A packrafting trip in Olympic National Park
A few weeks ago I went packrafting on the Queets River with my friend Patrick who recently moved to Seattle.
On the first night of my trip to Maine, I impulsively sent him a message from my satellite messenger proposing the trip. I heard back a few days later confirming that he got the days off and was excited to go.
The weather turned cold and wet. I dealt with very high winds, large waves and days of rain. Those conditions made the trip satisfying and worthwhile but they took something out of me and coming home and working for two weeks only to fly across the country for a long weekend seemed like a bad idea. I reluctantly decided not to go but my mind wandered down mossy trails under the high canopy of ancient trees every chance it got. Three days before I was supposed to have left, I told Patrick I had changed my mind.
There were a couple cars parked at the trailhead this time so we wouldn’t have the rainforest to ourselves. Nonetheless, we were surprised when we saw headlamps across the river on the first night.
I shined my super bright flashlight into the thick forest. Who would be hiking in a trailless section of the park at 9pm? Were they lost? The headlamps slowly found their way to a narrow beach down a steep bank Just upriver from our camp. Patrick and I watched in awe as minutes later the headlamps forded the thigh deep, icy water and came our way.
They seemed like us, more or less, other than their freezing cold, soaking wet pants. I asked them where they had gone and they pointed to an unnamed ridge in the distance, miles off trail. “What were you doing up there?” I asked. “Exploring,” one of them said. We told them where we were relative to the trail. “Thanks for the light,” one of them said. “We needed that.”
Our undesignated campsite on the second night was on a floodplain along a wide, shallow section of the river. The water level had spiked the week before due to heavy rainfall not too long before our trip but it was low again. We first considered camping on the other bank but we saw better options on the opposite side and walked our rafts across.
Fresh elk tracks led to the site from where we came out of the water. Smaller prints followed them that were either bobcat or coyote but we could not tell. We entertained the possibility of it belonging to a mountain lion but we saw one’s prints up close the next day that were much larger. Patrick had spotted the bleached skeleton of an elk just off trail on our way in and a femur underwater in an eddy (he has a knack) so we were very aware that this was their realm.
When we left the next morning, we followed those prints back to the river and noticed bear prints mixed in too though they diverged closer to the river, where the bear moved from sand to gravel and its footprints disappeared. The rest continued under Patrick’s deflated raft in the picture above. Our footprints were those of the fourth species to walk that length of sand in that short period of time.
That campsite was a highlight of the trip. The night we arrived, we followed the loud hoots of owls to the edge of the forest. We could not find them in the dark but we returned to a warm fire under a bright moon.
My backpack was white with frost in the morning and my raft was glazed with ice but we had built the fire up enough the night before that decently sized embers made it through the night and we refueled it with dry leaves, bark and driftwood within minutes of waking. We drank coffee as the sun cleared the horizon and shined its light on the tips of the tallest trees first and it lifted cold wet air from their crowns which it pulled from their branches like cotton puffs before they vanished as the air warmed. Moist air gathers in river valleys but they have their rewards as well. Although our tents were soaking wet from condensation, we had a broad view of the mountains, forests, moon and stars around us.