Grays Harbor National Wildlife Refuge

IBA (Important Birding Area)

Directions: From Hoquiam follow SR 109 west for 1.5 miles turning left onto Paulson Road. Continue for 0.4 mile and turn right onto Airport Way. Follow this road for 0.7 mile to trailhead parking at a gate and kiosk (do not drive beyond if gate is open).

Ownership: United States Fish and Wildlife Service
Trail Distance: 1.9 miles roundtrip
Difficulty: easy and ADA accessible
Fees/Permits: None
Notes: Kid-friendly, dogs prohibited

Hike along a boardwalk to observation decks of the expansive mud flats of Grays Harbor’s Bowerman Basin. One of the finest places in all of Washington for birdwatching, the basin is inundated with hundreds of thousands of shorebirds from late April to early May. During this time Grays Harbor contains one of the largest concentrations of shorebirds on the West Coast south of Alaska. 

Start your hike by walking 0.4 mile west on the gated paved airport to reach the Sandpiper Trail. Then on boardwalks follow this trail into the 1500-acre Grays Harbor National Wildlife Refuge. The trail passes through a tunnel of alders and willows before coming to several interpretive displays and good view points of Bowerman Basin’s extensive tide and mud flats. 

From late April to early May observe tens of thousands of migrating western and least sandpipers, short-billed dowitchers, red knots, greater yellowlegs, black-bellied and semipalmated plovers, and dunlins. In the fall watch for Ross’s geese, snow geese, greater white-fronted geese, sandhill cranes, and white pelicans. In early May the city of Hoquiam sponsors a Shorebird Festival complete with guided walks at the refuge.