Most of my time in Sequim has been spent with family, my mother and my sister, so not much motorcycling to write about as we spend our time visiting. Yesterday my mother and I went to the Sequim Museum and Arts. It has some excellent displays about local history and two special exhibits. One was about the bones of a mastodon that was unearthed here. The highlight of that includes the preserved tusk along with a leg bone that visitors are encourage to touch. The other is an extensive collection related to Joe Rantz, a local guy who made the Olympic rowing team and competed in Germany in the 1936 event where his team won gold. There was a movie made about him and the team called “The Boys in the Boat” taken from a book of the same name. It was well worth the visit.
Also yesterday, I was looking at the city’s bus system, just out of curiosity, and noted that it is fare-free except one route. That’s pretty cool but when I looked into the one route that isn’t free, it said it goes up Hurricane Ridge. Huh? What is that?
After looking into that, this morning’s agenda was set in place. It’s a curvy and twisty road to the top of a mountain in the Olympic National Park, a summit that is 35 miles from where I am sitting. What? How did I not know about this before? I’ve been here a few times and while I certainly looked into and took advantage of local running routes, I hadn’t looked into local riding routes.
The information I found noted that since it’s in the park, a fee or a pass is required. I have that covered with my America the Beautiful card. It also stated that since the road dead ends at the top and there is limited parking, they only let in 343 cars at a time. If 343 are already in, others have to wait at the gate until someone leaves. Well, I don’t plan on waiting so I want to be there shortly after opening time to give those undoubtably waiting a bit of time to get through. My sister and my mom want to go and they will take my sister’s van and follow along. We set a departure time of 8:30.
I got up about 5:30, donned my running clothes and got in a 4-1/2 mile run, going out to the “Railroad Bridge” and back. I’ve run here before and it’s an old bridge that’s been converted for pedestrian use and is on the Olympic Discovery Trail. You can see my run and the bridge from last September here.
Instead of crossing the bridge I ran some trails along the river south of it.
It was a very pleasant outing and felt great to be out.
After a shower and breakfast, I geared up and we hit the road right about 8:30. The ride to Port Angeles felt great. I really like riding first thing in the morning. I turned up Race Street that leads to the park and was happy to see that there was no line at the entry gates. I showed my card and ID and headed up the road. Its curves through the forest with the occasional pull out to check the scenery.
Stopping photos is a requirement.
The rest of the road gets slower with tighter curves, a favorite for motorcycles, and even goes through three tunnels. I dealt with no traffic on the way up. At the top there is a large parking lot but no visitor center as it burned down a few years ago and it’s questionable whether it will be rebuild. There were already quite a few cars here and I’m guessing they were the ones lined up at the opening time. I parked in the middle of the lots and grabbed some photos.
I headed back down and stopped for these shots:
Shortly I came to the tunnels and found just enough room to pull over for this picture.
There was another scenic view pull out ahead so stopped there to check it out. The first shot was look south and the other looking east. I believe that is Mount Baker.
Here’s the route.
That was it. The rest of the ride returned us to Port Angeles where we stopped for lunch. I had an excellent hummus wrap.
The rest of the day is unstructured but we’ll probably go to my sister’s place for dinner. She’s in a nice hillside home with a great view of Canada across the Salish Sea.
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