Olympic National Park was by far my favorite from this summer. It is HUGE and has so many different habitats. We spent one day in the rain forest, and two days on the coast. We didn't even visit the Olympic mountains, which is the most popular part of the park, since we had just done mountains in Glacier and Mount Rainer. We camped 4 nights at Mora so we had 3 full days. We didn't get up early our first day to head into the Hoh rain forest and they only allow so many people into the parking area at time. So we ended up waiting in a line of cars for a hour before we could get to the visitor center. It wasn't too bad though because we had the pack mule with all our food on the back that makes a nice picnic table. We ate lunch as we crept along so when we got the visitor's center we were good to go. We did two hikes around some of the old growth rain forest in the area that looked like we were in Jurassic Park. The trees were enormous, everything was incredibly green and covered with moss. One of our hikes was a guided hike with a park ranger, which definitely helped me see the forest differently. Many of the tree species in this forest need other old dead trees to grow on, which is pretty cool. The girls saw their first and not last banana slug. Despite getting many, many feet of rain a year, it had been unusually dry so things did look a little less green than normal I guess. Our campground was very near the beach (~2 miles), but was actually in the rain forest.
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