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Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 21:08:41 :
In Reply to: OT: Anybody in Port Townsend? posted by Dave Speed on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 20:32:24 :
As I remember, there are lots of artists and musicians in PT. They have a big musical doings at Ft Worden called "Fiddle Tunes" that's supposed to be quite the event according to friends who have gone. I haven't spent a lot of time there and don't know that I currently know anyone who lives there, although I've known a lot of people who lived there for a while. My general impression is it attracts lots of nice wholesome organic women and lots of guys who like to work on wooden boats and smoke pot. The best thing about PT is it's on the right side of the sound for exploring the Olympic Peninsula. If you go there, and you haven't been to the coast, at least take a day trip and go out to Ozette or LaPush.
Most of the logging spurs are now gated, but some of the mainline roads are usually open. Last time I was out there on Rayonier land I ran into a bunch of Mexican tree-thinning crew that couldn't speak English but as soon as they saw I was trying to get through a locked gate, tossed me the key. If you want to drive right to the beach and not hike at all, the Indian reservations are the best way to go. All the other beaches belong to the Olympic National Park.
If you want a really bizarre post-civilization sort of drive, go to Taholah on the Quinalaut reservation and take the "highway" north. You go across big wide concrete bridges whose guard-rails were either never installed or were stolen, and through major road cuts and fills that are all grown with trees except for a narrow dirt track. The further north you go, the less finished the bridges are until you get to one place where the cuts, fills, and abutments are all there, but there's no bridge and you have to drive down through the swampy bottom on the pioneer road that was no doubt just built to be temporary. I think it has a bailey bridge over the creek. All this was built in the 1960s when they were going to move US 101 and run it right along the coast and straight across the res, rather than detouring way inland like it does, but the Indians stopped them after the construction was well under way.
An interesting bit of history about about PT is that after one early treaty, England still owned it, even though the 49th parallel had been settled on as the US/Canada boundary. PT was one of the earliest settlements and was considered to be the critical fort that guarded the entrance to Puget's Sound. I'm not sure what the US eventually had to do to get Britain to give it up.