Port Angeles, Washington is not a place most people travel a long way to visit. The harbor is deep and the port active, the line at Dairy Queen slinks out the door on warm summer nights. But the town doesn't sport much besides a great location to get into the mountains, out to the sea, or across the strait to Victoria, Canada. It’s a place to go, to go somewhere else.

Looming south of the port, the Olympic Mountains dominate their eponymous peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water. As the bones of the earth shifted in an earlier age, part of the Pacific ocean floor marched eastward. As it ground into the coast, burrowing under North America some of what had been the floor of the sea scraped off. Jammed between Vancouver Island and the North Cascades, the Olympic peninsula and its pantheon of peaks churned below the waves.

20 million years ago they began to rise from the sea, a jumbled collection of rocks. Ice sheets invaded from the north and glaciers cut through the mountains as they grew.

Now, people crawl like ants through the rainforests on the western edge and pick their way across the dryer peaks in the east.

Port Angeles sits in the range’s rain shadow—a relatively dry waystation between a rainforest and the sea—and is home to the headquarters of Olympic National Park.

My father and I stayed in Port Angeles for two reasons: there is a defunct rail signal out front of the Barhop Brewing & Taphouse down by the water and Hurricane Ridge is only a dozen or so miles south. The Adirondack chairs out front of the Taphouse were occupied when we wandered to the bar after dinner. My father took some pictures of the signal, the people watched us over their drinks. Eventually we went inside. The woman tending bar was friendly and the crowd steadily grew as the last of the summer day fled over the Pacific.

Later, as a band began setting up in the corner, we decided it was time to go. We had a schedule for the next day: drive an hour east to Port Townsend and catch a ferry. Head for Bellingham.

Dad and I were staying in a strange little motel on the edge of town—it had a kitchen, a table, two beds, a real key. The All View motel’s horseshoe of hotel rooms is the sort of place you could stay in for a week or more — venturing up the the mountains each day and cooking your own dinner each night. It had that beach-hotel, homey, weird but comfortable feel. The beds didn't look half bad.

We parked out front of our room, the lights in the office and most of the other rooms were dark.

Dad fumbled in his pockets for the key. At first there was light cursing, then heavy cursing from both of us as we came to the realization that the single key to the room was somewhere between Hurricane ridge and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Back by the water, we followed our own footsteps from the car to the restaurant to the bar to the Dairy Queen. Inside the bar, I shouted over the sound of the band, but the woman serving drinks shook her head. No one had turned in a key.

Dad and I looked up at the mountains and, remembering the steep road and sheer cliffs, decided it would be best to not tempt the mountain in the darkness. We parked the car out front of our room and I examined the window but fear of breaking the screen stopped me from jimmying it open. Resigned to fate, but thankful for a pleasant summer night, we put back out car seats and slept.

It’s out there somewhere still, the key to our room at the All View Motel.