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In addition to eating in every state, another goal of the trip was to make it to all four directional extremes of the lower 48 states. Today the goal was to pick up the furthest western point in the lower 48 states.

• North: Angle Township, MN
• West: Cape Alava Trail, WA
• South: Key West, FL
• East: West Quoddy Lighthouse, ME

This point is the only one of the four that is not accessible directly by roads, so I drove back up from Olympia, WA to the ranger station in Ozette, WA. The route there took me through huge wooded areas dotted with logging sites. When I got to the trailhead, I was happy to find that my national parks pass let me park for free instead of having to pay $15. I threw a few things into a backpack: water, a first aid kit, a compass, and extra socks and headed into Cape Alava Trail. As it turned out water was the only part of that I would need, in retrospect the rest of it was entirely ridiculous, but I had no idea what I was getting into (I’m not an avid hiker by any stretch of the imagination).

The Cape Alava Trail is about three miles long and has a boardwalk for the majority of the way. The forest that it cuts through was pretty dense most of the time but in several spots gave way to large grassy areas. Back in Denali one of the signs had caught my eye related to bears, and it said walking along through the woods is a reasonably good way to find bears, and of course I was not interested in the slightest of seeing any bears not in a zoo on this trip Apparently the main problem is that people accidently sneak up on them and then the bear freaks out. So, before heading out I grabbed a handful of change to put in my pocket so that I’d make plenty of noise walking through the woods. In any event, I did not see any bears

I made it past the trail and onto the shore and I could hear what sounded like seals off in the distance. There were two islands off to my right and a bigger island on the left, and it sounded like the seals were located on the far island to the right. I started to walk down the beach to see if I could find them, and because it was low tide I was able to walk out to the first island, however I couldn’t get to the second island without swimming.

I spent a little time taking a pictures and watching some crabs fighting in a pool that had been cut off from the rest of the ocean when the tide went out. Even though it was a pretty remote area there were a couple of other groups of people out there setting up camps or just walking along the beach.

After hiking back I headed for Aberseen, WA, however by the time I got there everything was closed. The streets in Aberdeen were setup in a bizarre pattern with one way streets all over the place. That kind of a setup may make sense in big cities, but it didn’t seem like that was merited in Aberdeen. I decided to just call it a night and drove to my hotel in Centralia, WA.

Tags: Big Road Trip