Olympic National Park
Olympic National Park is a national park of the United States located in Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula. The park has four regions: the Pacific coastline, alpine areas, the west-side temperate rainforest, and the forests of the drier east side. Within the park there are three distinct ecosystems, including subalpine forest and wildflower meadow, temperate forest, and the rugged Pacific coast.
President Theodore Roosevelt originally designated the park as Mount Olympus National Monument on March 2, 1909. The monument was redesignated a national park by Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 29, 1938. In 1976, Olympic National Park was designated by UNESCO as an International Biosphere Reserve, and in 1981 as a World Heritage Site. In 1988, Congress designated 95 percent of the park as the Olympic Wilderness, which was renamed Daniel J. Evans Wilderness in honor of the former Washington state Governor and U.S. Senator Daniel J. Evans in 2017. During his tenure in the Senate, Evans co-sponsored the 1988 bill that created the state's wilderness areas. It is the largest wilderness area in Washington.
Olympic National Park had over 3.7million visitors in 2024, ranking 25th among all parks in the United States.
Park purpose
As stated in the foundation document:Natural and geologic history
Coastline
The coastal portion of the park is a rugged, sandy beach along with a strip of adjacent forest. It is long but just a few miles wide, with native communities at the mouths of two rivers. The Hoh River has the Hoh people and at the town of La Push at the mouth of the Quileute River live the Quileute.The beach has unbroken stretches of wilderness ranging from. While some beaches are primarily sand, others are covered with heavy rock and very large boulders. Bushy overgrowth, slippery footing, tides, and misty rainforest weather all hinder foot travel. The coastal strip is more readily accessible than the interior of the Olympics; due to the difficult terrain, very few backpackers venture beyond casual day-hiking distances.
The most popular piece of the coastal strip is the Ozette Loop. The Park Service runs a registration and reservation program to control the usage levels of this area. From the trailhead at Ozette Lake, a leg of the trail is a boardwalk-enhanced path through near primal coastal cedar swamp. Arriving at the ocean, it is a 3-mile walk supplemented by headland trails for high tides. This area has traditionally been favored by the Makah from Neah Bay. The third 3-mile leg is enabled by a boardwalk which has enhanced the loop's accessibility. Another popular trail is the path that leads to Second Beach, which includes views of offshore seastacks and wildlife.
There are thick groves of trees adjacent to the sand, which results in chunks of timber from fallen trees on the beach. The mostly unaltered Hoh River, toward the south end of the park, discharges large amounts of naturally eroded timber and other drift, which moves north, enriching the beaches. Even today driftwood deposits form a commanding presence, biologically as well as visually, giving a taste of the original condition of the beach viewable to some extent in early photos. Drift material often comes from a considerable distance; the Columbia River formerly contributed huge amounts to the Northwest Pacific coasts.
The smaller coastal portion of the park is separated from the larger, inland portion. President Franklin D. Roosevelt originally had supported connecting them with a continuous strip of parkland.
The park is known for its unique turbidites. It has very exposed turbidities with white calcite veins. Turbidites are rocks or sediments that travel into the ocean as suspended particles in the flow of water, causing a sedimentary layering effect on the ocean floor. Over time the sediments and rock compact and the process repeats as a constant cycle. The park also is known for its tectonic mélanges that have been deemed 'smell rocks' by the locals due to their strong petroleum odor. Mélanges are large individual rocks that are large enough that they are accounted for in map drawings. The Olympic mélanges can be as large as a house.
Glaciated mountains
Within the center of Olympic National Park rise the Olympic Mountains whose sides and ridgelines are topped with massive, ancient glaciers. The mountains themselves are products of accretionary wedge uplifting related to the Juan De Fuca Plate subduction zone. The geologic composition is a curious mélange of basaltic and oceanic sedimentary rock. The number of glaciers within the national park declined from 266 in 1982 to 184 by 2009 due to the effects of climate change.The western half of the range is dominated by the peak of Mount Olympus, which rises to. Mount Olympus receives a large amount of snow and consequently has the greatest glaciation of any non-volcanic peak in the contiguous United States outside of the North Cascades. It has several glaciers, the largest of which is Hoh Glacier at 3.06 miles in length. In the east, the range becomes much drier due to the rain shadow of the western mountains; the eastern mountains include numerous high peaks and craggy ridges. The tallest summit in the eastern Olympics is Mount Deception, at.
Temperate rainforest
The western side of the park is mantled by temperate rainforests, including the Hoh Rainforest and Quinault Rainforest, which receive annual precipitation of over, making this perhaps the wettest area in the continental United States.As opposed to tropical rainforests and most other temperate rainforest regions, the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest are dominated by coniferous trees, including Sitka Spruce, Western Hemlock, Coast Douglas-fir and Western redcedar. Mosses coat the bark of these trees and even drip down from their branches in green, moist tendrils.
Valleys on the eastern side of the park also have notable old-growth forest, but the climate is notably drier. Sitka Spruce is absent, trees on average are somewhat smaller, and undergrowth is generally less dense and different in character. Immediately northeast of the park is a rainshadow area where annual precipitation averages about 17 inches.
Ecology
According to the A. W. Kuchler U.S. Potential natural vegetation Types, the park encompasses five classifications: Alpine Meadows & Barren, aka Alpine tundra potential vegetation type with an Alpine Meadow potential vegetation form; a Fir/Hemlock vegetation type with a Pacific Northwest conifer forest vegetation form; a cedar/hemlock/Douglas fir vegetation type with a Pacific Northwest conifer forest vegetation form; Western spruce/fir vegetation type with a Rocky Mountain conifer forest vegetation form; and a spruce/cedar/hemlock vegetation type with a Pacific Northwest conifer forest vegetation form.Because the park sits on an isolated peninsula, with a high mountain range dividing it from the land to the south, it developed many endemic plant and animal species. The southwestern coastline of the Olympic Peninsula is also the northernmost non-glaciated region on the Pacific coast of North America, with the result that – aided by the distance from peaks to the coast at the Last Glacial Maximum being about twice what it is today – it served as a refuge from which plants colonized glaciated regions to the north.
The park also provides habitat for many species that are native only to the Pacific Northwest coast. As a result, scientists have declared it a biological reserve and studied its unique species to better understand how plants and animals evolve. The park is home to sizable populations of black bears and black-tailed deer. The park also has a noteworthy cougar population, numbering about 150. Mountain goats were accidentally introduced into the park in the 1920s and have caused much damage on the native flora. The NPS has activated management plans to control the goats.
The park contains an estimated of old-growth forests.
Forest fires are infrequent in the rainforests of the park's western side; however, a severe drought after the driest spring in 100 years, coupled with an extremely low snowpack from the preceding winter, resulted in a rare rainforest fire in the summer of 2015.
Climate
According to the Köppen climate classification system, Olympic National Park encompasses two classifications: a temperate oceanic climate in the western half, and a warm-summer Mediterranean climate in the eastern half. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the plant hardiness zone at Hoh Rainforest Visitor Center is 8a with an average annual extreme minimum temperature of.Human history
Before the influx of European settlers, Olympic's human population consisted of Native Americans, whose use of the peninsula was thought to have consisted mainly of fishing and hunting. However, recent reviews of the record, coupled with systematic archaeological surveys of the mountains are pointing to much more extensive tribal use of especially the subalpine meadows than seemed formerly to be the case. Most if not all Pacific Northwest indigenous cultures were adversely affected by European diseases and other factors, well before ethnographers, business operations and settlers arrived in the region, so what they saw and recorded was a much-reduced native culture base. Large numbers of cultural sites are now identified in the Olympic mountains, and important artifacts have been found.When settlers began to appear, extractive industry in the Pacific Northwest was on the rise, particularly in regards to the harvesting of timber, which began heavily in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Public dissent against logging began to take hold in the 1920s, when people got their first glimpses of the clear-cut hillsides. This period saw an explosion of people's interest in the outdoors; with the growing use of the automobile, people took to touring previously remote places like the Olympic Peninsula.
The formal record of a proposal for a new national park on the Olympic Peninsula begins with the expeditions of well-known figures Lieutenant Joseph P. O'Neil and Judge James Wickersham, during the 1890s. These notables met in the Olympic wilderness while exploring, and subsequently combined their political efforts to have the area placed within some protected status. On February 22, 1897, President Grover Cleveland created the Olympic Forest Reserve, which became Olympic National Forest in 1907. Following unsuccessful efforts in the Washington State Legislature to further protect the area in the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt created Mount Olympus National Monument in 1909, primarily to protect the subalpine calving grounds and summer range of the Roosevelt elk herds native to the Olympics.
Public desire for preservation of some of the area grew until President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill creating a national park in 1938. The Civilian Conservation Corps constructed a headquarters in 1939 with funds from the Public Works Administration. It is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The national park was expanded by in 1953 to include the Pacific coastline between the Queets and Hoh rivers, as well as portions of the Queets and Bogachiel valleys.
Even after ONP was declared a park, though, illegal logging continued in the park, and political battles continue to this day over the incredibly valuable timber contained within its boundaries. Logging continues on the Olympic Peninsula, but not within the park. The Olympic Wilderness, a designated wilderness area, was established by the federal government in 1988 that contained within Olympic National Park. It was renamed the Daniel J. Evans Wilderness in 2017 to honor Governor and U.S. Senator Daniel J. Evans, who had co-sponsored the 1988 legislation. A proposed expansion of the wilderness area by in 2022 was not successful.