Enchanted Valley, Olympic National Park

The sky is a brilliant blue. The valley I am in is surrounded by deciduous trees on one side and pine trees on another. My my left there are snow capped mountain peaks, behind me are mountain rocks covered in green grass and pine trees. The tops of the rocks look like dry brush strokes of gray and green. Sitting in the belly of the valley, I look around and see wide open spaces (hello Dixi Chicks) with fist-sized rocks gray and white, flat and rounded, filling the spaces between little streams running across the ground.

There are bare snags of sun bleached logs strewn about, and I find one to sit on. The noon summer light makes me feel like I am time traveling centuries, if not millennia back and seeing this place before humans ever did. Logically, a thought bursts in that even a mere 20,000 years ago, this valley was under a sheet of ice, but I push it aside.

This moment in the early afternoon sun, which is not quite roasting me yet, highlights the small flowers and green leaves dotted across the valley floor as if with a bright coat of paint. I feel the warmth on my bare skin. I look and see waterfalls carving their way from the tops of the mountains and I am reminded of Tarzan, of a little boy becoming a man, of the jungle, of how this continent is not so different from another, and yet might as well be another planet.