Urban kid in the forest

Awake at 9 a.m., my neighbors eat breakfast together. Their cooking and chatter rouses me from sleep. I smell their cigarette fumes and campfire smoke from inside my tent.

“Don’t spill that beer,” I hear one of them say.

I emerge from my tent, blinking in the sunlight.

“Good morning,” one of them says.

“Good morning,” I grumble as I stumble half-awake toward the bathroom.

I walk past a bulletin board on my way to relieve myself. “Beware of cougars,” it says.

I am in Olympic National Park, about 1,400 square miles of rainforest, coastline and alpine environments roughly within the borders of Highway 101.

I am only able to see a sliver of the park during my weekend stay; 19th-century explorers, lauded by the Seattle Press newspaper for their “abundance of grit and manly vim,” spent six months trekking through the park and still didn’t see the whole thing.

So I go to the experts for a little help. Joanna Coffey, an intern for the National Park Service, runs the Olympic National Park Visitor Center’s information desk.

“The best thing is to take as much time as you can, because it’s a huge place,” she says. “To really appreciate it, you have to set aside time and plan really well.”

I try not to blush from embarrasment. I was up Friday night researching where I should go camping for the three-day weekend. I arrive on Saturday afternoon and hastily make camp, struggling through setting up my dad’s tent. I’m wearing jeans I bought at Urban Outfitters and a $30 T-shirt. I’m not even sure I can make a fire.

But no worries: My photographer and I have a hazy idea that we want to go hiking.

We start out on a 6.1-mile path, which ends at the 5,757-foot-tall Hurricane Hill. At least that’s what a small wooden sign reads. Ahead of the sign is a winding, narrow path that disappears into dense foliage.

We set out, ascending through the forest for about three and a half hours. The trail has not been cleared by the park service and several trees cut across it. They’re so large I can hardly climb over them.

Pine boughs litter the forest floor. The scent of Christmas infiltrates my nostrils. The only noises I hear are my own breathing and the snapping of branches beneath my feet.

It’s just my friend and I — the only animate life for what seems like miles — until we see two young men descending toward us. I ask them if we are close to the top.

“We’ve been coming down for two hours,” one of them says.

Not an experienced hiker myself, I rationalize the ease of the descent versus the slope working against the ascent, and I reckon it’ll take three to four more hours to reach the top.

“You should go,” the other one says. “It’s beautiful up there.”

But it’s already 5 p.m., and I’m not interested in getting lost in the woods at night. We don’t make it to the top. We turn and go back.

There are few clouds in the sky. Sun breaks through the forest canopy and I’m pleasantly warm, even in the shade. It would’ve been beautiful — and I should’ve planned.

Maybe I’ll come back. I ask Coffey when the best time to visit the park is. Summer, she says.

“It’s just a really happy spirit,” she says. “The place comes alive.”

My campsite is a few miles south of Port Angeles, Wash., along the Elwha River; an exploration expedition during the summer of 1885 took about a month to reach the same place. Now, a paved road cuts about 10 miles into the river valley before digressing into footpaths. Most of the park is still inaccessible by car.

But my traveling companion and I choose the easy way to see the park. We whip out a map and find the shortest hike available. It’s right next to the entrance, and a crowded parking lot is adjacent to the trailhead. I park the car and pack a bottle of juice and a s’mores Pop Tart — a city kid’s version of the traditional campfire treat — for the hike.

Two women emerge from the trail.

“Is this the way to Madison Falls?” I ask.

“It’s right around the corner,” she says.

And she meant it. The hike is a tenth of a mile along an even-keeled pathway. I don’t even break a sweat.

We stand on a paved path, arms resting on a wooden guardrail built to stop people from getting too close to Madison Falls, 100 feet of water tumbling down a basalt cliff.

But something isn’t right. The continual clatter of the waterfall is interrupted by another sound: whistling.

I look up. My campsite neighbor is crouching on the side of a woody embankment about 40 feet above me — and he is whistling.

I scramble up the cliff, clutching onto protruding roots and kicking down pebbles and dirt behind me.

There is another waterfall if I keep going up the cliff, he says. He points straight up to a slope hardly fit for mountain goats. His sons are up there right now, he adds.

My interest is piqued. I blitz my way up the rest of the cliff, suddenly finding myself looking a few hundred feet down to the river valley below. Behind me is the other waterfall.

I descend the cliff to the water’s edge, nearly losing my balance as I do, and gaze up at this new waterfall. There are no paved paths to get here, only the footprints of my neighbors. But a curious steel pipe juts into the water and continues up the hillside — so much for finding wilderness.

The interior of the park tends to hold more promise for those seeking adventure.

“You’re in a place where no roads have ever been,” Coffey said. “It’s complete wilderness.”

But at this point, I’m looking for a road. I’ve got to get home. I only have time for one more adventure.

I begin chatting with Darrell Charles Sr. of the Klallam Tribe. He’s selling jewelry at the visitor center at a desk a few yards from Coffey’s situation.

I’ve done the hiking and seen one of the park’s many rivers. I’m not ready for wilderness camping, nor do I have time to see the rainforest. I want to go to the beach.

Charles recommends Dungeness Spit, one of the world’s largest sandbars and also a wildlife refuge. People find mastodon tusks there, he says.

The spit is a short drive away from the park. We speed down Highway 101, passing four deer along the way: Three are feeding in a meadow and one is dead beside the road.

We take a left down the peculiarly named Kitchen-Dick Road and park at the spit about five minutes later. The spit juts five miles out into the Pacific. A white dot is all I can make of the lighthouse at the end of the sandbar.

My friend and I hike a mile or two. We sit down and eat sandwiches for lunch, watching as seagulls also chow down — on shoreline clams. They peck the clams out of the sand, fly a few yards above the beach and drop the shellfish upon the rocks below, shattering the clams’ shells and leaving only the soft clam bodies to gobble up.

After lunch, we stroll back to the car. The sea-to-land breeze whips my cheeks. I stare up at the sand bluffs above the spit, the wall of evergreens lining the bluffs and the craggy white peaks of the Olympic Mountains beyond. It’s hard to convince myself I could be home to campus in three hours.

I remember what Coffey said only a few hours ago.

“This peninsula is kind of like an island because it is so isolated,” she explained. “It’s like its own world.”