![]() ![]() Check road conditions in advance, keep your fuel tank topped off, and if you intend to visit the deep interior, plan to get there on your own two feet. The primary way to access different entrance points is via Highway 101, which roughly circumnavigates the park however, those roads into the park essentially dead-end in 10 to 15 miles. Ninety-five percent of the park is federally designated wilderness, in which motorized traffic is prohibited. Unlike many national parks, Olympic contains no through roads. What You Need to Know Before Traveling to Olympic National Park You can drive around the park but not through it If you’ve ever wanted to watch a pair of goats fly off into the sunset, well, has the Olympic National Park YouTube channel got the video for you. The goat-relocation operation has attempted to restore the park to its original goat-free state while also supporting dwindling goat populations in their native North Cascades habitat. Over time the goats proliferated to a population of over 1,000, trampling rare and indigenous plants and disrupting natural ecological processes. Mountain goats aren’t native to Olympic and a dozen were introduced here by a sporting club in the 1920s. ![]() Forest Service to begin relocating mountain goats via helicopter from Olympic National Park to the North Cascades, over 100 miles away. More recently, in 2018, in a quirky case, the National Park Service teamed up with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and U.S. Tribal members and others showed up to celebrate in T-shirts emblazoned with “It’s about Dam time!” Today, the Elwha again runs free. In 1992, Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act, which, nearly two decades later, resulted in the largest dam-removal project in U.S. ![]() However, their construction flooded the traditional homelands of the Lower Elwha Klallam, violated the tribe’s treaty rights, and decimated salmon populations by blocking their migratory upstream route. In the early 1900s, the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams were built on the Elwha River to supply hydropower to the nearby town of Port Angeles. national parks, Olympic has a complicated history, but over the years, attempts have been made to right a few wrongs, some of which predate the park’s formal establishment in 1938. The views in Olympic National Park (Photo: Carmen Martínez Torrón/Getty) Don’t be fooled by its modest elevation the peak is home to many large glaciers, including the three-mile-long Hoh Glacier, and requires an 18-mile approach, mountaineering skills, and a Class 4 scramble to summit. The choices are copious and depend on your preferred setting and mode of exploration: you can wander the temperate rainforest or some 70 miles of coastline, paddle lakes and spend time at tidepools, backpack to more than 100 wilderness campsites, or head straight for the park’s rugged and remote crown jewel, 7,980-foot Mount Olympus. Most park-goers find themselves asking not what to do here but how much they can cram into their visits. ![]() Ski in the morning, hike through an old-growth forest that same afternoon, then camp on the beach at night-welcome to Olympic National Park, one of few places on earth boasting such a wide range of ecosystems. ![]()
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