Can dogs hike in Olympic National Park?

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Ahead of you is a park with seventy-three miles of wild coast, thirty-two named glaciers, and at least sixteen kinds of animals and eight kinds of plants that live nowhere else on Earth. Nearly all of it, about ninety-five percent, is wilderness, land Congress has set aside to stay without roads. This is Olympic National Park.

Before the park

People have lived on this peninsula for more than thirteen thousand five hundred years. In nineteen seventy-seven, a man named Manny Manis dug up the tusks of a mastodon, a kind of elephant now long gone, on his land near Sequim. A piece of bone was lodged in one of its ribs, and a fresh look in two thousand eleven showed it was a spear point, carved from mastodon bone, from a kill about thirteen thousand eight hundred years ago.

Eight tribes still hold a living tie to this park: the Lower Elwha Klallam, the Jamestown S'Klallam, the Port Gamble S'Klallam, the Skokomish, the Quinault, the Hoh, the Quileute and the Makah. They govern themselves, and since two thousand six all eight have worked with the park as one government to another.

In treaties of eighteen fifty-five and eighteen fifty-six, the tribes gave most of their land to the United States, and they live now on reservations along the peninsula's shores. They kept the right to fish at their usual places, and the Makah, who call themselves the Cape People, kept the right to hunt whales.

Making the park

The first outsiders came by sea: in seventeen seventy-four the Spanish explorer Juan Perez sighted this coast and named its highest peak, which later became Mount Olympus.

In nineteen oh nine, two days before he left office, Theodore Roosevelt signed a proclamation, an order on his own authority, making Mount Olympus National Monument. It sheltered a herd of elk that now carries his name, the Roosevelt elk. Six years later, Woodrow Wilson cut the monument by more than half and handed its heavily timbered land back to the national forest for logging.

In September of nineteen thirty-seven, Franklin Roosevelt toured the peninsula, and three thousand schoolchildren held up a sign that ended, "Give us an Olympic National Park". The next June he signed the law that made it one.

Harry Truman added the coast in nineteen fifty-three. In nineteen eighty-eight, Congress made about ninety-five percent of the park wilderness.

One story

Before the dams, the Klallam people on the Elwha River counted on ten separate runs of salmon and other sea-run fish every year, and some chinook salmon weighed more than a hundred pounds.

Then a man named Thomas Aldwell spent twenty years gathering land and money for a dam. The Elwha Dam was begun in nineteen ten, and a second, taller dam went in eight miles upstream in nineteen twenty-seven. Neither dam had any way for fish to get past it. The salmon coming home from the ocean were left with just five miles of river. The water behind the dams also drowned homelands and cultural sites of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe.

It took most of a century to undo. Congress passed a law to restore the river in nineteen ninety-two, and the government bought both dams in two thousand. On September seventeenth, two thousand eleven, the largest dam removal in the history of the United States began, with the tribe as a key partner. The lower dam was gone within six months, and the upper one by two thousand fourteen.

The fish did not wait. Within five years, chinook, sockeye, steelhead and bull trout had swum past both old dam sites, and one bull trout made it twenty-nine miles up from the sea. For a hundred years, the salmon had five miles.

Today

The park drew three point seven one million visits in two thousand twenty-four, the eighth most of any national park.

Some of the biggest work here now is moving uphill. The threat of a tsunami, a giant wave from the sea, is pushing the coast's tribes to higher ground. In two thousand twelve, Congress gave the Quileute seven hundred eighty-five acres of park land so their school and offices could leave the tsunami zone. The Hoh got park land for the same reason in two thousand ten, and the Quinault Indian Nation plans to move about six hundred fifty people half a mile up the hill.

On the coast road south, stop at Ruby Beach and look out at the sea stacks, tall pillars of rock left standing in the surf. This is Olympic National Park.