It's on the part of the coast which belongs to Olympic National Park. Well, actually, much of the coast on the northern Olympic Peninsula does, but here highway 101 runs right along the ocean so there are places to get down. Map to see it in context.
Maybe I should do like the family we saw leaving the beach as me and M. were arriving. Mom, Dad and the littlies all in gumboots, they just walked right through the creek where it crossed the beach, and out into the washing-ashore receding-tide waves, sploosh sploosh.
M. went for a walk further on down the beach. I stalked sea gulls with the bird book for a while --western gulls, probably, though the book says herring gulls are more common. Then I ran amok with picking up size-sorted stones the wash of the waves had arrayed along the shore, here lentil-sized, there coin-sized; behind a log, mini-cobbles maybe the size of aspen leaves. If we had aspen leaves here. Which we do not. When M. came back she showed me there were now critters exposed in the rocks I was sitting near, orange and purple sea stars, green sea anemones, tube worms.
On our way home we detoured into the Hoh Reservation, past the Tribal Center and out to where the Hoh River flows into the Pacific. Just to see it.
Altogether an elegant way to spend the first short day of the winter. We drove back in the sunset and then the dark.
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