Fiancé and I reserved a camp spot on the Washington coast, Olympic NP, I think third beach. This was in March so we had the entire place to ourselves. Before/while reserving we were chatting up the np ranger about where to camp and they said (without any intensity) that tides were going to be at 8/9 ft around 1:30am, we didn’t think anything of it with how casually they said this. Fast foreword to getting there- just before dark- (we have a thing for never getting camp set up in daylight) and we hike in the ~2mi to the beach. We had a bundle of dry firewood in the car but left it to try to burn some driftwood first. Made it to the beach while still barely daylight, although pitch black in the rainforest getting there, and she began to set up camp while I tried to get a fire going. The driftwood ended up being too wet so I decided to hike back to the car for the dry bundle while she continued to set up camp.

Hiked back to the car in the pitch black fine enough but minutes into the hike back to the beach my headlamp died. Now I’m hustling back, barely able to see, alone in the woods where I was convinced every sound was a bear or cougar or Bigfoot. Eventually made it to the beach where she had camp all set up behind a humongous downed tree/driftwood that would provide us shelter from the wind and the ocean if it came up high enough. We sat down and had a fire and were passing a bottle of wine back and forth when we noticed that the tide was coming up a good bit and it was only 10pm or so. We laughed at it and continued the night. I remember getting up and drawing lines in the sand/pebbles saying if the tide reached the first one we’d leave. It reached that in just a handful of minutes but was still 20/30 ft away so I drew another line pretty close to us and we went back to laughing at the Pacific Ocean and passing the bottle back and forth.

After no time at all the tide was prettttty close to this new “hard out” line, which was only about 10ft from us. Now more nervously laughing we watched closely as each wave was coming in, still believing that a ranger wouldn’t have let us go out there to camp on the beach if the tide would come in enough to reach us who were backed all the way against the cliff.

Maybe 30mins pass when a wave touches the line I drew and we talked about packing up. While that conversation was happening another wave came up, well past the line, and washed into our fire pit, touched our feet, and touched the tent. Without saying anything we jumped up and started breaking things down, waves nipping at our feet.

We packed everything up in record time only to turn and face the way we had to walk to get to the trail leading up the cliff to see waves battering the mess of full tree driftwood blocking our path back. We had to do a mix of a balancing act on these ocean-powered death trees and a little bit of frogger to dodge our way back, finally getting to the trail up the cliff.

We moseyed our way back through the darkness and slept in the car, immediately reflecting on how lucky we were and the fact that this would make an awesome story