50 Fun Facts About Olympic National Park

Olympic National Park sits on a peninsula in which U.S. state?

Washington's Olympic Peninsula was walled off by ice-age glaciers and is ringed by salt water on three sides, an isolation that left it with animals and plants found nowhere else.

What effect of the Olympic Mountains leaves the park's east side drier than its west?

Rain shadow is what the peaks cast: storms off the Pacific drop 12 to 14 feet of rain a year on the west-facing valleys, and the air that crosses the mountains arrives nearly wrung out.

Which president first protected the Olympic Mountains as a national monument in 1909?

Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the monument on March 2, 1909, two days before he left the White House, in one of his last acts as president.

Which president toured the Olympic Peninsula, then signed the bill creating its national park?

Franklin D. Roosevelt was greeted on his 1937 visit by about 3,000 schoolchildren beside a sign asking him for an Olympic national park; he backed the plan and signed the bill the following June.

Which elk, North America's largest by body mass, was the main reason for the 1909 monument in the Olympic Mountains?

Roosevelt elk, once known as Olympic elk, were in such steep decline by 1909 that saving their calving grounds and summer range drove the creation of the monument.

Which UNESCO designation did Olympic National Park receive in 1981?

World Heritage Site status rested partly on the park's wild Pacific shore, which UNESCO calls the longest undeveloped coast in the contiguous United States.

Which highway loops around Olympic National Park?

U.S. Route 101 has to go the long way round: no road crosses the park, 95 percent of it designated wilderness, and its own roads are spurs that stop well short of the interior.

Which former logging town beside Olympic National Park became a tourist draw as the setting of the Twilight novels?

Forks got the part by search engine: Stephenie Meyer looked online for the rainiest place in the United States, landed on the Olympic Peninsula and picked the town off a map.

What is the highest peak in the park and the Olympic Mountains?

Mount Olympus tops out below 8,000 feet, yet it catches so much snow from Pacific storms that glaciers flow down its flanks.

Which owl of Olympic's old-growth forests was at the centre of 1990s logging battles?

Spotted owl numbers kept falling even after a 1991 court order stopped logging in its national forests: the barred owl, an invader from the east, has moved into its range and competes with it.

Which valley of Olympic National Park is known for a hot springs resort with mineral soaking pools?

Sol Duc has had a spa since 1912, and each autumn visitors gather at its Salmon Cascades to watch coho leap the falls on their way upstream to spawn.

Which predator was hunted out of the Olympic Mountains in the early 20th century?

Gray wolf packs were hunted as a threat to settlers until none were left: the last one on record in the Olympics was trapped in 1920, and wolves have not returned.

Which glacier on the highest peak of the Olympic Mountains is the largest by area and volume?

Blue Glacier is one of the most studied glaciers in the world, and the record shows it shrinking: its snout drew back about 325 feet between 1995 and 2006 alone.

Which Olympic rainforest valley, home to the Hall of Mosses trail, gets about 140 inches of precipitation a year?

Hoh maples wear thick curtains of moss and fern that do them no harm: these epiphytes live on rain and air and take nothing from the tree but a place to sit.

Unlike tropical rainforests, Olympic National Park's rainforests are dominated by what kind of tree?

Conifers here pile up so much wood that these forests may hold more living matter per acre than any others on Earth, tropical jungles included.

What tiny monument in Olympic National Park marks what its creator calls the quietest place in the United States?

One Square Inch of Silence is a small red stone set on a mossy log in 2005 by sound recordist Gordon Hempton, who uses it to campaign against aircraft noise over the park.

What happened in 2014 to Olympic National Park's giant Kalaloch Big Cedar?

Half of it fell in a winter storm, yet the Kalaloch Big Cedar still draws visitors down a short loop trail to see the standing half and the fallen trunk lying beside it.

Which 5,242-foot viewpoint in Olympic National Park has a small ski area in winter?

Hurricane Ridge earns its name in winter, when high winds and blizzards can shut the only road up, and snow often lingers on its trails into July.

What happened in May 2023 to the 1950s day lodge at Olympic National Park's main mountain viewpoint?

It burned down so fast that it had collapsed before fire crews arrived; renovation work had just begun, so most of its contents had already been moved out.

Which whale can be watched from Olympic National Park's coastal bluffs as it migrates between Mexico and the Arctic?

Gray whale travellers pass this shore on a round trip of about 10,000 miles between Mexico's calving lagoons and Arctic feeding grounds, one of the longest yearly migrations of any mammal.

Lake Crescent's famously clear water is put down to a shortage of which nutrient?

Nitrogen is so scarce in the lake that algae can barely grow, which leaves glass-clear water all the way down an official depth of 624 feet.

Klallam legend says Mount Storm King hurled a boulder that split which lake off from Lake Crescent?

Lake Sutherland really was split from its bigger neighbour by falling rock: a huge landslide thousands of years ago cut one long glacial lake in two, just as the legend has it.

Which trout, found only in Lake Crescent, evolved after a landslide landlocked the lake's fish?

Beardslee trout descend from sea-run fish trapped when the slide blocked the old outlet; a waterfall on the new one, the Lyre River, kept their relatives from ever swimming back in.

Which rodent, found only on the Olympic Peninsula, was named the state's official endemic mammal in 2009?

Olympic marmot life is mostly sleep: it hibernates for seven to eight months from early autumn, living off fat that can double its weight over a single summer.

What is the main predator of Olympic National Park's endemic, cat-sized alpine rodent?

Coyote hunting in the high meadows is a recent problem: they once kept to the lowlands, and their move uphill was at least partly to blame when the rodent's numbers fell around 2000.

Which non-native animal, introduced in the 1920s, damaged Olympic National Park's plants so badly that rangers set out to remove it?

Mountain goat numbers grew from a dozen animals to more than 1,000, and with no natural salt licks in the Olympics they took to pestering hikers for the salt in their sweat and urine.

Which giant slug of Olympic's rainforests can stretch to nearly ten inches?

Banana slug recycling helps keep the forest fed: it eats fallen leaves, animal droppings and fungi and turns them back into soil.

What do visitors come to explore at Olympic National Park's Beach 4 and Hole-in-the-Wall?

Tide pools on this coast also made scientific history: in the 1960s Robert Paine cleared the sea stars from a stretch of its rocky shore, saw mussels crowd out other species, and coined the term keystone species.

Which 9-mile loop on Olympic National Park's coast runs on boardwalks from a lake through cedar swamp to the beach?

Ozette's shore hid a whole village buried by a mudslide centuries ago; the mud preserved it so well that diggers recovered tens of thousands of objects from its longhouses.

Which tribe's home is La Push, at a river mouth on Olympic National Park's coastal strip?

Quileute leaders won back higher ground from the park under a 2012 law so the village could move out of the tsunami zone, and its school reopened uphill in 2022.

Which country's written records of a tsunami date the last great earthquake off the Olympic coast to January 1700?

Japan logged waves that came with no earthquake felt there; matched with cedars drowned on the Northwest coast just after their 1699 growth ring, they fix the quake at 26 January 1700.

The Olympic Mountains are pushed up as which small ocean plate, sharing its name with a nearby strait, slides under North America?

Juan de Fuca Plate rock is scraped off and jammed against the continent as the plate sinks, which is why these peaks are built of basalt and sandstone that formed out at sea.

Which town in the dry country just northeast of Olympic National Park is known for its lavender farms?

Sequim gets about 16 inches of rain a year, a fraction of what soaks the park's western valleys, because the mountains wring Pacific storms nearly dry before they reach it.

What did the Elwha Dam's builder leave out, against state law?

A fish ladder would have let salmon climb past; instead the state let the builder off in return for a hatchery, which failed and shut in 1922, and the runs above the dam were lost for a century.

Which was the taller of the Elwha River's two dams, at 210 feet?

Glines Canyon Dam came out last, in 2014, finishing the largest dam removal the United States had yet seen and letting the river run free from the mountains to the sea.

Which salmon, the largest of the five Pacific species, is among those returning to the Elwha River now its dams are gone?

Chinook and the river's other salmon were shut into its last five miles for a century; with both dams gone they can again reach some 70 miles of spawning water inside the park.

Which seabird nests in summer colonies on the rocky islands off Olympic National Park's coast, alongside common murres?

Tufted puffin pairs need those wave-battered rocks: they breed where land predators can't reach them, then spend the winter far out at sea.

Which president created the Olympic Forest Reserve in 1897, the first federal protection for the peninsula's forests?

Grover Cleveland signed the reserve into being on February 22, 1897, with ten days left in office, to slow the logging that was stripping the peninsula's forests.

Which agency's workers built much of Olympic National Park's headquarters, now on the National Register?

Civilian Conservation Corps crews began clearing the site in 1939, and it is not in the park at all: the headquarters stands on a hill in a nearby town, outside the boundary.

Which tree towers over the coastal rainforests of Olympic National Park?

Sitka spruce seldom strays far from the sea, which is why it rules the park's coastal valleys yet is missing from its drier eastern side; it is the largest spruce on Earth.

What licence do anglers need to fish the rivers inside Olympic National Park, unlike waters elsewhere in the state?

No licence at all is needed on the park's rivers and lakes, though anyone after salmon or steelhead must carry a free state catch record card, and every bull trout goes straight back.

Which town is the gateway to the road up to Olympic National Park's best-known mountain viewpoint?

Port Angeles sits on the shore, so the road from town climbs from sea level to 5,242 feet, almost a vertical mile, in under 20 miles.

Which Lake Crescent trail leads along the north shore to the swimming cove known as Devils Punch Bowl?

Spruce Railroad Trail follows a line the Army built in World War I to haul timber for warplanes; the war ended before the line could carry any.

What name is given to a fallen, rotting trunk in Olympic's rainforest that seedlings sprout along in a row?

Nurse log seedlings get a start they can't find on the crowded, mossy ground; when the trunk finally rots away, it leaves a straight line of big trees standing on stilt-like roots.

Which member of the weasel family, wiped out statewide, was released back into Olympic National Park from 2008?

Fisher releases brought 90 animals to the peninsula from 2008; tracked by radio collar and remote camera, they were soon found to be breeding.

What name is given to the loud call bull elk make in Olympic's valleys during the autumn rut?

Bugling does two jobs at once: it warns rival bulls off and advertises the caller to the group of cows he is trying to gather and keep.

What kind of business sponsored the 1889 expedition that made the first recorded crossing of the Olympic Mountains?

A newspaper, the Seattle Press, sent five men off in midwinter to beat a rival Army party; both their mules died and the crossing took nearly six months.

Which long, fjord-like inlet runs along the eastern foot of the Olympic Mountains?

Hood Canal is no canal at all but a natural arm of the sea, and the rivers of the park's east side, the Dosewallips and Skokomish among them, drain into it.

Which sea mammal, hunted out of the state for its fur, was reintroduced to the Olympic coast?

Sea otter numbers in the state grew from 59 animals released in 1969 and 1970 to almost 2,800 by 2019; by eating sea urchins they keep the coast's kelp forests from being grazed away.

Which tribe from Neah Bay has ancestral villages along the far northwest shore of Olympic National Park?

Makah hunters once chased whales in cedar canoes, a right their 1855 treaty kept for them, and in 1999 the tribe took a whale again after more than 70 years.