Olympic National Park

My trip to photograph this national park was actually my second visit to Olympic, so I generally knew what to expect. But with more planning, more experience, and more time, I was even more amazed the second time around. Olympic National Park is one of the most diverse in the national park system. Its got rain forests, beaches and sea stacks, glacier capped mountains, lakes, waterfalls, and wildflower filled meadows. Another Washington national park filled with a ton of hiking trails with a lot of vert, you could spend a full week here hiking to your heart’s content and never repeating a trail.

After my second visit here, it dawned on me that this is one of my favorite national parks. The various ecosystems have their own weather, so you can go from moody rainforest, to sunny coastline, to fog covered mountains. In fact for my last morning before heading up to North Cascades, I decided to sleep past sunrise to get some good rest before an aggressive trip to North Cascades National Park. I still ended up doing my last destination up to Blue Mountain, and was treated to one of the most surreal scenes I had ever seen. I had panoramic views over the Olympic mountains, and fog in the valley was being burned up by the continually rising sun. A moment I’ll treasure forever, but also a lesson learned: get out there, you can always sleep at home.