History Geography Demographics Culture Places To Visit Map
| History, the Olympic Peninsula was an Eden for its early inhabitants. There was an ocean of fish, rivers teeming with salmon and trout, forests abundant with deer, elk, game birds, berries and roots, and trees towering 200 feet high. The Skokomish, Quinault, Quileute, Hoh, Makah, Klallam, and Chehalis tribes lived in a land of abundant natural resources and from it built a rich culture here. The people that lived on the northwest coast lived in longhouses, houses made of cedar and hemlock. |
| Geography, The Olympic Peninsula is on the far west side of Washington state. It is made up of mostly state and national forests and is surrounded on three sides with bodies of water. The Pacific ocean on the west the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the north, and Admiralty Inlet and the Hood Canal on the east. |
| Culture, On the Pacific coast, the Hoh Tribe and the Quileute Tribe, share common, Chimakuan language family roots. Today, most Hoh tribal members live on the 443-acre reservation surrounding the mouth of the Hoh River, the head waters of which begin on Mt. Olympus. The Quileute Tribe, approximately 15 miles north of the Hoh, live at the awesome junction of the Quileute River and the Pacific Ocean. At the furthest northwest point of the United States, at Cape Flattery, live the Makah Tribe. From the Wakashan linguistic family, they share language and cultural traditions with tribal communities on Southern Vancouver Island, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Makah have traditionally been known for their fishing and whaling expertise. The S'Klallam Tribes--the Lower Elwha Klallam, the Jamestown S'Klallam, and the Port Gamble S'Klallam--belong to the Salishan language family. They originally lived, non-divided in approximately 15 villages, across the south shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, from the Hoko River to Discovery Bay. |
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A place to visit, Often
referred to as "three parks in one", Olympic
National Park encompasses three distinctly different
ecosystems—rugged glacier capped mountains, over 60 miles of wild
Pacific coast and magnificent stands of old-growth and temperate rain
forest. These diverse ecosystems are still largely pristine in character
(about 95% of the park is designated wilderness) and are Olympics gift to
you.
Olympic is also known for its biological diversity. Isolated for eons by glacial ice, the waters of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Olympic Peninsula has developed its own distinct array of plants and animals. Eight kinds of plants and five kinds of animals are found on the peninsula and live nowhere else in the world. |
| Image Credits,
http://www.olympic.national-park.com/ http://www.williamjosephgallery.com/ www.sequimgazette.com/homesland/ http://www.olympicpeninsula.org/film/files/locations.html
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