Olympic National Forest: The Forest the Park Left Behind

Olympic National Park gets the glaciers, the rainforest, and the coastline. Olympic National Forest gets the rest.

The forest wraps around the park on three sides, a collar of federally managed timber and watershed land that does not appear on most tourist maps. It covers more than six hundred twenty thousand acres, administered by the United States Forest Service rather than the National Park Service, which means its mandate is different: multiple use, including commercial timber harvest, motorized recreation, and grazing, alongside conservation. The park protects. The forest manages. The two agencies share a boundary but operate under separate philosophies.

What the forest has that the park does not is the Hood Canal Ranger District, which administers the road network and recreation infrastructure along the canal's western shore. The canal is a natural fjord, formed when glaciers carved a narrow arm of Puget Sound thirty miles inland. Its water is cold and extraordinarily clear. The oyster culture along its southern reaches is among the most productive in the state.

The forest also contains the Quinault Research Natural Area, a grove of old-growth Douglas fir that was preserved specifically for scientific study rather than timber production, and several wilderness areas that fill the gaps between park boundaries and private land.

A less-visited part of the Olympic country, and a better one for solitude, is the forest road system along the Hamma Hamma, Skokomish, and Dosewallips river valleys on the canal's western shore. The roads penetrate deep into the foothills, ending at trailheads where most hikers never arrive. The forest is not the park. It is quieter, less marked, and in some stretches indistinguishable from the old growth that made the Olympic Peninsula worth protecting in the first place.