Shi Shi Beach, August 2-3 2008
For a break from climbing weekends, Sketchy and I went for a short camping trip to Shi Shi on the Olympic coast with Kutta, Lera, Aileen, Gray, Sandra, Wally, Adam and Wes.
It was quite a gourmet trip. We started out the morning at the Little Oven in Port Angeles. My favorite breakfast stop, Bonnie’s, had closed, but the Little Oven is just as good. No full breakfast, and no inside seating, but the table outside the laundromat is as good a setting as any for inhaling the excellent croissants (almost excessively buttery and flaky), blueberry muffins (supersaturated with blueberries, not too sweet), and other pastries (we cleaned them out all pastries involving brie and ham).
We arrived at the beach after a short but muddy hike (and I mean muddy — Sketchy didn’t believe me and ended up with mud caked all over his legs from the sandals up) with a stop to harvest some thimbleberries on the way. We set up our tents right near where the trail descends to the beach, had a snack, and had a nap.
I wandered south to Point of the Arches, gathering some seaweed for the miso soup for dinner, and watching the sandpipers pecking at the sand and running in and out with the waves. When I got back to camp everyone hard arrived/woken up and wanted to go for a walk so I turned around and went back to Point of the Arches with them. It looks like it’s right there, but the beach is more than 2 miles long. At this point it was low tide, so after everyone turned around and went back for dinner, Ritchie and I stayed and waded/scrambled around. We saw a little cave behind one of the sea stacks, a little cove filled with hermit crabs and the snails that they stole the shells from, tons of anemones, barnacles, and mussels (inedible due to PSP, unfortunately). A little farther out a sea lion was watching us (waiting for us to slip into the water so it could point and laugh?).
When we got back the fire was started and people were sitting around talking about dinner. Dinner was another ridiculous buffet: miso soup, “boy scout stew”, macaroni and cheese, cheesy rice, tastybites, and smores for dessert (and probably a few other things I don’t remember).
We dragged a giant dry tree root over so the fire lasted a while. It was still kind of burning by breakfast. I made pancakes with salal berries and salmonberries picked in the woods. When I was packing, I thought the eggs, pancake mix, maple syrup, and olive oil was a little excessive, but I think I ended up bringing less food than anyone else.
I’ve been to Shi Shi and the coast several times before, but always in early spring and late fall. To be honest, I was a little disappointed with this trip. The coast is still nice, and it was fun to be there with the whole group, but the shoulder to shoulder tents and garbage kind of detract from the wildness and beauty. In the winter it’s a little grayer and cooler, but there’s solitude, weird things washed up on shore (like dead whales, Chinese light bulbs, and mounds of jellyfish that look like plastic)
On the way back we continued the gourmet theme with a stop at Frugal’s, for drive through burgers, then parked in an abandoned Burger King parking lot (appropriately enough) to eat them.