Hiking The Spruce Railroad Trail

This trail winds around the north shore of beautiful Lake Crescent on the Olympic Peninsula. The trail was built during World War I as a railroad to transport Spruce trees from the wilderness to Port Angeles where they would be shipped to facilities that built aircraft. The railroad was completed 19 days after Armistice Day, and was never used for military purposes. It was sold and used for commercial logging until 1954. In 1981 it was turned into a trail by Olympic National Park rangers.

It was a beautiful day and Cody, Jen and I headed out for the 7 mile hike at around 9AM. We drove to Lake Crescent singing along to a road trip CD that I'd made. It included some Merle Hagard, CCR and Hank Williams Jr.. Cody acted like we were ridiculous but I think he enjoyed it. We arrived at the trailhead around 11AM. It was an absolutely gorgeous day out. We had a picnic lunch packed in the backpack. Cody volunteered to carry it. We called him our pack mule.

About a mile into the trail, we came across a spot called The Devil's Punch Bowl. A bridge seperated it from Lake Crescent. You can look out over the lake, it's 5,000 acres and 9 miles long, to the surrounding Olympic peaks. It is then clear why people might have thought it had no bottom (it's actually about 600 feet deep). Native Americans reportedly refused to canoe or fish in the lake, believing evil spirits lived in its depths. There is a story about the lake that tells about a woman being murdered by her husband. She was thrown into the lake and her body turned up three years later and had turned to soap. It looked very peaceful to me and when we came back to it at 2PM there were people jumping off of the bridge and swimming.

There were two tunnels built during the railroad construction. They have both collapsed so you can't go through them but I did get this picture of Cody standing at the entrance of the longer tunnel. We had to hike about 100 feet up a hill to get to the entrance and when we got there it felt like the air conditioner was on. We could even see our breath.

After the last tunnel entrance we turned around and headed out. We didn't get to have our picnic lunch because the mosquitos were swarming everytime we stopped. We opted to eat a little while we walked and stop at Wendy's on the way home. Everyone was happy with that.

I drove halfway home and then Jen took the wheel. I promptly fell asleep only to be wakened by my cell phone a few minutes later. It was my mom and we had a nice chat.