3.8 miles of hiking • 250' elevation gain •
At the last moment we cancelled our family vacation to North Cascades National Park and Leavenworth due to all the fires and closure of Hwy 20. This was quite disappointing as we planned this vacation nine months back. We were actually able to get reservations in Forks, WA with only those two days notice, and visited Olympic National Park instead. This turned out to be quite an excellent decision as the only fire (Queets River area) was deep in the backcountry and being somewhat managed and not a threat to our visit.
Our son also took some vacation and joined us! We planned our hikes around minimizing elevation (and too much distance) to avoid any injury/aggravation to his hip, and he's scheduled for surgery in a couple of months to rectify the issue. Being a long driving day, we stayed close to Hwy 101.
The Sam's Loop trail seemed like a nice little loop to start out with. The Queets River Road is very nice and an easy drive from the highway. It was evident that the loop wasn't used much, and felt more like an animal trail for many of the meadow areas. In fact, we lost the trail in a large meadow and I had fun finding it again! There's a short piece of the trail that used the road, and we found a Massive old growth tree (not marked with a sign) on a short spur trail. It must have been 10+ feet in diameter! We ended up going down to the Queets River and found the crossing to the Queets River Trail. The water was quite low, and easily cross-able, but the rocks were covered with a thin slippery slime. We didn't cross, and there was no mention of closure due to the fire. Interestingly enough, there was NO water in the Sam's River! A fun short hike and worthwhile!
