Aberdeen, WA to The Forks, WA – Part I.

Well, can’t say much for Aberdeen, WA.  It smelled bad, it was run down and depressing and depressed.  Dirty town.  Along the main street (Route 101 heading north) houses were so bad that the community began a local campaign to have local business support re-painting them.  There are signs posted in front of the house with the name of the business that sponsored that house.  Tacky.  (clever but tacky)

I tried to find the tent I want at their Wal-Mart there too.  No luck, again.  Getting out of that town was like working your way through a broken maze.  Finally I got on 101 going north.  It was really good to get out of the pollution of Aberdeen, WA.  And although I got good internet connection last night, enough to do my blog, I got nothing this morning.  I still (at 3:30pm in Forks) cannot get a Verizon Air Card connection and am using one of the Forks hotel free wifi connections.   Geez!  Well, I wanted boondocks… and guess that’s what I’m getting today.

 

But as I was leaving Aberdeen and getting out into the wilderness again… I found I had no one in front of me and no one behind me.  That’s what makes me feel like I’m going in the right direction.  I love this life.

Saw a couple deer along the road.  Listening to the radio, the announcer called it “Bigfoot Radio,” but after awhile, I lost radio signals too and resorted to CD music to keep myself awake.

Not much out there between Aberdeen and the Forks.  Some timbering activities.  When you look on a map and see nothing between the two towns… or very little, it’s cause… that’s right… not much out there.

The most exciting part was where the road comes close to the ocean… and you can see it… the ocean.  I guess there are lots of places to get off the highway and into the Olympic National Forest, but with my rig (trailer and van) I don’t feel very adventurous.  There were signs of timbering activities all along Rt. 101.

 

I did stop at the Quinault National Fish Hatchery… which was really interesting.  I didn’t know the fish were tagged so that when caught you could learn where they had come from. 

Before European arrived in the Quinault area of the central Washington coast, hundreds of native peoples were living here in villages, hunting and foraging in the pristine forests, and fishing on these shores and crystal clear rivers. The hatchery is on lands within the Quinault Indian reservation on Cook Creek.  From September through February visitors can watch the exciting spectacle of these magnificent fish ascending the hatchery’s fish ladder and see large adult fish in the hatchery’s holding ponds.  While I was there, they were inserting coded wire tag in the nose of fish.

 

To be continued in Part II.