From Elk Reserve to National Park: The Making of Olympic

The creation of Olympic National Park was an act of conservation driven by the near-destruction of a single animal. Roosevelt elk, the largest subspecies of elk in North America, once ranged across the Olympic Peninsula in enormous herds. By the late eighteen hundreds, hunters had reduced the Olympic Peninsula population to perhaps five hundred animals. One settler reportedly boasted of killing seventy in a single day.

President Theodore Roosevelt, a hunter who also understood the value of protecting wild animals, established Mount Olympus National Monument on March second, nineteen oh nine, in the final days of his presidency. The monument was created specifically to protect the remaining elk, which were eventually named Roosevelt elk in his honor. The designation put more than six hundred thousand acres of the Olympic Peninsula under federal protection.

Over the next three decades, the question of whether the monument should be upgraded to a national park, with stronger protections, played out in Congress and in public debate. Timber interests wanted access to the old-growth forests inside the monument boundaries. Conservationists wanted permanent protection. President Franklin Roosevelt visited the Olympic Peninsula in September of nineteen thirty-seven and saw the forests and the elk firsthand.

The following year, on June twenty-ninth, nineteen thirty-eight, Roosevelt signed the act creating Olympic National Park. The park eventually grew to nearly a million acres and was later expanded to include a strip of wild Pacific coastline. Today it protects three distinct ecosystems: glacier-capped mountains, old-growth rainforest, and ocean coast. The elk for whom it was originally established still graze in the Hoh River valley in herds that number in the hundreds.