Churchill Family Yurt Tour 2013: Dosewallips

The Churchill family began the 2013 summer Yurt Tour at Wallace Falls. Our second stop was a few weekends ago at Dosewallips State Park (pronounced doe-see-wall-ups - thanks native Seattleite friend Sarah). First, note that this one, too, is not technically a yurt but rather a platform tent. I promise, the rest of our yurt tour stops are actually at yurts.

Dosewallips is situated on the Hood Canal on the lower, inner part of the Olympic Peninsula. It's the only stop on our tour featuring a platform tent, and we were pumped. A platform tent is pretty much what it sounds like. Tent on a platform. This one was sort of deceptively not rustic since it had electricity - meaning electric heater and lamp - but it still felt like camping since we didn't use the heater that much, still cooked over a campfire, and got to hear the rain on the tent through the night. (Which happens to be one of my favorite parts about camping. Is that weird that I like it when it rains?)

We arrived just around noon on Saturday and got settled in our tent. Setting up camp is my specialty. We had some Yurt Tour approved snacks, then decided to set off for a short hike while the rain held off. The hike ended up being sort of disappointing. Being on the Hood Canal, we were hoping we could hike upwards a bit and get some good views. But, the trail stayed pretty much in the woods with little change in elevation. The highlight for me was seeing several banana slug friends (there was much ooing and ahhing and look how big this is compared to my thumb).

After our hike, we walked down to the beach area. The highlight of this stretch of beaches on the Hood Canal are the oysters and clams. With a license, you can harvest oysters easily and dig for severals species of clams and the much sought after goeduck. We saw a family digging for clams while we were there, but didn't do any harvesting ourselves (this time).

Then, it was back to our site for a fire and dinner. Kevin insisted on getting steak and I gave in pretty easily. Add wine in coffee mugs and it was a classy campsite. We've decided these are our official Yurt Tour mugs. Both the potatoes and the steak were seasoned with my Dad's special secret seasoning mixture, which Kevin had labeled "Range Seasoning" for the spice drawer (My Dad's name was Randy and his nickname was Range for those who don't know. As in "home, home on the...." as he used to say).

Sunday we woke up to a little bit of drizzle. So, we decided to skip out on hiking any more trails in the area and instead look the leisurely drive home by going north up the Hood Canal side of the peninsula to Kingston to take the ferry ride. We also stopped at several antique, estate, thrift stores along way, which is much more fun than hiking in the rain in my opinion.