We just got back from a trip to Washington state, where we visited family and spent all-too-little time exploring one of my favorite parts of the planet, the Olympic peninsula. We spent most of our time on that stretch of the coast held by the Quileute reservation. We stayed in a cabin on First Beach at La Push, and used that as a base to travel to a few other places on the northwest tip of the peninsula. It was a very civilized way to see a bit of wilderness.

La Push had all the traditional aspects of a beach vacation: lots of sand, beautiful sunsets, surf (although the water at these Pacific beaches is cold), and at least while we were there, sun.

The main appeal to us, though, was rugged rock formations and an abundance of marine life. This place was paradise for tidepooling. We spent our time hopping over huge heaps of driftwood, scrambling around tall seastacks, and peering into pools. Every square centimeter of the intertidal zone is crawling with life. The rocks are covered with anemones and clumps of seastars. Where you don’t find anemones, you find barnacles and mussels and algae. Even the relatively barren sand flats are hopping with clouds of amphipods. Look out over the water and you see flocks of cormorants diving, and occasionally a seal bobbing about before diving and disappearing.

The beaches are diverse. In previous trips, we’ve visited more northern strips of the coast along the Makah reservation, and the differences leap out at you. Some, like this beach at La Push, are thick with starfish; others are covered with herds of sea urchins; one had beaches shingled with layers of purple sand dollars. It’s rough terrain, but it’s worth hiking along the shore to see how everything can change over the course of a mile.

This is the way beaches are supposed to be, and I worry about it. When I was a kid, we used to take day trips to Salt Water State Park, just south of Seattle, which was almost this rich. The beach was rocky, and under every rock were scores of small crabs; we’d find shrimp and hermit crabs and moon snails in the tide pools. Sadly, the last time I visited it (a few years ago), it was barren and nearly dead. There were strands of weedy algae everywhere, but it took a lot of searching to find any large animal life left at all. I probably contributed to that destruction—I was one of the mob of happy kids who flipped rocks with abandon and collected sand dollars and dug up clams and marine worms. We didn’t realize we were creating a desert.

When we lived in Philadelphia several years ago, we made a few trips to the Jersey Shore. That was very depressing. I have never seen beaches so dead and empty (except, of course, for the kind of wild life that tends to be pale and flabby and wear speedos or tank tops), and I had to wonder what it was like before the vacationing hordes descended upon it and leveled it into a flat and sandy desolation. Were there shoals of echinoderms and molluscs, schools of fish and wallowing marine mammals, deep burrowing worms and crustaceans everywhere? Perhaps the saddest part of the story is that very few even know, let alone appreciate, what we’re missing.

We didn’t restrict ourselves to just the coast—there’s also plenty of beauty in the interior of the peninsula. We also made one short hike up the Sol Duc Valley. Again, what you see is life everywhere. The trees are shaggy with moss, and while the forest is sprinkled with fallen trees, you can also see that they rot fast...all are this lovely dark red pulpy softness subsiding into the soil. Even the rocks are sheeted with algae and moss. It’s been a rather dry summer, so we didn’t find as many as usual, but we did see one spectacularly beautiful banana slug on a tree trunk.