Dwight Peck's personal website

Summer 2004

The Olympic Peninsula in Washington, USA


You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

Cape Flattery, Rialto Beach, and the Hole in the Wall

Cape Flattery is at the extreme northwest of the Olympic Peninsula, within the Makah Indian Reservation, and it's fairly impressive. A short automobile drive in from Neah Bay (where the Indian Museum is emphatically worth a stop), and then a short walk out to the point, where you can see the orcas, whatever they are.

Forget the orcas, whatever they are; this is Goonies country. The Goonies was a Spielberg-assisted film from 1985 that was probably the best movie ever made for its purpose - a teen-oriented take-off on Indiana Jones adventures in which kids follow a treasure map and evade subterranean traps set by long-dead pirates and modern gangsters, and succeed in finding One-Eyed Willie's treasure as his pirate ship floats out of the caves and into the sunset. (IMDB database entry.)

Well, if these are not those same caves, rebuke me.

Kristin envisaging Goonies escaping from the pirate caves.

[If we were in Cornwall, this would be called "Merlin's Cave"!]


Rialto Beach and the Hole-in-the-Wall

Rialto Beach lies just north of La Push, across the mouth of the Quillayute. The favored hike goes northward, towards those little pointy things in the left photo, but we are enjoined to pick our times wisely, since some of the route is submersible.

This phallic item (behind Kristin) is not a problem, in tidal terms -- one of them is over there to the right, where a little hole in the buttress coming off the highlands can be seen dimly, and an hour later not at all.

Kristin visits the huge phallic coastal thing and watches the powerful oceanic fluids surging in and out with the tides and action of the waves.

Kristin amongst oceanic fluids surging in and out.

A point along the coast, now passable, but soon not.

Kristin contemplating the eternal ebb and flow of the tides (perhaps recalling Arnold's immortal lines on "the turbid ebb and flow of human misery" on Dover Beach, but perhaps not), and timing things pretty closely as the window of passability begins to close tidally.

Scrutinizing phallic symbolism in all directions

Kristin wends northward and watches the incoming tides for any signs of not getting home again.

Dr Peck, since he's wearing his Makuma Matata T-shirt (which drew frequent comment throughout the State of Washington, though he doesn't know what it means (something to do with Disney)), waits patiently for the tide to come in, as for him it has never done.

Here's the next buttress off the headland that won't be passable in about twenty minutes, but will be six hours and twenty minutes later, of course. WAY after dinnertime.

It's a seriously irregular, and pointy, coastline. North Carolina's Outer Banks are the opposite.

Kristin looking closely for starfish and anemones, visibly moved when these little guys can be seen hugging their fragile support networks and . . .

. . . trying to wait the Bush regime out of office so they can get on with their lives.

The phallic coastline view northward.

With the tide becoming fairly incessant -- "time and tides wait for no Kristin" (proverb) -- Kristin decides to bolt southward again.

The "hole in the wall" has got tides of hefty momentum, so up we go over the overland path on top of the buttress.. . .

and so back to La Push for another splendid fish dinner in the local BYOB.


Oh, wait, here we are at Second Beach in the evening, putting dinner off by just a little bit.

More of nature's left-behind monuments -- a Washington State obsession, it appears -- near Teahwhit Head.

Kristin in some of the tidal caves, with her stopwatch out waiting for the last moment to clear out of here, and get back to La Push for a very nice fish dinner, with free use of the bottle-opener and wine glasses.

Visit to North America, July 2004
Olympic National Park, Washington, USA, July 2004
Hoh Rain Forest and the Quileute Reservation at La Push
Ozette Lake and Cape Alava
Cape Flattery, Rialto Beach, and the Hole in the Wall
Hurricane Ridge and Obstruction Point
Dungeness Spit and Whidbey Island
and then
Visit to Marlowe, Ottawa, Ontario, 2004
The Thousand Islands and Boldt Castle

Feedback and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative, . All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 24 September 2004, revised 27 April 2013.


Olympic National Park, 2004