A walk through the Hoh Rain Forest, part of Olympic National Park, starts with a pool that looks like something the late great Takashi Amano might have designed (see Summer travel idea: the public aquarium in Lisbon to see the Takashi Amano show and Return trip to the world’s best public aquarium (in Lisbon)):
It happened to be what passes for “sunny” in this part of the country on the day that we visited, which isn’t ideal for atmosphere:
The iPhone 17 Pro Max doesn’t do the best job at managing the contrast and capture the experience:
They make a big deal out of this banana slug, a victim of iPhone overexposure (I don’t know of a convenient way to tell the iPhone “make all of the photos for the next hour subject to -0.7 f-stops of exposure compensation; probably this would have been a good time to use a third party camera app):
Getting to this part of the Park requires a two-hour wait in a traffic line to get in on busy days. Because the entrance fee is essentially zero ($80 for an annual pass that covers an entire carload of humans), the NPS doesn’t have the cash to accomplish the basics, e.g., repair a broken water fountain that the rangers said hadn’t worked for months. If they’d added a $10 per person crowd-control surcharge and the number of visitors fell by 5 percent as a result, that would have given them over $600,000 to fix the water fountain, almost enough even at California High-speed Rail levels of efficiency.
Practical tip: There is a good burger place, Hard Rain Cafe, on the way into the park. It would be nice if they cranked up the burger prices by enough to pay for real bathrooms, though, instead of Graham Platner-style portapotties.
What if you don’t want to deal with a two-hour sit in your rental car, various bathroom emergencies, etc.? There is a similar rainforest roughly an hour’s drive to the south: the Quinault Rain Forest. It’s part of the National Forest.
Because the U.S. Forest Service has decided to charge almost nothing, just like the National Park Service, they can’t do maintenance. Here’s a bench in the middle of this old growth forest that is probably worth $10 million:
Another example:
There’s a nice lodge (with some masked staff members), but we didn’t eat there:
A few miles up the road is the world’s largest Sitka Spruce tree. The trail there includes “Free Palestine” and “Land Back” messages:
> https://www.foxnews.com/politics/unearthed-posts-show-dem-senate-hopeful-praising-vulgar-graffiti-making-crude-porta-potty-admissions
Stop the world and let me off, seriously.
Phil,
I’ve been amused by the last several posts. I’m on a long road trip this summer. I the last 10 days or so I’ve been through Yellowstone and Glacier. I’m seeing the same over crowding. The same traffic jams at entrances. The same lack of maintenance. It seems like a winning issue for the current administration to fix this stuff. Since I’m a veteran, I paid $10 for a lifetime pass to all “federal recreation areas.” That was a good deal. It contributes to the overcrowding though.
I did see a grizzly cub walking down the middle of the road today in Glacier. Good stuff.
My pics aren’t all that great but I’m posting some. I’m using an iPhone 15 and 3 Nikons that are all over 25 years old.
The President did cut NPS budgets and fired experienced staff. I am sure it does not help the situation.
Anon: A U.S. President usurped the U.S. Congress’s power to set an agency’s budget? How did that happen?
Separately, ChatGPT says that nobody knows what the NPS budget is because Congress may appropriate $X and then hand out an almost equal amount in “disaster supplemental” over $2 billion in FY2025 when the nominal budget was just over $3 billion.
Park facilities have been crowded and crummy for at least 25 years. Zion, for example, banned private vehicles in the only part of the park that people wanted to see, in May 2000. I was there about 10 years ago and the buses were more crowded than public buses in Manhattan while the trails were more crowded than a typical Manhattan sidewalk. These crowds were served by… almost exactly none of the infrastructure that exists to serve residents of Manhattan.