Olympic National Park South Coast Route

Dogs No Dogs

Features Birding · Commonly Backpacked · River/Creek · Views · Waterfall · Wildlife

This trip offers so much variety it keeps you engaged and distracted the whole time. You'll travel on beaches half the time, visiting tide pools, watching bald eagles, and maybe plugging your nose passing a beached whale. The other half the time you are scrambling up bluffs with the assistance of ropes or other trail features and enjoying the lush rainforest just off the beach. You'll even pass a couple waterfalls along the way.

Plan your route based on tide times and bring a tide chart!

The route is very straightforward to navigate as you are just doing a straight through route along the coast and shuttling back from the exit back to where you started. You can start from either end, but beginning from Third Beach Trail in the north, you run through the woods down to the beach. Traveling across the beach toward Strawberry bay Falls, you take an overland route before reaching the falls to get past Taylor Point.

Returning to the beach at Taylor Point, you need the tide to be around 4.5' or lower to traverse to the beach and continue. You travel on the beach up to Scotts Bluff where you scramble up bluffs again to bet behind Scott's Bluff and come back to the beach again on the other side. There is a camping area here by Scott Creek.

Continuing on shortly after Scott Creek, you have another place where the tide needs to be around 4 feet or lower for you to pass by on the rocky beach. You pass by a couple points on the beach, Strawberry Point and Toleak Point, both of which have lots of camping areas just inside the tree line. Continuing along the beach past Toleak Point, you eventually reach another overland route following Goodman creek trail.

This route takes you past a lovely waterfall on Falls Creek, then to a crossing of Goodman creek which you'll be getting wet for. The trail returns to the beach shortly after, and you follow the beach for a long way until you reach Mosquito creek.

Mosquito creek is another crossing you'll be getting wet for, and right after it you climb the bluffs again on a trail that takes you up to a large camping area overlooking the ocean. Leaving this campground, you continue overland through some muddy, thick terrain behind Hoh head and eventually pop back out on the beach again after climbing down a steep ladder in the rock face with assistance from a rope.

After a short beach run you approach an area strewn with large rocks and boulders where you have to do a lot of rock hoping or climbing and you can only cross this area when the tide level is about 2 feet or lower. Once through that, you continue on the beach to the mouth of the Hoh river where you pick up the Oil City Trail following along the banks of the Hoh River to your exit point.

Lots of Salal, Bald Eagles