The Good Rain - Blue Glacier and Mount Olympus

The approach along the Hoh River, fed by glacial melt and winding through old-growth temperate rainforest, builds the anticipation for everything that follows. Flat, long, ancient — Douglas fir and Sitka spruce filtering what little light makes it through, the river running beside you, moss on everything. This is the good rain country.

Our guide had an almost mythical quality about him — the kind of rugged, deeply experienced alpine veteran who seemed less like someone visiting the wilderness and more like someone who belonged to it. This was my first guided trek with Alpine Ascents, and under his watch I learned the foundations of glacier travel: self-arrest with an ice axe, moving efficiently in crampons, and traveling safely as part of a rope team. But he taught more than technique. He carried himself like an old-world mountaineer, equal parts leader, teacher, and mentor — the sort of alpine presence that feels increasingly rare now. In the Pacific Northwest wilderness he seemed part of the landscape itself: a little mysterious, weathered, and quietly formidable, like some Sasquatch of the glaciers. He was the kind of person you instinctively trusted in consequential terrain.

Somewhere along the approach I found a pool of glacial meltwater, clear to the bottom and cold enough to lock up your chest on contact. I swam in it anyway. Later, an avagit lanche chute had wiped out the trail, forcing us down a giant cable ladder hanging along the slope. By the time we reached base camp, the bugs were so relentless we barely left our tents.

The Blue Glacier

Then we came over the moraine and saw it.

I’ve seen glaciers before — from a distance, they usually appear as a smear of white on a dark mountainside. The Blue Glacier is something different. It fills the basin below the summit like it owns the place, and from the top of the moraine you can see the full sweep of it: crevassed, enormous, deeply blue in the shadows, and so obviously receding it takes a moment to register. The colour in particular — that deep glacial blue that only exists where ice has been compressed for centuries — was unlike anything I’d seen in my life. We carefully climbed down the moraine, loose shredded rock carved from the earth by the glacier’s retreat. You can see exactly how far it once extended, the scraped and striated walls on either side marking its old edges. It’s beautiful in the way evidence of slow catastrophe can be beautiful. Hard to look at for too long.

The Summit

We went for the summit in worsening conditions. The snow above the glacier was deep and soft. Progress was slow and exhausting, and the rain came in properly about halfway up. Visibility closed down to maybe twenty meters. The clouds sat on everything, and I was grateful again for our guide, who post-holed our path knee-deep, dragging each leg back out before the next one.

The March Back

On the way back out, the plan had been to camp five miles from the exit, get a few hours of sleep, and head home in the morning. The problem was that by then everything was soaked. Not damp — soaked. Bags, layers, sleeping kit. There was no version of making camp in that that ended well. What followed was a death march: 20 miles in one day back through the rainforest. We made it to the car park just as the sun was setting.

There’s a 24-hour burger joint in Port Angeles. I don’t remember the name. I remember eating a double cheeseburger at one in the morning in soaking wet clothes, sitting alone while my boots dried slightly on the floor, and that it was one of the better meals of my life.

---

The Blue Glacier is worth the trip on its own terms. Some trips are about the objective. This one turned out to be about a glacier at the end of a rainforest, a swim in water so cold it took your breath away, and getting back to the car.

That’s enough.