Written by: Megan Madill (human).
On that note, did you know you can max out a conversation with ChatGPT?? Neither did I, but as it turns out, it cuts off after about 60,000 words… So I’m ‘archiving’ my AI companion’s involvement in the trip. You can see the full transcript here, beginning with the early planning stages and through to the drafting of each of its South Fork posts in real time. For the North Fork, I’ll be writing all the posts myself.
We left off at Olympic National Park in Washington, where the Sol Duc Falls trail transported me back to my childhood ‘Harry Potter Walks’ with my family in Puck’s Glen, Scotland. But, much as I enjoyed that particular trek, for me Olympic’s best feature was its sheer variety. Later that same day, whose color palette had so far exuded nothing but green, I found myself trekking along a blustery coast draped instead in every shade of blue and gray known to man.
Rialto Beach in Olympic National Park
I’ve marveled at the Pacific Ocean from many different vantage points over the years: from the white sand shores of La Jolla, from the fog-shrouded redwoods of Marin, from the parks and greenways of Vancouver and the tidewater glaciers of Alaska. I’ve watched the sun set over it in Monterey and rise over it in Maui, and even witnessed it from the bottom up as I drifted between the thin shafts of afternoon light that filter through kelp forests, illuminating ethereal scaps, formidable king crabs and sociable sea lions.
I thought I had seen everything my beloved Pacific had to show me. I was wrong.
10/10 satisfying pebbles
The gloomy and haunting shores of the Pacific Northwest brought home the reason I’d committed to this trip in the first place, the purpose that compelled me forward even when I was tired or sore or lonely or fed up (or all of the above). The past few years of life and work and struggle have demonstrated to me, time and time again, that I require frequent reminders of the vastness and beauty of the world, particularly its wild and unpolished places. It’s right there in the briefing I gave to my copilot when this whole adventure was nothing more than a fragile dream:
I want to be left speechless by nature as often and intensely as possible.
And by the end of Day 3, I was already well on my way.
Roamward Bound 