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Hood Canal

Day 35 · Completed

Brinnon

Jefferson County, Washington

Brinnon and the Dosewallips estuary

This day on the route

Date
The day
Walking
Walked
12.2 miles

Day 35, October 11: 12.2 miles walked into Brinnon. Christie drove her 7.8 miles over Walker Pass, and she walked the same distance on foothill roads near Brinnon. The planned awareness day in Quilcene became this walking day.

Route overview, not turn-by-turn directions.

Braided shallows wind through gravel, driftwood and golden marsh into blue coastal water, beside a road and forested hills, painted in gouache.
Illustration inspired by Brinnon, Jefferson County, Washington.

On October 11 Jeana walked on from Quilcene to Brinnon, 12.2 miles including make-up miles in the foothills, and spoke at the Brinnon Community Church that evening.

At the mouth of the Dosewallips, sediment carried down from the Olympic Mountains spreads into the flatter ground beside Hood Canal. State Parks describes the river dividing among channels as sand, silt and gravel accumulate. The resulting estuary provides habitat for shellfish and other aquatic life.

The park’s history follows the effort to secure public access to these tidelands. The public shoreline here has a civic history as well as a natural one. The effort to protect access returns later in the chapter at Potlatch, farther along Hood Canal.

Hood Canal itself is a fjord, despite its name. USGS describes its long, narrow form and has studied the way water circulates and oxygen changes within it. The route follows the western side through Brinnon, Triton Cove and Lilliwaup before reaching the Great Bend near Potlatch.

The plan had a second day in Quilcene, but she packed up her tent and walked on toward Brinnon. Christie drove her over Walker Pass, and she walked the same 7.8 miles on steep foothill roads near Brinnon to make them up. At the community centre Jeremy sent her up the hill to the Brinnon Community Church, where Pastor Matt invited her to speak at the evening service about the walk and how to join NMDP, and she slept in the social hall.

From the road

A ride over Walker Pass, and a church social hall for the night in Brinnon

She packed up her tent once more and got ready to walk further south, to Brinnon. Jan had given her the most amazing gift the night before: she had washed Jeana’s clothes. Jeana was down to her last pair of socks — the last pair of everything — and now her clothes were freshly washed, folded and packed away in her backpack.

For breakfast, Jan gave her a wonderful English muffin with egg salad on it and a cup of coffee, and Jeana enjoyed their visit that morning as much as she had the night before. What an incredible woman, she says: nearly 80, raising sheep and chickens, caring for her dog and her cat, and organising the fiber festival every year. Jan is committed to her community and to improving life for others.

She had been a bit worried, she says, about this particular leg of the journey. There are a lot of miles between the towns, and on many days she can’t walk from one town to the next, so she has to stop in the middle and camp out. She had been staying in her tent a lot, as she had expected, but whenever she put it up at night she was somewhere protected, and that had kept her dry on rainy nights.

The following day would be one of those days. Lilliwaup, the next town after Brinnon, was 21 miles away, and with her heavy backpack it wasn’t realistic to walk that far, so she planned to walk somewhere between 9 and 11 miles, look for a place to camp overnight and walk into Lilliwaup the day after. She would have to be very careful about using her phone, so that it would last her the next two days.

Christie and her husband, Mark, had told her they were concerned for her welfare and her safety on Walker Pass, where there is a lot of traffic on Highway 101 and only a very small shoulder. Christie, so kind, offered to pick her up that morning, and she drove Jeana 7.8 miles — quite a way — up over Walker Pass and past the point of danger on the road.

Jeana walked into Brinnon and stopped at the community centre, where she talked to a gentleman named Jeremy. He recommended that she go up the hill to the Brinnon Community Church and talk to the pastor there about finding a place to stay for the night. It was a pretty steep hill, but she made it to the top.

Although it was Sunday, the morning services were over and the church was already closed when she got there. She was about to knock at a house she hoped was the parsonage when out came the pastor — Pastor Matt — with his wife and several children. She explained what she was doing, and he suggested that she sleep in the church’s social hall. That was extra kindness, she says, because he and his family were packing to leave the next day, and still they took time out of their Sunday, already their busy day, to help her get settled in and to feed her lunch.

Then she packed her little pack and set out to make up the 7.8 miles she had missed that morning. Rather than take Highway 101 along the bay, she picked a challenging path up and down very steep hills, and she was glad she did; it was so beautiful up in the foothills. Pastor Matt had asked whether she would come to the service and talk to everyone about her journey, so she was making her way back in time for it.

The Sunday evening service at the Brinnon Community Church was uplifting. Pastor Matt played the piano, his wife sang and played guitar, and three of their sons played instruments. The music touched her heart; she felt it was a living, sacred prayer to the divine in us all. It made her feel close to her sister, Melinda, who was an ASL visual choir director for many years.

Then Pastor Matt invited her to speak about the walk, the Jada Bascom Foundation and how to join NMDP, the National Marrow Donor Program, and she felt the congregation was receptive to her message of saving lives together. The pastor’s daughter, Keziah, prepared a light supper, and Jeana settled in for the night with a grateful heart. Her hosts that night were Pastor Matt and his family, at the Brinnon Community Church.

The sky is blue, the air is crisp, and the light of the sun is dancing on the fall leaves, twisting and turning in the wind.

Jeana Moore
Five sheep, several with curling horns, graze and rest on a sunlit green pasture, one lying down in front, beneath leafy trees, tall conifers and the dark roof of a building, with the low sun glaring through the branches.A horned sheep with a black-and-white face and a shaggy brown and cream fleece stands side-on in a sunlit pasture, looking straight at the camera, with another sheep at the left edge and trees behind.Two horned sheep in a sunlit pasture, the nearer one in profile with a black-and-white face and a shaggy brown and cream fleece, the other just behind it with a mostly white face and tall upright horns, looking at the camera.A decorative metal tree covered in small white artificial blossoms and hung with glass ornaments, among them a turquoise heart, clear teardrops, blue icicles, a red drop, a cobalt heart and cut-crystal prisms, glinting in the sun before a chain-link fence.A tan taper candle hand-lettered Believe beneath a small black star stands in a tin chamberstick with a ring handle, in front of a heart-shaped amber glass bottle on a wooden windowsill.Tall dark trunks and feathery branches, silhouetted against the light, frame sun-glittered water and a line of hazy blue hills across it, with power lines overhead and a mown lawn and a picnic table along the shore.Two tall conifers with straight dark trunks frame a glimpse of sunlit, sparkling water and a low far shore under a pale blue sky, with dense shadowed undergrowth in the foreground.A leafy tree leans out over a pebbly beach and calm blue water sparkling in the sun, with a dark wooded headland, a long low shoreline and a faint snowy peak on the far horizon.Seen from above, a broad reddish-purple mushroom cap with a split in its rim, flecked with pale cream patches and scattered with conifer needles, sits on a forest floor of needles, twigs and cones.A gravel lane curves along a rock-lined shore beneath overhanging trees, the sun glaring through the branches above sparkling blue water, with a young conifer on the bank and a small sign reading NO PARKING.A lone young conifer and a leafy shrub stand at the edge of a rock-lined shore beside a gravel lane, against sparkling blue water, a low line of distant hills and a clear sky under an overhanging tree.A pale, weathered chunk of fallen wood, its grain deeply twisted and furrowed, lies among young conifers and fallen brown leaves beside a path leading toward a bright gap in the trees.
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A green street sign reading NEVER GIVE UP RD. stands on a metal pole in front of dense evergreens and leafy shrubs, with sunlit yellow foliage glowing through the branches behind.Dense, glossy green ferns fill a sunlit forest floor between moss-covered trunks, with a broad, pale, mottled trunk in the foreground and fallen orange leaves scattered among the fronds.A climbing vine of glossy lobed leaves, lit bright green where the sun catches it, wraps a tree trunk at the left, beside tall dark trunks and moss-hung branches in a shadowy forest.A brown sign with cream lettering reading Leaving OLYMPIC National Forest stands on a mossy stone base, above a smaller board partly hidden by sunlit shrubs that ends in the words OF AGRICULTURE.A green roadside sign reading ENTERING Brinnon, above a faded white sign reading Home of ShrimpFest, Memorial Day Weekend, stands on a post beside a steep, sunlit bank of shrubs under power lines.Sunlight shines through yellow and orange autumn leaves onto a cluster of moss-covered trunks, with green undergrowth and shadowy forest behind and patches of blue sky above.A quiet two-lane road with a double yellow center line runs between tall conifers and trees turning gold toward a steep, forested mountain peak under white clouds, past a yellow warning sign showing a truck on a slope.Sunlight catches arching green fern fronds, lighting one a bright yellow-green, in a dense patch of ferns with orange leaves and a dark tree trunk in the shadowy woods behind.A two-lane road with a double yellow center line runs between metal guardrails and curves away under trees in bright gold and green autumn leaves, below a clear blue sky.A two-lane road curves left past the end of a metal guardrail and a wooden post, beneath a hillside of trees glowing gold and orange in the sun, with power lines strung across the leaves.A shallow, rocky creek glitters in the sun as it runs between mossy boulders, beneath trees with leaves turning yellow, orange and red.Big yellow and green leaves and a few curled brown ones hang in the foreground over a creek tumbling white between dark, mossy boulders.A tall mushroom with a pale, shaggy, bell-shaped cap darkening at its frayed edge stands on a slender white stem among fallen brown leaves, small round green leaves and blades of grass.Feathery pale plumes of a tall grass bend in the wind against a clear blue sky beside a mown strip of lawn, with a quiet road, a SPEED LIMIT 35 sign and autumn trees in the distance.
Distance walked
12.2 miles
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Sources

Local history and background reading for this stop.

  1. Dosewallips State Park history — checked Sep 5, 2026
  2. Potlatch State Park history — checked Sep 5, 2026
  3. Hood Canal — checked Sep 5, 2026
The flyer: STOP BLOOD CANCER set in tall letters over a dark plum page, a quote, and a QR code beside a text-to-join line for the U.S.One standing face of the table tent: the same headline and quote on the left, a large QR code on the right.

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Print it. Put it where people already stand.

A coffee counter, a church foyer, a break room, a race table. Every sheet carries the code that opens Jeana’s walk, and a number to text for anyone who would rather not scan — no app, no wifi, nothing to hand back.Every sheet carries the code that opens Jeana’s walk — nothing to install, nothing to hand back. The number to text printed beside it is for joining NMDP, which registers people who live in the U.S., its territories and the freely associated states. If you live anywhere else, find your country’s registry.

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