Historic Sites

Evergreen Coho SKP Park – Chimacum, WA

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Evergreen Coho SKP Park – Chimacum, WA

August 2024 was the first time we stayed at Evergreen Coho SKP Park in Chimacum, Washington, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Chimacum is on Puget Sound’s west side and the Olympic Peninsula’s east side, about 10 miles south of Port Townsend. The weather was fantastic the entire month we were there. Although we only had one day of heavy rain, we had drizzle on several days, which made the temperature perfect. We only had one day when the temperature reached 80° Fahrenheit, and most days were in the 60s—perfect for me!

Chimacum is right on the edge of the Olympic Mountains rain shadow and only gets 29.5 inches of rain a year as opposed to Forks, Washington, just a few hours away, which gets nearly 119 inches of rain, and Mount Olympus, which is even closer and receives a whopping 220 inches a year.

No trip to the Olympic Peninsula is complete without a visit to the Olympic National Park.  Our visit can be found on our post, Olympic National Park and Port Angeles.

We also visited Port Townsend, where we had lunch at Sirens overlooking Puget Sound.  Port Townsend, a town of less than 10,000, is home to over 300 Victorian homes, many of which have been restored.  In the mid-1800s, town planners believed that Port Townsend would become the busiest port in Washington state.  They built for a large influx of people, but that dream came crashing down when Seattle was selected as the railroad hub.

Fort Worden Historical State Park is a short drive from Chimacum and overlooks Admiralty Inlet, the entrance to Puget Sound. Along with Fort Casey and Fort Flagler, Fort Worden was part of the “Triangle of Fire” defense system, designed to protect against sea invasions. The fort was named after Admiral John Worden, who commanded the ironclad warship, the U.S.S. Monitor, during the American Civil War’s Battle of Hampton Roads.  Fort Worden was featured heavily in “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

Evergreen Coho is an SKP Co-op where you can purchase a lifetime lease on an RV plot. This allows you to live there full-time with only an annual maintenance fee. As an Escapee member, we can stay at any Co-op park depending on availability without purchasing a lifetime lease.

Evergreen Coho has a very active social activity calendar.  While we were there, there was a pet parade, an ice cream social, and a nacho and margarita fundraiser to support the landscaping committee, and this didn’t include the crafting and committee meetings.

Our timing coincided with the plum harvest at the RV park, and we enjoyed several plums picked from the park’s colossal plum trees every day. The apples weren’t quite ripe yet.

Our favorite amenity in the park was the well-manicured walking trail through the moss-covered, shaded forest surrounding the park. Penny and Little Bit loved their multiple daily walks along the roughly half-mile, woodchip-covered path that nearly fully encircles the RV park.

While in the park, I utilized their well-stocked woodworking shop to drill holes in five copper busbars for the 48v, 300 amp-hour battery I’m building.  Unfortunately, I could not finish drilling all the holes, so I will have to finish them at a later stop.  There will be a later blog post on the entire project when I finish, likely around March 2025.

One afternoon, we rode our e-bikes through a nearby city park to Indian Island and Marrowstone Island. We intended to visit Kinny Point State Park, but following Google’s direction took us to a dead-end in a neighborhood, and we could not access the park. It turns out that Kinny Point State Park is only accessible via the water. One of the friendly residents of Marrowstone Island told us about the beautiful East Beach County Park about five miles north. This beach was about halfway up to the island’s north end. I didn’t find it that nice, as the beach was covered with smelly, fly-infested, rotting seaweed. It was a 20-mile bike ride, and we barely made it back to the RV park with any juice left in our e-bike batteries.

Petrified Forest National Park – Petrified Forest, AZ

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Petrified Forest National Park – Petrified Forest, AZ

We made two half-day trips to the Petrified Forest National Park in early November 2023 while staying at the Holbrook/Petrified Forest KOA Journey RV Park, about a half-hour drive from both the south and north park entrances. The Petrified Forest National Park stretches north and south between Interstate 40 and Highway 180. There are two entrances into the park, each one with a visitor center. The petrified log fields are found at the southern end of the park. Outlooks, trails, cultural sites, and painted desert badlands are found in the middle and northern sections.

During both of our visits we drove the full length of the park, southbound on the first trip, and northbound the second time. We stopped at some different overlooks and points of interest each day.

The Painted Desert has a very unique, other-worldly, landscape with colored bands running horizontally through its rolling hills. The colorful Painted Desert badlands are composed of bentonite, a product of altered volcanic ash. The clay minerals in the bentonite can absorb water and swell much as eight times their dry volume. The expansion and contraction properties of the bentonite cause rapid erosion including by preventing much vegetation from growing on—and thus fixing—the slopes of the hills.

There were also views of spectacular mesas and buttes along the park road. Their flat tops are created by the presence of cap rocks, more erosion-resistant rock such as sandstone over softer clays. The softer rock is protected by the cap stones, but, as the sides weather and the protective rock falls down, the softer rock erodes away as it is exposed to the elements. Without the capstone, the feature becomes another rolling badland. Mesas typically are wider than they are tall while buttes are taller than they are wide. Towers, monuments, and hoodoos are even further eroded features.

The petrified trees that lie strewn throughout the southern sections of the park are an amazing sight. Initially, looking out over the fields of petrified logs, you might think you are looking at the remnants of recently felled trees, but then you realize that these are actually fossilized trees that are some 200 million years old, and there is a sense that time has stood still in these areas. The quartz within the petrified wood is hard and brittle, fracturing easily when subjected to stress. It is thought that during the gradual uplifting of the Colorado Plateau, starting 60 million years ago, the still buried petrified trees were under so much stress they broke like glass rods. The crystal nature of the quartz created clean fractures, evenly spaced along the tree trunk, giving the appearance today of logs cut with a chainsaw.

Towards the north end of the park, we visited the cultural site of the Puerco Pueblo. A 0.3-mile paved walk winds through the remains of a hundred room pueblo, occupied by the ancestral Puebloan people over 600 years ago. We were able to see Petroglyphs along the south end of the trail, that are still clear and well defined hundreds of years after they were created.

Probably our favorite spot in the park was the Blue Mesa trail, a 1-mile loop descending from the mesa through the hills of the Painted Desert badlands. The loop trail offers the unique experience of hiking among badland hills of bluish bentonite clay as well as petrified wood. We wandered among the hills and petrified logs and were again struck by the timeless quality of the area.

We were able to take the dogs with us on the Giant Logs trail, a 0.4-mile loop behind Rainbow Forest Museum towards the south end of the park. The trail winds around some of the largest and most colorful logs in the park. “Old Faithful”, at the top of the trail, is almost ten feet wide at the base!

Photos of our visit are provided below. Click on the thumbnails to view the photos.

Olympic National Park
and Port Angeles

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Olympic National Park and Port Angeles

Encompassing nearly a million acres, Olympic National Park protects a vast wilderness, thousands of years of human history, and several distinctly different ecosystems, including glacier-capped mountains, old-growth temperate rain forests, and over 70 miles of wild coastline.

We visited Olympic National Park in late August 2024 while staying at the Evergreen Coho SKP Park, Chimacum, Washington. Olympic National Park is very large, and we only visited a small part of its northeast corner not too far from where we were staying.

On the way we stopped at the town of Port Angeles for lunch at the wharf. After lunch we strolled along the City Pier and climbed the newly renovated observation tower. The tower afforded great views of the town and port. After lunch we continued on to the Olympic National Park Visitor Center which is just south of the town.

From the visitor center we drove about 17-miles up the Hurricane Ridge Road to the site of the former Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center which burned down in May 2023. There were restrooms, water, information and maps at temporary buildings in the Hurricane Ridge parking lot.

The day we visited it was sprinkling with rain and cool. Winds can gust over 75 miles an hour on the ridge, so we were grateful that it was a relatively light breeze during our visit. The 45-minute drive from Port Angeles to Hurricane Ridge travels from the lowlands blanketed with old growth forests to treeline, where clumps of subalpine firs give way to open meadows. The day we visited, it was clear enough to enjoy good views of the Olympic Mountains to the south, the highest peak being Mount Olympus.

Hurricane Ridge has a number of hiking trails, from ridgetop traverses to steep trails that descend to subalpine lakes and valleys. We took the short Big Meadow Loop and overlook which climbed the ridge and provided views towards the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Vancouver Island to the North.

Photos of our visit are provided below. Click on the thumbnails to view the photos.

Mount Rainier National Park

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Mount Rainier National Park

Mount Rainier National Park was established on March 2, 1899, as the fourth national park in the United States, preserving 236,381 acres including all of Mount Rainier, a 14,410-foot stratovolcano. The mountain rises abruptly from the surrounding land with elevations in the park ranging from 1,600 feet to over 14,000 feet. The highest point in the Cascade Range, Mount Rainier is surrounded by valleys, waterfalls, subalpine meadows, and 91,000 acres of old-growth forest. More than 25 glaciers descend the flanks of the volcano, which is often shrouded in clouds that dump enormous amounts of rain and snow.

We visited Mount Rainier National Park in early September 2024 while staying at Harmony Lakeside RV Park, Silver Creek, Washington. We entered the park at the Nisqually entrance in the southwest corner of the park and drove along the winding Paradise Valley Road through old growth pine forests to the historic Longmire Area.

We parked at Longmire and walked around the historic district where many original park buildings can still be seen. At Mount Rainier, designers selected massive logs and glacial boulders as the building materials best suited for integrating new structures with their natural settings. This style of architecture, known as “National Park Service Rustic”, is on display throughout the Longmire district. This style of architecture became a model for buildings across the National Park Service.

Walking through the Longmire district we reached the historic Longmire Suspension Bridge that crosses the Nisqually River. We walked over the creaky wooden suspension bridge that is the oldest surviving road bridge in Mount Rainier National Park, and one of the few road-bearing suspension bridges in the National Park system. The road bridge was originally built in 1924 using local logs for the suspension towers and bridge structure. Although the logs were replaced with dimensional lumber during later renovations, the bridge still maintains it original design form and appearance.

Continuing on from the Longmire district, we stopped at the Cougar Rock camping and picnic area to enjoy our lunch at a picnic table amongst the old grown pine forest. At this point we were wondering if we would get to see Mount Rainier as the tree tops all around us were shrouded in low-cloud and mist.

Continuing on along the road we visited the Christine Falls, and Narada Falls. The second falls was much taller, fully visible from a view area about a 1/4-mile walk from the parking area.

As we continued along the road, we started to climb out of the pine forest through the low clouds and mist into sub-alpine meadows with colorful seasonal wildflowers. As we rounded one of the switchback bends near the Paradise area, we finally got our first view of the spectacular snow-capped dome of Mount Rainier. We parked at the Paradise area parking lot and walked the short distance to the Henry M. Jackson Memorial Visitor Center and Paradise Inn. There were spectacular views of Mount Rainier and other surrounding mountain peaks from here.

We continued through the Paradise area and proceeded downhill a mile-or-so to Reflection Lake. As its name suggests, the snow-capped peak of Mount Rainier was fully reflected in the lake and offered a spectacular photo-opportunity.

Photos of our visit are provided below. Click on the thumbnails to view the photos.

Mesa Verde National Park

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Mesa Verde National Park

About 1,400 years ago, long before Europeans explored North America, a group of people living in the Four Corners region chose Mesa Verde for their home. For more than 700 years they and their descendants lived and flourished here, eventually building elaborate stone communities in the sheltered alcoves of the canyon walls. Then, in the late A.D. 1200s, in the span of a generation or two, they left their homes and moved away. Mesa Verde National Park preserves a spectacular reminder of this ancient culture.

We visited Mesa Verde National Park in April 2023 while staying at the nearby Mesa Verde RV Resort in Mancos, Colorado. We stopped at the Mesa Verde Visitor and Research Center at the base of the winding main park road to learn about the fascinating history of the cliff dwellers that lived here over 1,000 years ago.

We took the 15-mile winding park road climbing up to the Far View Area. At this point there is a turn-off to the Weatherill Mesa Road, however that road was not yet open for the season, so we continued a further 6-miles on the main park road to the Mesa Top and Cliff Canyon loops. We chose to take the Cliff Canyon loop which took us to two spectacular cave dwelling viewpoints. The Cliff Palace is a huge, partially restored dwelling that was fully visible from an overlook just off the road. Guided tours through the dwelling are available starting in May but had not yet started for the season during our April visit. The second dwelling we visited was the Balcony House, which was visible from a more distant viewpoint across the canyon at the end of the Soda Canyon Overlook Trail.

In addition to the cliff dwellings, we also enjoyed some spectacular canyon views from the various overlooks along the park roads.

Photos of our visit are provided below. Click on the thumbnails to view the photos.

 

 

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