Chuckanut Drive (Washington)

Olympic National Park

142 stops· 2 hr 8 min· 233.0 mi

A self-guided driving and walking tour of the ENTIRE Olympic National Park — three worlds in one journey: glacier-capped mountains, the wettest temperate rainforest in the Lower 48, and seventy-plus miles of wild Pacific coast, all driven on the great horseshoe of Highway 101 from Port Angeles down to Lake Quinault. Ranger Quinn guides you up every spur — Hurricane Ridge and Mount Olympus, the freed Elwha River, blue Lake Crescent, Sol Duc Falls, the Hoh Rain Forest, Rialto and Second Beach, Ruby Beach, the Kalaloch coast, and the Valley of the Rain Forest Giants — while Ranger Boone Merrick tells the tales that matter: the Lower Elwha Klallam who freed their river in the largest dam removal in American history, the Lady of the Lake, the Quileute's Move to Higher Ground, the Makah village the sea kept at Ozette, the two Roosevelts who built the park around its elk, and the world's largest spruce. This is the ancestral homeland of eight living, sovereign nations who steward it with the park today. The park interior is roadless, so you drive the perimeter and turn up the spurs; the tour plays whichever end you start from, by GPS. Around thirty dollars a vehicle gets you in for a week; cell signal dies past Port Angeles, so it works fully offline. On the coast, the tide can trap you and rolling drift logs kill — carry a tide chart and never turn your back on the ocean. 2026 note: some roads are gated by washout or fire (the Elwha beyond Madison Falls, Rialto's Mora Road in late season, the Quinault South Shore loop, Staircase) — the tour routes what's open and tells you the rest honestly; check the park's road line before you go.

Coronado Trail Scenic Byway — US-191

51 stops· 1 hr 30 min· 94.7 mi

Hocking Hills — Caves, Cliffs & Waterfalls

38 stops· 1 hr 9 min· 28.4 mi

The flagship tour of Hocking Hills — six legendary stops strung along one winding scenic byway, driven at your pace with a walk at every one. Start at Cantwell Cliffs, the rugged corner most visitors miss, and squeeze down a crack in the rock the locals named a century ago. Stand inside Rock House, the only true cave in these hills — a corridor in the cliff with great arched windows where outlaws and bootleggers once kept house, so the story goes. Walk the hush of Conkle's Hollow, a boardwalk gorge beneath walls of two hundred feet, where pioneer legend says a robbers' treasure is still up on the ledge. Give the centerpiece its due at Old Man's Cave — waterfalls, the Devil's Bathtub, stone bridges raised by the CCC, and the great recess cave where the hermit Richard Rowe lived out his days with his dogs. Catch the biggest water in the hills at Cedar Falls — named by settlers who couldn't tell a hemlock from a cedar — and finish in the grandest stone room in Ohio: Ash Cave, a seven-hundred-foot amphitheater sheltering ten thousand years of human firelight, where Ranger Boone closes the day with the story of Grandma Gatewood, the sixty-seven-year-old Ohio grandmother who out-walked everyone who doubted her. Ranger Quinn guides; Boone stops you seven times for the deep stories. The park is free; the tour works fully offline — exactly what these no-signal hills require. Works in either direction, north or south. Good shoes recommended; every walk is under ninety minutes and one is fully wheelchair-accessible.