Oh, the beautiful trees...

 I'm sorry my blog posts are late and all over the place. It has been a very busy month with family visits, a last minute summer vacation, and school starting again.
I am far behind on posting anything but I still wanted to share some of the photos from our little trip north to the Olympic Peninsula.

I took hundreds of pictures and mostly of trees, but come on, they were so amazing!

Take a look:

(so hard to show the scale, it was huge my head would have barely touched the lowest branch)

I saw pictures of this tree on the internet when I was researching places to go on our trip to the Olympic National Forest and the Lake Crescent area and I wanted to find it so badly. I knew it was somewhere along the lake so did a lot of hiking and exploring around the shore but we just couldn't seem to find it. I almost gave up hope as we packed up our campsite on our last day by the lake but on the drive out of the campground we saw it right off the road down to the boat ramp. We had never used that road since a short path led to the lake from our campsite. It was right there the whole time.

 

Here are a few more gorgeous trees that live around Lake Crescent:

Autumn's Glory....

We have been hiking whenever we can these days, between downpours. I find Autumn walks in the woods to be very inspiring and peaceful.
Mushrooms of many colors and sizes were every where. I also saw a huge bird fly off with a small furry animal from the forest floor. It looked like a hawk with a bunny. I didn't get a photo of that as it happened very quickly. Ben missed it, and I am not sure if he believed me until we heard the bird shriek from the tree tops as we hiked down the trail.
I just love the totem pole with the gnome couple on top. It is adorable.... and very multicultural. There were Native American symbols and animals carved all around it. It was in a dark area of the forest and hard to photograph.
All these photos were taken at The Magness Tree Farm. If you happen to go there, keep an eye out for a green hat with eyes on it. We lost Solomon's turtle hat out there somewhere....bummer. At least it happened after Halloween.