Third-Busiest in Federal System : Olympic Park: Still Wet and Wild at 50

The people here fretted that the persistent rain of the Olympic Peninsula would dampen Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first impression of the craggy mountains and ancient forests proposed for a national park.

They needn’t have worried. Roosevelt told them, that September day in 1937, that the park was needed for the old and young then, but also “for a whole lot of young people who are going to come along in the next hundred years.”

On June 29, 1938, FDR signed a bill setting aside 634,000 acres as Olympic National Park.

Today, the park is 922,000 acres of glacier-capped mountains, alpine meadows, temperate rain forest and ocean shore. It is the third-busiest national park, with more than 3 million visitors a year, yet remains one of the wildest natural preserves. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization recognizes Olympic as an international biosphere reserve and World Heritage Site.

50th Anniversary Summer

Park officials are preparing for 50th anniversary events this summer, but are also focusing on resource-management issues ranging from pesky mountain goats and vanishing salmon to animals of the two-legged variety.

“The one (issue) we’re going to have to address in the long haul . . . is human impact, particularly in the backcountry, but also in the front country,” said assistant park superintendent Don Jackson.

Olympic so far has been fairly successful at accommodating visitors, Jackson said.

Only two spots in the park--Lake Constance and Flapjack Lakes, both easily accessible to hikers who have only a weekend to reach the backcountry--currently limit the number of campers admitted at one time.

“This park is behind the curve, so to speak, in that the volume of human impact has not begun to overrun the resource,” Jackson said.

The park’s crown, 7,965-foot Mt. Olympus, was named in 1788 by John Meares, an English voyager to whom it seemed an appropriate home for the gods, like Mt. Olympus in Greece.

Rare Inhabitants

While the presence of gods has not been established, the park does contain some rare natural creations:

- The Western Hemisphere’s largest expanse of temperate rain forest, composed heavily of giant Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, hemlock and western red cedar, and bathed in an annual rainfall of 12 feet.

- The Olympic Mountains, drained by 14 major rivers and frosted by more than 60 glaciers. In the meadows just below the peaks grow numerous types of wildflowers, some of which can be found only in the park.

- The largest herd of Roosevelt elk, estimated at 5,000 head, and other rare creatures, such as bald eagles and peregrine falcons.

Lt. Joseph O’Neil, leader of an 1890 expedition into these mountains, concluded that “the interior is useless for all practical purposes,” although he regarded the heavily forested outer slopes as valuable, as loggers then and now would agree.

Today, Jackson said: “There are some people--a few--that would just as soon see parts of the park dismantled for timber interests or whatever.”

Standing watch on the side of preservation are the Sierra Club and other groups, such as the Olympic Park Associates.

Preservationists’ Concerns

Associates president Polly Dyer describes the members as “park supporters as long as the park (management) is not doing things that we think are contrary to protecting the park.”

The Associates claim some credit for having Shi Shi Beach and intertidal zones added to the park’s coastal strip, for closing Olympic Hot Springs as a resort and, more recently, for reducing the right-of-way that was cleared for a new road to the Sol Duc hot springs, she said.

Charlie Raines of the Sierra Club said the hot springs project, in which the road was straightened and improved, was an example of the national parks’ “perhaps overzealous road construction program . . . under the guise of safety and visitor convenience, we end up cutting down giant, old-growth trees.”

“Why not let people know that this is an old wagon road . . . and you’re only going to be going 25 miles an hour and driving around trees, not through them?” he asked.

The watchdog groups and the park managers don’t see eye to eye, either, on what to do about the mountain goats, which were brought to the Olympics 60 years ago. The goats are damaging the sensitive high-country vegetation.

Goats Being Relocated

The Park Service is carrying out a plan to capture at least 800 of the goat herd, estimated at 1,000 head, and move them to areas where they are native, such as the Cascade Range. If, after a few years, the plan is found not to be working, rangers then will shoot some of the goats.

Dyer said she thinks leaving even a few of the goats is a “major mistake,” since the current herd is descended from only about a dozen animals.

Increasing pressures on the park recently caused the Wilderness Society to add Olympic to what it considers the 10 most-threatened national parks. Concerns range from the potential for offshore oil drilling to logging around the park’s boundary--a practice that critics say disrupts everything from the scenic views to the continuity of the ecosystem.

Meanwhile, others are thinking not only about preserving the park, but also of expanding it. The nonprofit National Parks and Conservation Assn. has proposed that about 180,000 acres be added to Olympic, to further protect important watersheds and habitat.

Even as such goals are set, association officials warn against complacency. Park lands are not necessarily safe, they say, particularly from timber companies.

“Rarely a Congress goes by when a senator or congressman doesn’t propose deletions of some parkland somewhere, for reasons of development,” said Destry Jarvis, vice president of the association.

“It’s not inconceivable in Olympic.”