EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second dispatch from Roger Harnack, Peninsula Daily News’ local news editor. Packing a laptop computer and satellite telephone, he is sending back daily reports from the 13-person, five-day, 46-mile “Across the Olympic Mountains” expedition to Lake Quinault this week. The full reports appear exclusively in the Peninsula Daily News, on sale throughout Clallam and Jefferson counties.
CAMP WILDER, Olympic National Park — Day 2 — Cold, wet and tired. And lots of blisters from wet hiking boots.
That’s summarizes our drenched status as of Tuesday night 21 miles into the Olympics on “Press Expedition — Across the Olympic Mountains 2001.”
Monday we had wasps. Tuesday we had rain. Lots of rain.
We expected the storm — forecasters said it was coming before we left Port Angeles.
When I woke up at 6:45 a.m. it was raining. It rained all day. It never stopped raining. It is supposed to continue raining today.
We trudged — in good spirits but with wet packs — about nine miles along the rushing, rain-swollen Elwha River from our first night’s camp in the Elkhorn to Camp Wilder (also known as Crackerville).
The trail parallels Semple Plateau, which lies just across the river, then passed the confluence of the Elwha and Goldie rivers and entered the broad bottomlands of Press Valley.
These geographic features were named by the original Press Expedition of 1889-1890 which we are retracing.
