A long weekend and cheap airfare to Seattle meant short backpacking trip. I wanted to re-attempt a Blue Glacier hike up the Hoh River Trail since my first go in November 2018. Unfortunately, the Olympic National Park (ONP) area had large snowfall the days before my visit. Two rangers in their pickups greeted me on my way hiking up the Hoh River. They warned me of avalanches from melting snow and that I was the only known person in that portion of the park. I continued hiking in roughly four inches of snow before I turned around, settling for a more snow-free excursion up the Olympic coast line.
The Rialto Beach area caught my eye when I was studying a map of ONP. Rialto to Norwegian Memorial seemed like a relaxing overnight hike: ~40 degrees, light rain, and a virgin ocean beach was a perfect substitute to a 24 mile one-way hike in snow to an avalanche-ridden Glacier. Plus, Rialto to the Memorial is only about 10 miles, perfectly doable with good tide-timing.
I spent the first night in the car at the Rialto Beach trailhead, leaving around nine in the morning. That day’s hike ended at the Norwegian Memorial around 3:40 PM. Along the way, I encountered more bald eagles than I could count (beginning north of the Chilean Memorial) and completed an exhausting cliff-climb-detour when the trail was submerged during high-tide. Soft rains cooled me during my intermittent runs and walks on the sand, beach rock, and jagged shoreline.
There was enough sun left for me to explore the Norwegian Memorial, set my camp, and read a few scenes from the copy of Much Ado About Nothing that I brought along. The tide rose to a few feet of the tent; the waves crashed violently against the logs on the shore throughout the night under the drops of a cold rain.
The next morning I waited before sunrise for the tide to lower. Unfortunately, the tide was still too high for crossing along the beach by 10 AM. I took a path through the forest that led to a wider beach head and proceeded with the hike/run back. Light rains came and went. The highlight of the hike back was running into a family of otters swimming in the low-tide pools on the beach. I returned to the Rialto Beach trailhead before sun-down and headed to Forks for an awesome hot dinner at the local diner that night before my flight out of SEATAC the next day.
Take A Hike 