After leaving Long Beach in the morning (and stopping in at one of the area’s many drive-through coffee shops, where I tried my first mangonada — yum), we drove up towards the centre of the national park, through the amusingly named Humptulips and along the eastern edge of the Quinault reservation. Quinault Lake is a pristine, salmon-filled, mountain-lined expanse that looks like it could be in the Alps. It’s surrounded by the temperate rainforest for which Olympic National Park is famous.
We followed an excellent four-mile trail from the visitor centre through the rainforest and along the lake’s southwestern shore. In the forest, each cedar-and-moss-scented breath was like gulping fresh water. I’ve rarely been anywhere so moist and draped in green, or so diverse in evergreen trees. Where the path got particularly dense, we stopped every to often to look at each other with concern — there were unfamiliar growling sounds coming from the thicket. At one point, Eleanor spied a black bear canter away from us on the path up ahead (everyone else was too far back to see). Thus, it didn’t take us long to get into the headspace of small, vulnerable human being of old; we breathed sighs of relief upon reaching the open at the water’s edge.
Along the lake, I was delighted to spy caprisun-coloured wild lilies and picked handfuls of fragrant mint. This part of the trail was soon completed; soaked but elated, we piled back into the car and headed into Forks as evening fell. Funnily enough, the town does not look very much like in the Twilight films, which makes sense when you realise the latter were mostly filmed in Portland. The real Forks looks like it has only 3,000 inhabitants, and its glorified shed architecture put me in mind of a more wooded outer Greenland (although I have never been to Greenland). Our prefab Airbnb, warm and cozy and complete with dark leather armchairs and ‘wood’ panelling, contained the obligatory full collection of Twilight books and DVDs.
We had dinner at the Longhouse, a local Native American restaurant focused on fry bread. I felt bad for the grandmother, as basically everything on the menu had fry bread in it; luckily, the chili was an option. We kids shared plates of ‘Three Little Indians’ (fry bread tacos with three different meat fillings), which were unsurprisingly yummy. While we certainly could have eaten more, it was good for our insides that we treated it more as an experience and lived to eat another day.