Olympic National Park Trivia
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50 free Olympic National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Olympic National Park trivia quiz covers the Washington park that packs three worlds into one peninsula: a wild 60-mile Pacific coastline, the moss-draped Hoh and Quinault temperate rainforests, and the glaciated Olympic Mountains crowned by Mount Olympus. It ranges across Hurricane Ridge, Lake Crescent, the Ozette Loop, the Kalaloch Big Cedar and the endemic Olympic marmot that lives nowhere else. There is plenty of history too: the 1774 Spanish naming of the peak, the two Roosevelts who protected the elk that carry their name, the 1938 park act, UNESCO status, the wilderness renamed for Senator Dan Evans, the 2023 fire that destroyed the Hurricane Ridge lodge, and the Elwha dam removals that were the biggest in history and let salmon back into 65 miles of river. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one, so it works for a road-trip game around Highway 101 or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Mount Rainier, North Cascades and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Olympic National Park sits on a peninsula in which U.S. state?
Washington
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.
Q 02What effect of the Olympic Mountains leaves the park's east side drier than its west?
Rain shadow
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.
Q 03Which president first protected the Olympic Mountains as a national monument in 1909?
Theodore Roosevelt
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.
Q 04Which president toured the Olympic Peninsula, then signed the bill creating its national park?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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.
Q 05Which elk, North America's largest by body mass, was the main reason for the 1909 monument in the Olympic Mountains?
Roosevelt elk
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.
Q 06Which UNESCO designation did Olympic National Park receive in 1981?
World Heritage Site
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.
Q 07Which highway loops around Olympic National Park?
U.S. Route 101
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.
Q 08Which former logging town beside Olympic National Park became a tourist draw as the setting of the Twilight novels?
Forks
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.
Q 09What is the highest peak in the park and the Olympic Mountains?
Mount Olympus
Mount Olympus tops out below 8,000 feet, yet it catches so much snow from Pacific storms that glaciers flow down its flanks.
Q 10Which owl of Olympic's old-growth forests was at the centre of 1990s logging battles?
Spotted owl
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.
Q 11Which valley of Olympic National Park is known for a hot springs resort with mineral soaking pools?
Sol Duc
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.
Q 12Which predator was hunted out of the Olympic Mountains in the early 20th century?
Gray wolf
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.
Q 13Which glacier on the highest peak of the Olympic Mountains is the largest by area and volume?
Blue
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.
Q 21Lake Crescent's famously clear water is put down to a shortage of which nutrient?
Nitrogen
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.
Q 22Klallam legend says Mount Storm King hurled a boulder that split which lake off from Lake Crescent?
Sutherland
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.
Q 23Which trout, found only in Lake Crescent, evolved after a landslide landlocked the lake's fish?
Beardslee
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.
Q 14Which Olympic rainforest valley, home to the Hall of Mosses trail, gets about 140 inches of precipitation a year?
Hoh
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.
Q 15Unlike tropical rainforests, Olympic National Park's rainforests are dominated by what kind of tree?
Conifers
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.
Q 16What tiny monument in Olympic National Park marks what its creator calls the quietest place in the United States?
One Square Inch of Silence
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.
Q 17What happened in 2014 to Olympic National Park's giant Kalaloch Big Cedar?
Half of it fell in a winter storm
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.
Q 18Which 5,242-foot viewpoint in Olympic National Park has a small ski area in winter?
Hurricane Ridge
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.
Q 19What happened in May 2023 to the 1950s day lodge at Olympic National Park's main mountain viewpoint?
It burned down
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.
Q 20Which whale can be watched from Olympic National Park's coastal bluffs as it migrates between Mexico and the Arctic?
Gray whale
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.
Q 24Which rodent, found only on the Olympic Peninsula, was named the state's official endemic mammal in 2009?
Olympic marmot
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.
Q 25What is the main predator of Olympic National Park's endemic, cat-sized alpine rodent?
Coyote
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.
Q 26Which non-native animal, introduced in the 1920s, damaged Olympic National Park's plants so badly that rangers set out to remove it?
Mountain goat
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.
Q 27Which giant slug of Olympic's rainforests can stretch to nearly ten inches?
Banana slug
Banana slug recycling helps keep the forest fed: it eats fallen leaves, animal droppings and fungi and turns them back into soil.
Q 28What do visitors come to explore at Olympic National Park's Beach 4 and Hole-in-the-Wall?
Tide pools
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.
Q 29Which 9-mile loop on Olympic National Park's coast runs on boardwalks from a lake through cedar swamp to the beach?
Ozette
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.
Q 30Which tribe's home is La Push, at a river mouth on Olympic National Park's coastal strip?
Quileute
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.