We caught an early 6AM flight Friday morning from LAX  (the flight ended up being delayed for an hour and a half) and arrived in Seattle at 10:30AM. After picking up our rental car, lunch, water and fuel we headed out to the Ozette Ranger Station. We arrived at Ozette Ranger Station around 4PM only to realize this is a seasonal ranger station and our backpacking permits should have been picked up at the Wilderness Information Center (WIC) in Port Angeles! After reading over the online permit again, I realized it was my oversight. We were relieved to hear from the maintenance worker that the ranger will be coming back to the station later in the afternoon. The ranger finally pulled in at 6PM and was able to sort out our back country permit and lend us a couple bear canisters.

The hike to Cape Alava is 3.4 miles and it is mostly on board walks downhill to the beach. We left the ranger station at 6:30 and arrived at our campground around 8PM. Thanks to the abundance of day night, we had plenty of light to make camp and dinner.

Board walk trail before we descended onto the beach at Cape Alava

There are lots of campsites around Cape Alava. We skipped pass the campsites right at the entrance of the beach as it seemed pretty busy and ended up selecting one of the last campsites next to the abandoned ranger station. We experienced one of the most beautiful sunsets with Cape Alava as a back drop as we walked towards our campsite.

Abandoned ranger station looking right across at Cape Alava 

Shortly after getting the camp fire started, I began preparing for our dinner. I didn’t get very far with the dinner preparation when I realized there was something wrong with the seal of the fuel canister. Without a proper seal to the canister, we were not able to start the stove safely and had to resort to cooking cowboy style on top of the open fire. Although this wasn’t an ideal situation, things could have been much worse if an open fire wasn’t allowed on the trail. Thankful for the warm meal, we quickly ate our dinner and turned in for the night. It was a long day for all of us and we had an ambitious itinerary to accomplish the next day.