Hoh River Beach is at the end of Oil City Road, down a short trail, and is the southern entrance to a section of undeveloped Olympic National Park coast strip stretching north to La Push], about 12 miles. The small Hoh Tribe reservation occupies the far (south) side of the river mouth, with a few modest woodframe structures visible beach-side. Most visitors here remain more or less close to the Hoh, and then exit here as well. It’s a fine & easy day-hike, and an ideal overnighter too.
Not far up this coast to the north, the Hoh Head headland is impassable on the beach. It is necessary to use a more or less short overland trail along the top of the bluffs. Other headlands to have overland routes, usually only needed when the tide is high. Getting up these bluffs can be a muddy scramble, but there are usually ropes and aids installed, so it isn’t too hard (or exposed). The paths over the headlands themselves are then often messy and brushy, too … and difficult to keep well-maintained. Because the right tides are needed, and the headland detours aren’t seen as an attraction, few people tackle them and most remain near the Hoh mouth, instead.
Of course, on the other hand … impenetrable temperate rain forest jungle, several times the down-wood and trash as the worst of the Amazon Basin; ferocious underbrush thickets from the ocean-bluff sun-opening; consumer-hiker antipathy … what’s not to like? This ocean-strip was not preserved firstly for the tide-pools and wave-lapped sands, but for the obnoxiously rank habitat just inland from the beach-bluffs. Few pay it close attention, except as an imposing obstacle, much less engage it. Folks are here for the beach …
The terrain inland of the narrow Park-strip is all unpopulated commercial timberland without development, except for logging roads. This section of the Strip is backed by a rectangular block of State and corporate forest totalling 50 to a 100 square miles. A network of logical but easily bewildering roads covers all of it; the roads do not come quite “to” the Park boundary, instead the loggers drag logs from the boundary area, back to their roads. Then the logged units regrow into baby, juvenile, adolescent and teenage jungle. If there is anything worse better than the mature coastal jungle, it is this immature jungle. Whoa.
Oil City, Hoh River, Olympic Nat’l Park is a rectilinear block of many dozens, perhaps 100s of platted small-lots, a mostly undeveloped inholding in the Park, situated on the upland just north of the Hoh mouth, and not far inland from the gentle (but jungle-carpeted) bluffs along this part of the beach. These properties were sold off many years ago, and the Park did not acquire them when the Strip was taken over. The owners are scattered across the nation, even the world. They come and go on the real estate market. Some with primitive cabins; an occasional Hippie-fantasy in the forest, but mostly just woods.