Olympic's wilderness beaches are piled with massive driftwood: entire trees, often a hundred feet long and weighing several tons, torn from riverbanks by floods, carried to sea, and cast back ashore by winter storms. The logs accumulate along the high-tide line and can shift suddenly in heavy surf, a hazard the park warns beachgoers to respect.
That's the Pacific out your window now, and look what the storms pile up at the top of the sand. Whole trees, stripped of bark and bleached silver, stacked along the high-tide line like a giant's spilled matchsticks. Some of these logs are a hundred feet long and weigh several tons. Rivers tore them loose upstream, floated them to sea, and the winter surf flung them right back ashore. Keep well clear of them when the water's up. A single swell can roll one of these trunks like it weighs nothing at all.
Photo: Ron Clausen · CC BY-SA 4.0
