Rica Canyon Trail, Elwha River, Olympic Nat’l Park 1.5 mi to Elwha River's Goblins Gate

Rica Canyon Trail sign
Rica Canyon Trail sign

Rica Canyon Trail is the access to Goblins Gate, the upper entrance of Rica Canyon.  It begins at the 3rd intersection up the main Elwha River Trail, about 1.1 miles out of the Whiskey Bend Trailhead.

The first two junctions are for a short side-loop trail called Elk Overlook, which is a nice viewpoint for Anderson Ranch, itself an off-trail day-hike. It’s easy to miss the Overlook return junction, heading up-trail, which makes a bit of a stealth reentry. The Rica spur-trail leads several hundred feet down-slope to the river at the downstream end of Geyser Valley (no geysers), where the Elwha makes a dramatic entry into Rica Canyon at a feature known as Goblins Gate, a narrow slot with vertical cliffs on both sides. This is where the river enters Rica Canyon.

Rica Canyon itself is a slot-canyon; a white-water hard-rock gorge. You can’t casually go into the canyon itself; there are no ‘standard’ approaches to the river along its ~2 mile length. Getting into or out of the canyon from the river, would be full-on technical most everywhere. At the lower end, Rica Canyon opens up (ends) just above the upper end of (the former, now gone) Lake Mills, and Upper Lake Mills Trail goes back up the hill to the road shortly before the Whiskey Bend Trailhead, where it has a small trailhead of its own.

High performance experts are known to kayak the canyon, using Rica Canyon Trail to access its entry at Goblins Gate, and returning up the trail at the canyon-end to the road at Upper Lake Mills Trailhead, from which it is only roughly a quarter mile back up to Whiskey Bend, where they parked the car. Even for experienced kayakers, this would be possible only under low-water conditions, and would never be a reasonable outing for white-water tyros or the general kayaking public.

Vine maple out of Rica Canyon Trail
Vine maple out of Rica Canyon Trail

The Rica Canyon Trail forks once it reaches the river-bottom. One branch takes you downstream to the mouth of Goblins Gate, climbing up onto exposed & dramatic perches … which one should take care on. The other branch goes upstream through a very nice & well-developed section of mature river-bottom forest, called Krause Bottom.

It was once possible to make a loop of the Rica Canyon Trail side-trip, following the trail upstream on the Krause Bottom Trail, which then forked and either climbed back up the hill from the river-side to the main trail, or continued riverside in the local path-network. In the fall of 2009, river-erosion had cut away part of the maintained trail, and it looked like it had been that way for awhile. The hillside rises steeply from the river here, and going up this slope is not inviting, and gets worse as it is attempted. One might drop down into the river-channel and proceed upstream until the remaining portion of the trail can be found … but the best way to locate the other truncated trail-end may be to hike the trails back around to the upper end, having picked out landmarks at the lower end.

Interestingly, it is noticeable on some lower parts of this trail, that it was originally cut as single-lane road. A smaller-gauge version of the same thing (not quite small-road-width) is also plainly visible on the lower parts of Lake Mills Trail. The Rica Canyon Trail was actually wide enough for a typical wagon or small automobile … though now there is just a maintained path, with the old banks & roadbed overgrown.

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