Fourteen and a half miles down the canal

Quilcene sits in Jefferson County at the head of Quilcene Bay, an arm of Hood Canal. The Big Quilcene River forms its southern edge and the Little Quilcene its northeastern edge; both rise in the Olympic Mountains and empty into the bay. The population was 598 at the 2020 census. The Olympic National Forest keeps its Quilcene office, serving the Hood Canal Ranger District, on US 101 here, and Mount Walker — 2,804 feet, and the only peak facing Puget Sound with both a road and a trail to its summit — stands about five miles south.

The route comes through for the plainest possible reason: there is one road. US 101 is the only continuous way south along this side of the canal, and 14.5 miles is where a day of that walking ends. It is a long, quiet, unglamorous day, and there are thirty-four more like it. That is what the number 337 is actually made of.

The question that comes up most often on a long roadside day is who is allowed to join. NMDP's registry takes new members between the ages of 18 and 35. That is the registry's rule, set on clinical grounds, and the Jada Bascom Foundation has no part in it: JBF does not run a registry and does not decide who is eligible, so it cannot make an exception for anyone and will not pretend otherwise. If you fall outside that range, the registry itself is the place to ask what it currently accepts and what else is useful — that answer belongs to them, not to a foundation standing at the side of a highway.