Pemi West: The Setting

Our backpacking trips for teenagers and adults are set in the Olympic National Park to grant us the true wilderness feeling as we travel to mountain ridges and alpine lakes. Located on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, Olympic National Park has been described by National Geographic as “better than it ever gets.” The park offers an abundance of landscapes, from a 70-mile stretch of wild coastline, to glacier- clad mountains, to temperate rainforests. We will traverse the park, the drier valleys and rocky ridges of the eastern side of the mountains leading us eventually to the awe-inspiring snowfields and glaciers of Mt. Olympus, which crowns the western edge of the range.

Olympic National Park encompasses nearly 1 million acres of wilderness, not including adjoining National Forest lands. It is probably our only national park in the contiguous 48 states that does not have a road bisecting it, this due in part to the rugged nature of the mountains. It contains a vast network of about 600 miles of hiking trails, many of which are “primitive," as well as countless opportunities for challenging off-trail travel. The park boasts more than 60 glaciers nestled in its peaks and a temperate rainforest on its western side, where the moisture from the Pacific Ocean gets caught in the mountains and allows primeval trees to grow to outstanding widths and heights.

The park is also known for its wildlife, particularly elk, goats, black bears, and cougars, the footprints of the latter being the usual sole evidence of their presence. Because the Olympic Peninsula is surrounded on three sides by salt water, it has cascading rivers radiating outwards in all directions from the center of the mountain range. These rivers all support large runs of salmon from the salt water, though most of these runs occur in the late summer and fall. It is often forgotten that Olympic National Park also preserves a 70 mile stretch of rocky and windswept coastline, home to numerous species of pelagic birds and mammals including orcas, grey whales, sea otters, harbor seals, and sea lions. The Olympic coast is also the traditional home of at least four Native American tribes, all of whom have large reservations and continue to practice, in some form, aspects of their traditional way of life at the edge of the ocean.