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.” With ninety-five percent of the park designated by Congress as Wilderness, we agree. The park offers an abundance of landscapes, from a 70 mile stretch of wild coast line, to glacier-clad mountains, to temperate rainforests , where moss hangs from enormous old-growth trees like miniature curtains. 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.

True Wilderness:

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 which does not have a road bisecting it, this due in part to the rugged nature of the mountains. It contains a vast trail 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 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 4 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.

Climate and Landscape:

The climate of the park largely determines the broadscale landscape features of the park. Western slopes receive the brunt of winter storms which are relentless in the rain and snow they bring. The west facing valleys receive over 100 inches of rain per year, most of this falling in the winter months. As such, these valleys are the best examples of temperate rain forest in North America. They are the southernmost extent of forests extending from southeast Alaska and contain some of the largest trees in the world (in both height and girth), all adorned in copious amounts of moss and epiphytes. The world’s largest specimens of Douglas fir, yellow cedar, Sitka spruce, western redcedar, subalpine fir, and western hemlock are all found in Olympic National Park.

Copious rainfall at lower elevations translates to incredible amounts of snowfall at higher elevations. The western edge of the range often receives up to 100 ft. of snowfall in a year, and this translates into a range of highly glaciated mountains. Glaciers form when more snow falls in the winter than can melt in the summer, and thus snow turns to compacted layers of ice that start to flow down mountain valleys to lower elevations where they slowly melt. Mount Olympus, at just under 8000 ft., is the highest mountain in the range, and is the 3rd most heavily glaciated peak in the contiguous 48 states (behind Mt. Rainier and Mt. Baker, both of which are much higher). Walking across the glaciers of Mt. Olympus is like traveling back in time to the last ice age when all of the mountain valleys were filled with ice.

As one moves eastward across the Olympics, the climate becomes drier as the west side ridges intercept most of the moisture. The average height of the ridges and peaks remains about the same, but the snowfields become smaller, and true glaciers are rare. A colder climate more characteristic of the Rockies makes treeline lower and trees smaller, even though many of these trees are over one hundred years old. Average annual rain fall is only 40 inches or less. Meadows and flowers are abundant, but the upper valleys are often filled with scree and talus, which harbors its own unique set of plants, many of which are endemic to the Olympics.

Park History and Debates:

Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the Forest Service’s “Mt. Olympus National Monument” to the Olympic National Park in 1938 to better protect the habitat of Roosevelt elk and the old-growth trees. The wild stretch of coastline was added in 1953 and, in 1988, ninety-five percent of the park was designated as Wilderness. Wolves were hunted to extinction in the early 20th century and the park was recently at the center of a plan for their reintroduction. Due to the history of glaciation in the area, grizzly bears were never present on the Peninsula. The park is also the last stronghold of the rare and endangered Northern spotted owl, which was at the center of old-growth logging debates in the 1980s. Timber sales on private lands outside the park demonstrate a striking contrast in land-use policies on the Olympic Peninsula and provide opportunities for debate and discussion.