Olympic National Park - Shi Shi Beach

I've slept on a beach twice. In 1983, me and some Navy buddies drove out to Ocean City, Maryland on Fourth of July weekend. After discovering every bed in town was accounted for at 7 p.m. on Friday night, we decided we'd just head to the bars, pick up some girls, and crash with them. At 3 a.m.,  having not spoken to any girls all night, we stumbled out of a bar, across the boardwalk and flopped on the sand. After one of us puked, we staggered twenty yards away, took off our shirts and shoes, and used them as pillows and hunkered down. Tip: New Balance shoes make for suck-ass pillows. Around dawn, a cop jabbed his nightstick into my back. The camping trip was abruptly over.

Having overcome my fear of speaking to them years before, I now prefer to take women as hiking partners. They tend to accept being to bossed around and are easier to impress using the skills I learned from Man vs. Wild. Plus, if we're attacked by a wild animal, I can generally outrun my girl hiking partners, which gives me some piece of mind in the backcountry. So I got that going for me...which is nice.  Twenty-five years after Ocean City Beach, I tried camping on the Pacific Ocean with another buddy. We were in Seattle for our friend's wedding. The groom had plans for the honeymoon that didn't involve us, so we took off for the Olympic Peninsula with a backpack full of tiny corn on the cobs, celery with cream cheese, crackers, and other wedding h'dorves.

The Shi Shi beach trail, in in the Olympic National Park in Washington, is short and easy. You'll stroll about 2 miles through a rain forest to get from the trailhead to the beach. Ferns will brush your legs. Waterlogged treefall and moss surround you.  Moss hangs from old growth evergreens like a scene from a scary movie. Unless it's July or August, most likely it will be overcast, dreary, moist, cool. You won't see much sky anyway, the tree-cover is thick. You might come across toads or salamanders, and maybe some dear.



The trail descends toward it's end before the forest opens up abruptly and gives way to the beach. You see sand, ocean, and billions and billions of tree trunks turned driftwood. You'll have to log hop or Wallenda your way through the maze of logs to get to the breakwater.







Before you do anything, pause to consider you are further west than anyone else in the US except for a handful of American Indians a few miles up the coast. After pondering the enormity of that, find a place to pitch your tent. Here's a tip: when you pitch your tent, remember tides come in and can turn your tent into boat.  It's hard to swim inside a tent, especially when it's dark. Remember all those logs you walked across to get to your campsite? They weren't carried there by lumberjacks. The ocean moved them and it can move you while you sleep. So, if you see a bunch of tents lined up one-hundred meters from the water, don't be a wise-ass and setup fifty meters closer than them, unless you wanna end up further west than the Indians.

As you pitch the tent, send your girl out to convert driftwood into use-able sized pieces of firewood. Give her your overpriced, inadequate, multitool with its 2-inch saw blade and see what she comes back with. When you're relaxing on a log, sipping some rum you packed in, with the tent already setup, she'll probably come back with a couple twigs saying your tool is too short to do the job. Don't take it personally.

To get your firewood, show her how to snap branches off tree trunks by jumping off logs onto the branches. Then watch as she tries.

Or, come prepared with a really cool human-powered chain saw

Having pitched your Sierra designs tent and collected firewood, take off your hiking boots and don some water shoes and explore the beach.
















Enjoy the smoke-stacked cliffs and














the sea creatures which look like vaginas glued to rocks.

Go back to the tent, build a fire, cook up some food, and sip on that rum.











If you have an harmonica, do your fellow hikers a favor--keep it in your backpack. There's nothing more annoying than bad harmonica on a hiking trip. If you're with another dude instead of a girl, try not to think about how gay it is for two guys to camp together on a cold romantic beach, and bring a warm Mountain Hardware sleeping bag to head off any hypothermia-induced spooning.

And to mitigate the gay factor to the extent possible, under no circumstances, take photos together...

Crowds can be bad in the summer. I hear during high season weekends, tents are twenty meters apart. We went on a Sunday night in June and saw one other tent a hundred meters away. The highlight of this trip is beach combing.

See ya on the trail...