Tolmie State Park Olympia Wa | Travel Washington

Tolmie State Park is one of the lesser known state park in Washington State, located south of Seattle and Tacoma, near the more famous Nisqually wildlife reserve. Nothing advances or exotic here, but it’s a little park that holds its own and offer enough features to satisfy most weekenders who look for a lush evergreen forest slash serene classic Pacific Northwest beachfront to stroll, and it’s perfect for families with children and pets to spend a good half, or a whole day on.

The locally popular Four Cedars Trail is actually part of the Tolmie State Park, you can either park at the park entrance parking lot, or you can park at the trailhead parking lot. Fair warning though, both parking lot is not too big, so on a nice warm sunny day, especially in a weekend, parking can be hard to come by.

If you start your exploration from the park entrance, just head down to the beach, there you can do all the activities that you can do in any beach, you know, admiring the ocean, volley ball, build sand castle, beachcombing for shells and lost jewelry, buried yourself deep in the sand, and etc etc, and you can spend a whole day here just doing exactly those … activities.

If you decide to leave the beach and do a little more walking, you can head down to the bridge and walk down the path.

At the end of the bridge, you will hit the Four Cedars Trail parking lot, and you will have a choice to hike the longer Four Cedar Trail or take a shorter walk through another trail that will lead you to another part of the beach. This is supposed to be a lazy Saturday for me, so I took the short and easy beachfront trail.

It’s a lush green forest trail; it’s peaceful, it’s quiet, it’s serene, and it’s … a little chilly.  The bright sun can hardly penetrate the thick forest, so even though the outside world was warm and sunny, the temperature is a couple of degree lower here, which makes it a nice contrast. Take a deep breath, and you can feel the fresh air rushing through your body and you can’t help but to feel refresh.

It’s not a long trail, it’s about half a mile or so, but if you started walking at the beginning of the park entrance and feel like taking water stop, or you just want to sit and chill for no reason at all, no worries, there are plenty of benches and picnic tables available. Although I did not see any this time, this is definitely a good place for picnics and BBQ, I regret not bringing lunch with me.

The end of the trail is just another side of the beach, you can get here by walking the beach as well, that is if you do not mind getting your self-muddy and wet, because there’s a part where the water from the creek cut through the beach and flow to the ocean, on low tide you can walk it, but on high tide, you will have to swim it.

As you can see from the photos, it’s low tide when I was there, and it’s a good time to go find some seashells, sand dollars, starfish, and also trapped fish in pouches of isolated pool. And there’s a lot of crabs too, I mean a lot. See those holes on the sand? Those holes are made by the crabs, they go in and out of it, although they are tiny, but they are fun to watch, especially kids, they will have a blast discovering all these seas lives on the beach.

Dinosaur!!! We found a dinosaur!!! Well, just a dinosaur to be exact … I mean a fallen tree …. Haha~ But what fun is life without a little bit of imagination? And this is definitely a tail of a super mean dino, just look at it~

The trees and vegetation mark the boundary of the beach, it’s as clear cut as nights and days, entering the woods basically cut you off from the ocean, it’s like two different worlds.

The flora in the state park is for sure diverse, and at this time of year, it is amazingly green and lush, surely refreshing for anyone entering it’s domain, you come out of it renewed and were washed off all negative energy and is ready to face the world anew.

It definitely is a nice little state park that worth a visit.

-Lumaca