Shi Shi beach (and Point of Arches) is a place everybody in the Northwest has heard about, but few go there. It has had more poems written about it than any other place in the area, hands down.
The very name "Shi Shi" (rhymes with "My guy") evokes a mystical state of view, living, and awareness; your transparent eyeball caught between a very restive sea and steep spires of stone wreathed in mist, topped by lone cedars, and circled by eagles. The Olympics just sort of end here, along with the United States, the land torn off to leave stark cliffs. The creeks come down to the sea stained to tea color from seeping through the rain forests. There are several beaches, many only accessible at low tide, and woe to you if you miscaluculate--seriously, keep an eye out not to get caught on some beach that going to turn into a furious, freezing ocean in an hour or so. Shi-shi and its neighbor beaches are covered with logs, and undercut by a ledge of stone (which makes clamming almost criminally easy).
The Arches are preposterously painterly and mystic--like Chinese scrolls come to live. Tendrils of stone reaching out to sea, pierced by arches, topped by trees, with maybe an eagle nest or two--the reason people write poems about Shi Shi is because the place is a poem of nature and people just make despairing attempts to translate it.
It used to be possible to get to Shi Shi from the Indian Reservation at Neah Bay (where the tribes have recently resumed ancient whaling, causing controversy that gives you the choice of being on the side of ecology and The Whales or Native American Rights). But now that avenue of entrance has been closed of due to disputes, meaning you have to come to Shi Shi from the south end, through Ozette.
Thereby hangs a rant. I used to hang out on Shi Shi, living in handmade cabins with the hippies hardy enough to weather the Pacific Storms. Each creek had a cabin, built from driftwood essentially--my buddies would go down the coast in kayaks, spot cedar logs to tow back to Shi Shi, split the logs with wedges and build cabins, even a cedar meditation hut perched halfway up a cliff. That was their impact--building dwellings. One cabin had been there since a frustrated miner built it out of stone and cedar back in the twenties--by now every square inch of the interior intricately carved by successive residents bored out of their minds during the incessant rains. These cabins had no power, the only water was the "olympic tea" of the creeks, the only heat from packed-in wood stoves, firewood delivered to the door daily by the ocean. They were decorated with carvings, with Japanese glass fishing floats, with flotsam and jetsam. Okay, maybe their defecation ended up in the ocean, but so do The Whales'. It was a fantastic idyll, open to anybody who could live that way. Inhabitants of a dream/poem/cruel nature. But that was back when the beach was owned by the evil Weyerhauser wood products company. Now that it belongs to the Forest Service (read: people of the United States) you can't live there anymore. They bulldozed the cabins, they prohibit camping, they have closed off the trails and roads from Neah Bay. I just can't come up with a sentence to top that off--roll your own.