Up and at 'em early to head out to Shi Shi Beach for a night of camping right on the sand on some of the most rugged and pristine coastline in the entire northwest. This one you have to work for. You need a permit from the National Park but you ALSO have to travel to the tippy top most point of the US to Neah Bay onto an Indian reservation to obtain a recreation pass because Shi Shi Trail passes through their land. So, we headed down the long windy gravel road on the way out, locking the Silver Steed into first gear to keep from burning our brakes out. Steph was much more at ease being on the inside and away from the ledge so the trip out was fun.
The road to Neah Bay was long and windy and Steph got a little bit of car sickness but we eventually made it in and got our permits. The bay and roads on the way in were covered in a thick blanket of fog that would not lift all day. We had some fish and chips and strawberry shortcake from a food truck owned by an elderly couple. Fresh caught local Halibut cooked to order. The strawberry shortcake was ALMOST just like my mom does it.....in other words, the best strawberry shortcake known to man. Almost.
We made it out to Shi Shi after about a 3 mile hike down some muddy trails and a short set of switchbacks down to the shoreline.
We hiked down the shoreline to Petroleum Creek, which was our water source for the night, and found an awesome place to camp. We were tentative about pitching the tent directly on the sand because it uses only two treking poles and everything else is guylines, but too our pleasant surprise it pitched very nicely using large rocks on top of the stakes.
We then went down to explore the star of the show, Point of the Arches, which is a 300 yard set of rocks that jut sharply up out of the surf. At low tide around the rocks the beach is filled with shallow tidal pools full of Sea Anenomes, Starfish, coral and all sorts of other little critters. These pictures often look like black and whites, but they are actually color photos. This is how thick the fog off the ocean was. I thought we would be disappointed with these weather conditions, but the area was still beautiful in this light.
Those are all color pictures by the way....to give you some idea of the fogginess.
After exploring the Arches we made our way back to camp to get water, get situated and get dinner. Some time during dinner we noticed the weather clearing and we started to get a better picture of just how magnificent the area was. As the sun set completely, we could see that the nearest camp from us was a few hundred yards down the beach in both directions. Basically we had a beach all to our own and we were camped right on the sand. So close, in fact, that we had to look very closely at the previous days high tide marks on the beach to make sure we wouldn't wake up to a very nasty surprise of the ocean sweeping away our tent. We were actually camped in the middle of tree-sized driftwood pushed onto the beach during storm surges, but with no storms in the forecast we were safe....although we never could quite push the thought out of our heads. The ocean has always been a humbling force to stand in front of but, in that rugged, cold coast with no artificial light for miles it was truly awe inspiring. That same force carved those towering, jagged rocks out of stone cliffs. The enormity of it made it like sleeping at the mouth of the abyss. Being huge fans of white noise while sleeping, we drifted off to the absolutely glorious sound of an entire ocean in our bedroom.
From camp in the middle of the night.