When Goats Fly: Olympic National Park

by Rachel
Tuesday, July 9th

This is the dry season for Olympic National Park. There are only 3 inches of rain the entire month- which is very little considering the yearly average is over 100 inches of rain. This is good news because it means we lucked out with the weather today and had just a bit of sun and perfect hiking weather.

Olympic National Park is known for three things - the ocean, the rainforest and the mountains. Yesterday we visited the rainforest and the ocean, so that left us with the mountains today. When we got to the entrance of the Hurricane Ridge section of the park the ranger told us about how some of the trails were closed due to goat relocations. She gave us a flier which had a picture of a goat being air lifted off the mountain. I thought it was the most hilarious picture I had ever seen. The flier explained that the goats were not native to this mountain and they had been brought over by some people. Mountain goats normally like salt licks and since there weren't any on this mountain it caused problems. The saltiest thing they could find was human urine and sweat. They began to be aggressive towards hikers and rangers. The mountain nearby was supposed to have mountain goats, but they had been over hunted. The solution is to airlift goats out of these mountains and then drive them over to the next mountain.

My mom still found a nice trail - Klahhane Ridge - that was not closed for flying goats. We just hiked a hour out and an hour back along the trail. It was a ridge trail and it was beautiful. The trail wound along the side of mountain meadows with beautiful wild flowers. The back drop was jagged snowcapped peaks with a glacier visible in the distance. The bottoms of the hills were covered in pine trees.

It was hard to get my brother and cousin to cooperate to take a picture...

Beautiful mountains along the hike at Hurricane Hill

When we got back to the parking lot we began heading to the cars. I looked up and saw one of the helicopters with a goat dangling under it. I got very excited and started jumping and grabbed my grandpa's arm and shouting, "Look! There is a flying goat!" If you ever want weird stares from stangers in a parking lot- this is a good way to do it. I ran across the parking lot and onto one of the trails to an overlook to try to get a better picture. By this point, I was no longer the only person trying to photograph the flying goat.

Here's my screenshot of the helicopter airlifting the goat out of the park

After watching the goat fly into the distance, I returned to the car and we headed to the next hike. It was a short hike to Marymere Falls. The hike was lush green the whole way and the waterfall was surrounded by a mossy green rock.

Marymere Falls

along the hike to Marymere Falls

Once returning home and eating, I decided to get in the hot tub. I accidentally heated it up too much and by the time my cousins and I got out there, we had to wait a while for it to be cooler to go in. We had lots of fun sitting in the hot tub and then spraying ourselves down with cold water to cool off.

Tomorrow we leave. We have twenty-seven hours straight of traveling and I kind of really hate airports. It will totally be worth it though because I am beyond excited for the next stage of this trip: Bangkok, Thailand.