Introduction | Part 1: Yosemite | Part 2: Yellowstone | Part 3: Olympic | Part 4: Glacier | Part 5: Grand Teton
The twin bows of the Kingston-bound ferry float through the misty early light, but I’m still struggling to cut through my own morning fog. With the last bourbon of the year on my breath, and a girl now half a world away on my brain, the ache of self pity is setting roots somewhere deep in my solar plexus. It had been two weeks since my girlfriend had moved to Spain and told me not to follow. I hadn’t exactly sprung up off the mat since, adding healthy servings of holiday stress and job uncertainties into one very sorry New Year’s cocktail.
My friends are all migrating to respective Cascadian ski haunts, but I have to handle this noise on my own, and I know exactly where to go for that — the other side of Washington’s Puget Sound for some much-needed solace in the Northwest’s greatest ski-secret-in-plain-sight.
For such a prominent piece of Seattle skyline, the Olympic Mountains couldn’t feel farther away. Though only about 30 miles from Seattle as the crow flies, they are fortified by both the Puget Sound and the largest temperate rainforest in North America. The mountains are also a part of Olympic National Park, and the skiing, like that in most parks, is secluded and challenging. The area is notorious for exhausting, forested approaches, followed by long glacial ascents, and topped by snow that whips so hard off the Pacific entire ridgelines lay bare despite snowpacks as deep as 10 feet. My New Year’s Day mission, thankfully, was a little less ambitious.
Not many ski commutes start with a 30-minute ferry ride. But, after crossing the saltwater between Edmonds and Kingston, aboard the MV Spokane, I point the Subaru west along Highway 101. A hard frost is still waking up as I wind past miles of low-tide clam beds and docked fishing rigs outside of Discovery Bay and Blyn. The clouds break in Sequim, but patches of black ice remind me that temps are staying low, even down at sea level.
By the time I round the corner into the northern entrance of Olympic National Park, I’ve been on the road (and sea) for two and a half hours, but, coming from the heart of the city, it feels like I’ve entered a new world.
The objective is Hurricane Ridge — a 10-trail volunteer-run ski area tucked within the upper folds of the park. It can be gnarly: Gale-force winds and wet storms close the area’s 17-mile access road for days at a time and the ridge enjoys hanging out in vertigo-inducing cloud cover. But it can also be good. Like, really good. On average, the area receives 400 inches of snow a season, and after a “December to Remember” in the Pacific Northwest, I’m hoping to start the year off better than the way the last one ended by skiing that bounty.
Hurricane Ridge opened its doors in 1957, but skiing in Olympic National Park predates the park itself. In fact, early ski mountaineers were connecting the six-mile stretch between current-day Hurricane Ridge and Deer Park, a former ski area, to the east as early as 1937. Today it remains one of the oldest high-level ski routes in the Northwest.
The snaking Hurricane Ridge Road unfolds the Olympic Range like a pop-up book, with each turn adding a new alpine layer to the geologic diorama. In the parking lot, a beige single-wide sunk into a snowdrift houses the ticket window. Passes are priced per poma (one poma costs $12, two $24, and all three $35) with a full season pass going for $200. I slap a two-poma wicket ticket (with its slogan “I skied in the Olympics!”) to my parka.
After five minutes of hiking from the tow, I’m standing at the top of a snowy ridge, and all I can see is ocean. This is the diving board of the Olympics, surrounded on three sides by the Puget Sound, the Straight of Juan de Fuca, and the Pacific. Asia-bound freighters lumber from the safety of the Sound, and Canada’s Vancouver Island comes to a tip right in front of my nose. I can see Victoria, the island’s capital and imagine the line of hangovers looking for their fix at Tim Horton’s this morning. Behind me, the Olympics rise jagged and raw, thrust upward when the trifecta of Northwest tectonic plates collided millions of years ago. To the south, the rugged, multi-day approach to Mount Olympus, the highest peak in the park at 7,979 feet, is an awe-inflicting river of glaciers and cornices cascading from a thorny crown. To the east, Hurricane Ridge, Obstruction Point, and Elk Mountain form a tantalizing string of north-facing descents rolling down toward the Straight.
The whiz of the poma rope turning around its telephone-pole bullwheel is the only reminder that I’m not completely alone. The absence of ski tracks from my perch would suggest otherwise. The wind is uncharacteristically nonexistent, but I swear I can smell salt coming off the ocean. It feels as though I have this entire mountain, maybe the entire national park, to myself.
Skirting the area boundary along Klahhane Ridge, I yo-yo shady, boot-deep powder. With amphitheaters of bowls along the ridgeline, the skiing is as steep as I want it to be, but I find just the right dosage in drawn-out, mellow turns. Open pitches give way to thick pine forests, the highest fingers of a forest that stretches to the Hoh Rainforest. The other side of the ridge leads back down to the road, a Northwest twist on Teton Pass, I think to myself, and another day’s adventure.
As lactic acid and sour sweat catch up, I climb the ridge for one final push, and as the sun wanes toward the horizon, extending shadows in the valley below and casting a soft pink filter over swaths of green and blue, I realize I’ve found the clarity I sought. I give my poles a tap and drop in toward the sea.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Be sure to check out the film Monumental: Skiing Our National Parks, premiering October 20 in Denver, CO, followed by a nationwide tour. The film will be available to purchase online, as well. Additionally, POWDER produced a 150-page coffee-style hardcover book of the Monumental project. Go here for film, book, tour, and ticket information.
Read the Introduction and Parts 1–5 of Monumental: Skiing Our National Parks:
