Most of the park lies in the Olympic Mountains proper. With their craggy, ice-field heights, the Olympics are a bold announcement of the steep and snow-capped country to come up the “rain coast” of British Columbia and the Alaska Panhandle. To northbound travelers tracing Highway 101, this marks the end of the modest elevations typical to the Oregon Coast Range and the Willapa Hills and the beginning of the Olympics. The southern boundary is, roughly speaking, the broad valley of the Chehalis River and its estuary in Grays Harbor. The Peninsula is edged by saltwater on three sides: Puget Sound to the east, the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north, and the open North Pacific to the west. Olympic National Park occupies 922,651 acres of the Olympic Peninsula, that huge fin of land marking the Lower 48’s northwestern extremity. Sea stacks to snow peaks, it’s a downright mythic layout. Here, though, we’re rounding up its basic natural geography-the lay of the land-to orient you to its ridges and rivers. That’s long been the case, too: The heart of the Olympic Peninsula was one of the last great outbacks in the contiguous United States, a blank space on the map until the very end of the 19 th century, even as Seattle boomed and hamlets blossomed along the Peninsula’s coast.įrom spruce rainforest to manzanita thickets, from orcas and sea otters, to pumas and Roosevelt elk, Olympic National Park is a place of spectacular ecological diversity. To see most of this countryside-whether it’s Point of Arches on the coast or a full view of Mount Olympus-you’ve got to walk. Better than 95 percent of the park constitutes the Olympic Wilderness. Road access at Hurricane Ridge, the Sol Duc Valley, the Hoh Rainforest, Kalaloch, and other areas notwithstanding, Olympic is a hiking/backpacking destination above all else. The coastal strip of the park, meanwhile, describes the remotest seashore in the Lower 48 (alongside, arguably, the mangrove abyss of southwestern Florida and northern California’s Long Coast). The existing trails are long and the trail-less swaths plentiful. Roads ring it and cherry-stem its fringes, but the bulk of the park is a big block of roadless mountain wilderness. Olympic National Park may be one of the most-visited in the U.S., but it’s also among the wildest.
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