Rialto Beach - The Pacific Ocean

My Mom was able to visit for Memorial Day weekend. I was so excited to see her because it had been since Thanksgiving and I was missing my Mommy! We missed my Dad joining us because of his work commitments, but it was nice to have some mother-daughter time. And while Robb worked that weekend, Mom and I decided to take a couple of days to visit the Olympic Mountains, a place neither of us had ever been to. We crammed four very different ecological areas into two days. And each half-day was so impressive, that every ecological site will have it's own blog posting. I'll be trying to get everything up about our trip this week. First up: Rialto Beach.

On Saturday morning we got up very early to drive almost four hours to the Pacific Ocean. The plan was to visit Rialto Beach because I wanted to view sea stacks, which I'd never seen before. They don't have those on the beaches in Florida! It was really interesting because we're driving in the forest, driving in the forest, driving in the forest and then wham! There's the Pacific Ocean. The forest butted right up to the beach, which was a really unusual site for me. We got to Rialto Beach at about 11:00am and decided to hike to Hole-in-the-Wall. This 1.5 mile (3 miles round trip) hike was along the beach and was really cool because it was a little foggy and gray. It was a fun little hike We had to cross a pretty large stream coming from the forest into the ocean. No sand on this beach, just lots of rocks that were actually very pretty. And thankfully the tide was low so that we could get through Hole-in-the-Wall. Apparently when the tide is up, you can't even pass through.

Stream we had to cross.

See that brown speck in the middle of the picture? That's me. Next to huge sea stacks.

That's the Hole-in-the-Wall, looking back the way we came through.