The broad mass of the Olympic Peninsula projects across Puget Sound, sheltering Seattle from the open sea. Small towns are sprinkled sparingly along US-101, which loops the peninsula's coast, but at the core the Olympic Mountains thrust upwards, shredding rain clouds as they drift in from the Pacific and drenching the surrounding area. In the western river valleys, the dense vegetation thickens into rainforest, and the forests and unspoiled Pacific beaches provide habitat for a huge variety of wildlife and seabirds.

Although much of the peninsula is now protected land, and large areas of national forest surround the rugged and verdant preserve of Olympic National Park , the legacy of timber clear-cutting provides an all-too-visible scar on the landscape, especially if you venture off the main roads into an ecological dead zone riddled with ugly stumps and uprooted vegetation. The lumber trade brought the first Western settlers here in the nineteenth century, and while almost every town has a sawmill, the industry is in crisis and ecologists favor tourism as the lesser environmental evil.

Olympic Peninsula

• Olympic Peninsula

Explore Olympic Peninsula

• Aberdeen and further south
• Neah Bay, the Makah Indian Reservation and Cape Flattery
• Olympic National Park
• Port Angeles
• Port Townsend

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