Winding past lakes, Lake Crescent, Ozette, Queets and what was once a lake formed by the now defunct Elwah. You drive through ancient rain forests of trees. Ruby Beach and the coastal seaside hammered day after day by the unrelenting Pacific Ocean. Sunset then later rain. Perhaps the most diverse National Park, it throws at you so much visual eye candy. Each location seems to constantly change. Through the day or season. You can get sucked up into a maelstrom to challenge your senses. Not even knowing what you are missing. Birds from plovers to pelicans, sand pipers to seagulls. Mushrooms and moss. Each different location provides a cacophony, a barrage of sound. But in its own way it’s quiet. Normal. Only on occasional are there reminders of civilization.

Look beneath the surface and you see the raw geology of a peninsula formed less than 35 million years ago. Sand beaches made of sedimentary, metamorphic and granite rocks washed down from the towering mountains of the interior. Pock marked granite scarred by the persistent pholads, a clam that creates its own shelter from the storms, by slowly and inexorably penetrating the stone. Sea fog softening the edges of sea stacks, columns of rock left behind as the ocean erodes the landscape.

Woods that are covered in moss, mere yards from the ocean. Trees that are gnarled and burled. And then you look at the panorama that surrounds you. Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of logs that have fallen and been stripped of their outer garments of bark, whitened by the elements and stacked on the shore.