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Journeys
New trail journeys to 'the end of the Earth' Cape Trail leads to wilds of exotic Cape Flattery The Associated Press NEAH BAY, Wash. -- On a day like most days at the edge of the Earth, you can watch rain squalls shuffle toward the mainland, sometimes one by one, more often by twos and threes. But you won't have to slog through mud to get there.
There is a new trail, the Cape Trail, a prize winner -- best special project in Washington state, according to the Department of Transportation, which helped to pay for it.
The Makah Indian Nation supervised its completion on tribal land in November 1997, creating for the first time a safe route to the high cliffs of Cape Flattery, the northwestern-most tip of the Lower 48 and a place rich in history and legend.
The Cape Trail, just three-quarters of a mile long, has been widened; swamps have been bridged; steps have been carried in; and four viewing platforms -- with picnic tables, yet -- have been built for views of the surging surf.
It's a wild place, tamed just enough for visitors to bring the kids -- if they're hooked to a short leash.
"Definitely, even now, you'll want to keep an eye on them," said Alice Langebartel, the tribe's real estate specialist who coordinated the project.
"I was always amazed at how many people knew where the old trail was," she said. "But people did find it. They'd come from all over the world, and now they're coming to see the new one."
Now, the tribe is planning yet another trail, this one south from Neah Bay to Shi Shi Beach. It is expected to cut three miles and several days from the present route.
Long a favorite of beach hikers, but a grind with a full pack, Shi Shi currently requires a six-mile, two-day march north from a trailhead at the Lake Ozette Ranger Station -- and a careful reading of the tide chart. The hike back also can't be rushed because of the tide.
Builders of the new trail likely will be guided by the artistic success of the Cape Flattery Trail, its planks and steps still showing the yellow of newly hewn cedar.
Built for $240,000 from the DOT, the Department of Natural Resources and the Employment Security Department, the trail was designed by Stuart Bonney, then of Lindberg Architects, and built by Hoch Construction Inc., both of Port Angeles.
"It was definitely an interesting project," Rick Hoch said. Especially during lunch.
"We'd sit out at the end and watch the wildlife. We saw sea lions on the rocks and seals dragging salmon in their mouths. We saw lots of whales."
The view is riveting. The sandstone cliffs drop 100 feet or more to a slosh and slam of waves that shake the ground.
Rolling in off the north Pacific, the seas have bored huge holes in the rock, creating caves and ledges where wildlife proliferates. A site marker explains the process that is pulverizing the place, grain by grain.
Architect Bonney, also under contract to design the new Shi Shi trail, engineered the Cape Trail's platform facilities to withstand 100 mph winter winds and remains fascinated by the landscape's ongoing change.
While a likely phrase to describe the place might be "the end of the Earth," Donna Wilkie protests.
"No, not 'the end,' " she said. "For us, it's the beginning."
As the Makahs' tourism planner and sometime guide, Wilkie has her fingers on the pulse of history that throbs through the region. (See
www.Makah.com/trail).
"This is one of the places where Makah men would go on vision quests,"
Wilkie said. "They would go to clarify their goals and to ask for
strength and accuracy."
From such a high vantage point in times of strife, lookouts kept their eyes peeled for war canoes. In the modern era, the U.S. government did, too, keeping watch with electronic gear from Bohokus Peak, which rises between Neah Bay and Cape Flattery.
Weather and navigation gear also are installed on Tatoosh Island in and around the lighthouse, built in 1857.
Tatoosh Island is where the Makah people once fled to practice rituals denied them by whites.
From the wood platform at trail's end, visitors view the horizon's sweep, the gaps cut in the cliffs by waves and the free-standing columns called sea stacks.
Cape Flattery and Neah Bay form the western terminus of state Route 112, the two-lane road that snakes 60 miles along the Strait of Juan de Fuca west from Port Angeles.
Twenty miles to the north, Vancouver Island veers into the North Pacific to disappear in Canadian mists. To the south lie Flattery Rocks National Wildlife Refuge, Shi Shi Beach and the Pacific Ocean edge of Olympic National Park.
Below lies "the Gut."
Swept by currents of seven to nine knots and by ceaseless North Pacific swells, "it can be pretty wicked," said Makah fisheries technician Darrell Markishtum.
Markishtum, steeped in Makah tradition, has canoed the Gut as part of the tribe's whaling crew. He tells how their boat sliced through surging incoming waves as though it had "the power to part the ocean."
From the overlook platform at the end of Cape Trail, visitors might envision how men left their canoes centuries ago to hunt seals in the dark caves that pockmark the cliff.
"Several hunters at a time would leave their canoes and swim into the caves," Markishtum said. "To see in the dark, they carried spruce branches with lighted pitch on one end. They had to be quiet or risk spooking the seals and getting run over in the stampede." The Olympian Copyright 1999
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