The Olympic Peninsula Loop
US-101 around the wettest corner of the country, from a big chair at the northwest tip to a frying pan on the coast — with a Sasquatch in the rainforest between them.
3 stops · 3 days · Washington · roughly 81 miles point to point
See the whole route and everything odd beside it
OddWay draws your route first, then plots every stop that falls inside the detour you're willing to make. No hunting through a list to work out what is actually on the way.
Loading the map…
Every one of the 3 places in the index. Plan a route and the map narrows to what's actually near it.
US-101 runs a horseshoe around the Olympic Peninsula, and this is that road with five reasons to stop on it. Rainforest, coast, and the specific kind of roadside object that a town builds when the industry it lives on needs advertising.
Neah Bay
The northwest corner of the contiguous United States, on Makah tribal land. The big chair sits at the end of a long drive that is worth doing for the drive.
A recreation permit is required to visit Makah lands — buy one in town, and treat the whole area as somebody's home rather than a viewpoint, because it is.
Into the rainforest
The Sol Duc Sasquatch is a figure in the forest of Clallam County, in exactly the country that made the Pacific Northwest the centre of all this. Nothing is published about who made it. The forest roads out here are remote and seasonal, so check conditions.
The Quinault big Sitka spruce is a genuine giant and takes five minutes off the road.
Down the coast
South Bend calls itself the oyster capital of the world and has the sculpture to say so. Long Beach has the frying pan, built for a clam festival — which is the honest origin of most of these: a town needed a reason for people to come, once, and then kept the object.
Practical
Three days is right. It is further than it looks on a map, the road is slow, and the weather does what it likes — this is among the wettest places in the United States, and the rainforest is not a metaphor.
Fuel in the larger towns. Signal comes and goes across the whole peninsula.
The Route
Quinault Big Sitka Spruce
Quinault, Washington
This is the Quinault Big Sitka Spruce near Lake Quinault, not in Hoquiam itself. The natural tree is roughly 191 feet tall with a circumference approaching 59 feet and is estimated to be around a thousand years old; travelers reach it on a short trail managed from the Rain Forest Resort Village area.
World's Largest Oyster
South Bend, Washington
South Bend’s giant oyster is a concrete shell monument celebrating the Willapa Bay oyster industry and sits in Robert Bush Memorial Park. The exact installation year is not well documented in reliable current sources, but travelers today can walk up to the oversized shell in the public riverfront park.
World's Biggest Frying Pan
Long Beach, Washington
Long Beach’s giant frying pan was commissioned by the local chamber of commerce and forged in 1941 for the town’s Razor Clam Festival. It has since been surpassed by larger pans elsewhere, but the 14-foot-long landmark remains a free downtown roadside photo stop and one of the classic oddities of the Washington coast.
2 stops on this route are no longer in the index and have been left out.