Shelton to Sequim
- Distance: 84 miles
- Routes: SR 101, SR 19
- Estimated Driving Time: 1.5 hours
Cutting across the highway are many rivers and small streams. Dominating the horizon on the left, forested foothills rise in an ascending series to the saw-toothed Olympics, clear-cut and dazzling in bright sunlight, at other times veiled in mist or shrouded in storm clouds, which creep down the canyons and spread out over the lowlands. At infrequent intervals forest roads wind into the deep fragrant woods, bright with wild currants and rhododendron in bloom, splashes of red elderberry, and cascades of creamy-white spiraea and ocean spray.
On the right, seldom entirely out of range of vision, is Hood Canal, sleeping in the summer sun, its oily calm broken only by chance ripples or the forked wake of motor boat or fishing craft; or lying black and still at midnight, except when a leaping salmon or the oar of a passing boatman strikes balls of phosphorescent fire from its surface. At widely separated intervals, small settlements appear along the highway or perched above the water’s edge, where tiny docks on barnacle-encrusted pilings afford anchorage to fishing smacks, pleasure craft, and rowboats; and here and there the forests are broken by clearings, small ranches, and dairy farms.
Leading slightly inland, the route cuts across the neck of Quimper Peninsula, down which a branch road turns to Port Townsend; skirts the tip of Discovery Bay, and then turns left along the Juan de Fuca Strait to Sequim.
The tour winds through low hills, where small farms and chicken ranches alternate with patches of immature evergreen and clumps of alder, and skirts the tip of Eld Inlet, known locally as Mud Bay, and of Oyster Bay. Glimpsed through the trees are the stakes of oyster beds and, when the tide is out, the muddy flats dotted with shallow pools left by the ebbing water. Suddenly the highway lifts itself away from salt water and traverses a stretch where sturdy second-growth trees, stump lands, and small areas of virgin timber are intermingled. In the valleys of this rolling country are scattered farmhouses surrounded by gnarled old fruit trees, berry fields, pastures, and truck gardens.
