best places to go. Click To Tweet

I did both and because it was all still the same area, to me it didn’t matter that I was in the park or out of the park. I might’ve driven an extra eight to ten miles to get back up to Hurricane Ridge from the local campgrounds. To me, it was not a big deal because I was out driving for the whole summer anyway. To me to drive an extra ten miles for a campsite was not a big deal.

What kind of wildlife did you see?

In Olympic, I didn’t see too much. It’s not a real large mammal-heavy park, like the Grand Tetons and what Glacier is. I didn’t see moose, bison or bear. It’s mostly just smaller wilderness. I saw a lot of birds and a lot of smaller mammals, but nothing really big. It’s not epic like, “There’s a whole herd of bison,” it’s nothing like that.

Is it more the vegetation and just the landscape itself?

It was really beautiful.

The hiking varied from people that are either handicapped or not hikers all the way up to they had some rugged hikes as well.

I did a blend of some of these areas, so it seemed like almost every area that I went to, there were nice small hikes that were very short and then bigger, longer hikes where you could go up into the mountain range and see some of that stuff. Hurricane Ridge was set up really nice and there was a little area over there called Hurricane Hill that it was steep ascent, but it was short. Everywhere you went and it was plenty of waterfalls like, “There’s a waterfall a half a mile off the trail,” and there is another one where it was like, “Here’s another waterfall that’s only two miles from the campsite.” It was a nice blend of hikes.

Water’s accessible. You don’t have to carry a lot if you can treat your water, right?

There was a lot of water.

Did they have any lodges at the park or is it basic camping?

I think up at Sol Duc you could stay at the resort. There was a hot spring up there and they had a resort in the hot springs up there. That was the only place I really picked up on there being like a resort-type area. Everything else seemed to be mostly camping.

You were there in the heat of the summer vacation time. The glacier was crowded when we met. I guess we met you at the end of the month. Once you get away from the Hurricane Ridge crowd, were you pretty much on your own out there or was it still crowded on some of those trails?

Once you got away from Hurricane Ridge, there was not a ton of people. It was very nice. It was enough people to be friends with and like the shorter hikes to the waterfalls and stuff. There were plenty of people around but it wasn’t overly crowded. When you went on your long hikes, then as soon as you got two miles away from your car, everybody got really friendly because we are all out there in the backcountry doing the same thing. I hiked up to the summit of Mount Ellinor. It was a very small group that we all hopscotched back and forth, and we all became friends by the time we were on top of the mountain, took pictures for each other. We all watched out for each other. Not overly crowded, I didn’t feel like. Except for Hurricane Ridge, there was a lot of people up at Hurricane Ridge. 

I think it’s interesting what you’re saying when there are less of you. It makes it easier to first of all communicate and get to know the people and also, you bond really quickly for whatever reason. Do you keep up with any of those people like we keep up?

I didn’t do that. That was one of the things once I got back here and started settling in. There was an older couple that hiked up to Mount Ellinor with me and we spent a lot of time together talking. I was like, “Why didn’t I take a picture with those two and get their information?” I should have stayed in contact more with the people that I met along the way. I just chalked it up to, “This is this moment, this is this experience and this is this person in this experience with me.” I let that moment be that moment and I didn’t carry it over to my reality of coming back and being in the real world of not traveling every day.

There’s one woman that I met at Glacier that we spent probably three hours together, had lunch together. She was with her grandson. I regret that too. We really hit it off and I regret that because I would like to have kept up with her. You don’t think about it sometimes, but I have a handful for sure of people that I’ve met just for a hike, walking on a day that I still keep up with, you being one of them, although we hung out for a couple of days.

There was a gal that I met down in Oregon. We were in some way back little camping spot, and I was paying my money at the front and she pulled in. She was by herself. After spending so much time with you and Venti, she pulled in and I said, “Are you camping by yourself?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Come back over and camp by me and let’s hang out.” She was doing about the same thing I was doing where it was like I’m just going to go out. She was traveling in a larger vehicle and she was sleeping inside of it. I think it was a Suburban. We compared notes and I was going south, and she was going north. I gave her all of my information of like, “Here are all the parks and campgrounds that are north of you that you’re going to be driving through.” That’s one person I wish I would have kept in contact with because I would have liked to see where her adventure took her and how long she was out. 

Did you meet many people doing what you were doing?

I didn’t meet a lot of people at first. One of the really good things that have got me over as I’m an introvert with people I don’t know, it forced me to learn. If you don’t talk to a stranger, you’re not going to know what the best hikes are, what’s the best place to go. I eventually got comfortable enough that it was like, “Where are you hiking now? What other hikes have you done?” I got a lot better at being able to speak to strangers and it was something I’ve never had that skill set of. That helped me grow personally because it was like, “If I don’t talk to somebody, I’m going to miss the best stuff that’s here.”

In all those encounters, was anybody ever mean to you?

I don’t think I ever had a bad experience with anybody. I’m trying to think back through my whole summer and no.

We all have these fears and I can’t think of one time when I put myself out there that anybody was anything but gracious.

When you’re in crowded areas, people do get short and get frustrated because there are so many people. I probably was not the nicest person a few times because I was annoyed with the people around me doing things. As soon as you got into the backcountry, you got two miles away from wherever the trail was, it’s a totally different attitude of people.

Tell us some of your favorite memories and stories.

Probably the best memory I have is summiting Mount Ellinor and glissaded for the first time, which I slid down the snow.

What is that?

It’s the new word I learned. There was still snow up on the mountain and there was an area where the snow was still covering the trail, but it was a steep area, so when you hike up there you can go out onto the snowfield and slide down the snow as part of the trail. It’s called glissading. I did that coming down off of Mount Ellinor, and that was a lot of fun knowing that I had people that were keeping an eye on me and making sure I didn’t fall off the mountain when I got down to the bottom on the snow. That was a highlight being able to slide down the little snow glacier area. I really enjoyed going out to the beaches and doing the tide pooling out in the clay rock area out on the beaches. It was beautiful. I’ve never done tide pooling before and the tide pooling was cool.

Describe tide pooling.

When the tide goes out, all those little creatures get stranded above where the water line was, and so you can go out there and you find starfish. You find anemones and all kinds of little creatures and pick up some shells. Being from the Midwest, it’s a whole different ecosystem. It’s neat to go out there and be like, “What is that thing?” and doing the research and learning the different names of all the little sea creatures that you see out there. It was neat.

They’re the ones that got stranded by the tides?

Don’t get stuck in the mud. Do things while you can. Click To Tweet

Yes.

What would happen if you didn’t time your hike out there properly? Do you have to just stay there to the next low tide?

There are areas that are called headwalls. You need to learn like if you start hiking along the beach and you walk past a headwall where the topography comes out into the ocean and you can get around that headwall at low tide. You need to remember if the tide comes in, you might not be able to walk in front of that area again. It was interesting to talk to different people. I talked to a guy who was training to do a 24-mile beach hike and he was like, “You’ve got to watch headwalls.” I said, “Teach me about that stuff.” He taught me how you’ve got to pay attention to your tide charts and know which headwalls you can get past at high tide and which ones you can’t because you strand yourself. There were people getting rescued out there because they had stranded themselves from a headwall that they would walk down the beach and then the tide would come in and they couldn’t get back. I know there was at least one rescue while I was out there. You learn all kinds of new wonderful things. I’d never heard of the rain shadow of a mountain. I had somebody teach me about, “This area’s in the rain shadow.” I was like, “I don’t know what rain shadow means.”

I have never heard of that either. Please explain.

The rain shadow is there’s a little town that has a lot of lavender growers in it and it’s in the rain shadow of the mountains, so they get very little rain. Apparently, it’s in the shadow of where the rain comes through. I didn’t totally understand everything. I’m probably butchering that.

Sometimes mountains can create their own weather. Like down in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the Dominican Republic gets the rain and Haiti doesn’t get so much rain. I think that it can block it somehow. It blocks it a little bit.

There was beautiful lavender up there.

Lavender doesn’t like a lot of water, so they would like it on the dry side.

I learned a lot of different terminology and things to watch out for. I learned about tides. I learned about headwalls. I learned about the rain shadow. It was neat. You don’t find out that information unless you’re talking to locals.

Did you get to meet a lot of the locals in your travels or other travelers mainly?

I met a lot of locals and that’s where I started coming out of my shell because I stayed up at one of the county parks up there. I pulled in and I have Iowa plates on my car. I’ll bet you on the first day I had four different people walk up to me and say, “Are you from Iowa?” I said, “Yes.” Many people had a connection with family back in Iowa. I ended up spending a lot of time with a couple that the husband had grown up in Iowa. The joke was like, “This is like little Iowa because half the people I’m talking to have Iowa ties.” Everybody was so nice and very accepting. They were like, “Come over and have a beer with me or come over and have dinner with me. Are you alright? Are you camping by yourself? Come eat with us.” They were just really friendly.

Were you ever lonely?

I like being alone, so I never got to any point where I was lonely. Once I got down into Southern California and I realized that I wasn’t being wowed anymore, then I was like, “I think I’m ready to see my family,” but I wasn’t lonely. I never really had problems with loneliness. I’m pretty good at entertaining myself.

Any other advice you’d give people about Olympic?

If you really want to see a nice portion and not be rushed through Olympic, give yourself ten days to two weeks and try and see as much as you can. Don’t skip the beaches.

There are four ecosystems there. You’ve got the tidal the beach area, the rainforest, the alpine and the sub-alpine. If you had to rank them, if people don’t have two weeks, how would you rank that yourself as, “Do this first for sure.”

For me, Hurricane Ridge and seeing all the peaks was number one. Number two was the beaches and that stuff because the beaches are all part of the national park too. I would say seeing the rainforest stuff. It was great to see the really big trees, but then by the time I got down to sequoia and those other areas, I was like, “These are big trees.” If you’ve never seen big trees, when you go see them at Olympic, it’s like, “These are huge,” but then because I ended up seeing larger ones later down the trip, I look back at these and I’m like, “They were big, but they weren’t sequoia big.” Those are probably my top three. Make sure you go to Hurricane Ridge, go see the beaches and if you’ve never seen big trees before, definitely go out to the rainforest area. 

If you had to narrow down to your top three favorite national parks or state parks, or places that you’ve been on your journey, pick the top three.

That’s very easy. The Grand Tetons are always going to be my number one. I never get tired of them. The Grand Tetons are always number one for me. I really liked Glacier a lot. That would be my number two and then Olympic would be my number three.

We’re going to have to get you back on to tell us about the Grand Tetons and I’ve already covered Glacier previously. I definitely would love to have you back on the Grand Tetons. What’s next?

I’m hoping to put together some shorter trips to go grab some more national parks. Hopefully, just like longer weekend trips. Go up, spend two or three days in the Midwest national parks and then come back home, make some money and then go out again.

Are you still able to do some work on just your computer as you’re traveling?

I’m still working remotely part-time, so I still have money coming in. I have the freedom to be able to travel again and that’s what I keep telling myself is don’t get stuck in the mud. Do this while I can because someday I’m going to have to get back into a 9 to 5 job and re-stock the coffers.

You’re also quite a good photographer. If people would like to follow you and your adventures, are you on Instagram or any place that they could find you?

I didn’t start on Instagram until after this trip. I put a bunch out on Facebook but then like this last trip, I didn’t put as many out on Facebook, so I haven’t been putting pictures anywhere but on my hard drive lately, because I take so many. I took over 10,000 pictures last summer.

You got some good ones. I remember seeing that. Is there anything else that you’d like to tell the readers?

My best advice is to go out there and see this stuff because the longer you wait, the less chance that these parks are going to be as big and as beautiful as they were. Go out there and do it.

We sure appreciate you coming on and telling us about your overall adventures, as well as Olympic National Park. I appreciate it, Lorna.

Thank you.

Thanks to Lorna for a fascinating interview. She gave us the feel for the park itself, but I want to give you some of the details about the park, about some of the things that you’ll see that we didn’t quite get into in the interview. For example, we talked about wildlife. She didn’t see a whole lot herself, but you’re likely to if you’re there long enough to see black bears sometimes in the lower valleys, in the rainforest you’ll see elk. Off the coast in the spring and the fall during the migration season, you might see gray whales. During the summertime, you’ll see some marmots. There are salmon. They have all five species in the rivers of the salmon. If you get up high, you might see some mountain goats.

The longer you wait, the less chance that parks are going to be as big and as beautiful as they are. Click To Tweet

It’s a good idea to check with the Visitor Center to see what things you should be on the lookout for and also just to stop in any way to get the whole scoop on a place. They are not only a great resource for getting ideas of what to do once you get to the park, but they can also give you some cautionary things about if there’s any bear activity and what you should do if you should come across a bear. I also encourage you, in regards to bear safety, to go to ActiveTravelAdventures.com/Glacier and look for the bear safety link that I put in there that’ll tell you what to do should you encounter a bear that acts a little funky or aggressively on the trail. 

In addition to that wildlife, we’re also going to see a bunch of birds. You’ll see bald eagles, northern pygmy owls, black oystercatchers and some city grouse. There are about 300 species in the park itself, and the park is ginormous. It’s almost a million acres of incredibly diverse ecosystems. You’ve got lots of precipitation and also lots of elevation change, so you go through three ecosystems. You have the coastal region, then you had the temperate rainforest and then as you get up higher in the sub-alpine region. I thought it was interesting how Lorna said it was dryer if you get up in the mountains away from the lower coastal regions where you get all that precipitation. That’s something interesting and not something I would have thought of. I thought it was also cool too every time I’ve thought about Olympic until I talked to Lorna. I always saw the photos of the massive trees, the dark mossy green. That was what always appealed to me about this park, and yet that was number three on her list of what to see in that order. I’m really excited to go out there and see it myself and get my own take on what order would I put those three in.

I did a little bit of research and there are several lodges that you can stay in if you choose not to camp. I’ll also have a free travel planner that you can download that gives you active links that you can use to help plan your own trip. If you’ve already subscribed to the monthly newsletter, that’ll come automatically without any further effort on your part. That’ll tell you that Ruby Beach is the best place to go tide pooling or to make sure you check out the Tree of Life. As far as getting into Olympic National Park, it’s tucked away in the far northwest corner of Washington State. It’s a ferry ride from Victoria, British Columbia to Port Angeles, so it’s near Vancouver. The area has an interesting history as well. In the mid-1800s, free land was given to the homesteaders, but the land was too rugged for them to develop, so a lot of them just took off. In 1897, President Grover Cleveland designated the land as a forest reserve, which protected the trees, but it took President Roosevelt to make it a national monument, which protected the elk. He was a big hunter and they were being hunted to extinction. In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt made it into a national park. It took all the way until 1982 for UNESCO to make it a World Heritage Site.

The homesteaders and the native communities weren’t the first ones there. They still find remnants of a mastodon. The weather, because of the different changes in the altitude and the coast, you’ve got to expect it to change throughout the day, so this is something that you want to bring all your clothes and be prepared for change throughout the day. In the summer, it’s going to be generally in the 60s, foggy and dry, and that’s Fahrenheit. In the fall, it will be windy and rainier, nights drop down to the 30s. In the winter, that’s when the winter storms come in. At the lower elevations, you’re going to have the wet season and in the high, that’s the time for the winter sports. It’s a great time to go skiing up there. In the spring, it gets wet, especially at the high elevations, but that’s great for the rainforest. Generally speaking, because you’re on the coast, you’re always going to get a steady breeze and remember it can get stormy. Always remember if you do go to the beaches, to take your tide charts because that’s super important. You don’t want to get stuck behind one of those bulkheads. I happened to be on a big rock thing once when I was in Southern Cal and that’s a little bit scary because you want to make sure you can still pass along the beach. That’s an important thing. Check with the rangers and get the local tide chart.

People who don’t live near the ocean don’t necessarily respect the differences that the tide changes can make. Where I live on the coast of North Carolina, if I’m taking a walk along the beach, and the tide is coming in, I am constantly pulling up beach chairs, towels, toys and all that where the people that rent the house for the week went up for lunch and when they come back down, they think somebody’s stolen all their stuff. The ocean stole it because the tide came in and pulled it out to sea. Pay attention to those tide charts. It’s super important. Olympic National Park has always been really high up on my national park wish list. It’s just almost as far away as you can possibly get in the continental US for me to get there, but I will get there within the next several years. Particularly after talking to Lorna and hearing how this was in her top three out of all the amazing places that she’s been to, I’m definitely going to get my butt up there.

For the surprise I promised you. I went to Philadelphia for the Podcast Movement. This is a conference to help podcasters and hopefully help me to do a better job at producing and putting on this show for you. A couple of people said, “Kit, you ought to write a book about adventure travel. You’re doing all this research on all these cool places. You’re talking to all these cool people.” At first, I thought, “No,” and then I was like, “Why not? Why can’t I write a book?” I know how to research. I know how to write and I am meeting people like you folks. I’m going to do it. I would like to put together a book that tells people how to plan a trip, what to prepare, how to train for a trip, and also cover lots of amazing places on this planet that you can go and the kinds of experiences that you can have. I don’t think the book would be great if it’s just me.

What I would like to ask you to do is if you would please email or voicemail me the stories of your favorite adventures and your favorite memories, your favorite stories about some trips that you’ve taken. The ones that make you laugh, the ones that make you cry, and the ones that make you smile every time you look back on your trip. Please send me your stories. If you want to send it via email, it’s Kit@ActiveTravelAdventures.com or just go to the website and hit the Contact us button or leave me a voice mail at (252) 515-0166.

I’d love to hear your stories and let me also know if I’m allowed to share those here as well. Please share your stories and your tips. I really look forward to hearing from them. Thanks. I am very excited about this project and don’t know how long it’s going to take me to do it, but I promise everybody that contributes something, whether it makes it to the book or not, I will send you a free eBook copy of it just for helping and participating. I thank you very much and I’m excited about the project. I’m excited about Olympic National Park and I’m excited to be back with another great adventure. Until next time, adventure on.

Important Links:

• Lorna Miller
• Olympic National Park
• Glacier National Park – Past episode
• Instagram – Lorna Miller
• Facebook – Lorna Miller
• ActiveTravelAdventures.com/Glacier
• Kit@ActiveTravelAdventures.com

• Here’s How »

• activetraveladventures.com
• Active Travel Adventures Facebook Page
• Active Travel Adventures Facebook Group
• Active Travel Adventures Twitter
• Active Travel Adventures Instagram
• Active Travel Adventures YouTube
• Kit Parks LinkedIn