Olympic National Forest is a U.S. National Forest located in Washington, USA. With an area of 628,115 acres (2,541.89 km2), it nearly surrounds Olympic National Park and the Olympic Mountain range. Olympic National Forest contains parts of Clallam, Grays Harbor, Jefferson, and Mason counties. The landscape of the national forest varies, from the temperate Olympic rain forest to the salt water fjord of Hood Canal to the peaks of Mt. Washington.
Annual precipitation averages about 220 inches (5.6 m), giving rise to streams such as the Humptulips River.
Olympic National Forest was originally created as Olympic Forest Reserve in 1897, then renamed to Olympic National Forest in 1907. A 1993 Forest Service study estimated that the extent of old growth in the Forest was 266,800 acres (108,000 ha). It is administered in two ranger districts: the Pacific Ranger District on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula, and the Hood Canal Ranger District on the east side.
Forest headquarters are located in Olympia, with ranger district offices in Forks, Quinault, and Quilcene. The former office in Hoodsport closed in 2005, and now houses a local Chamber of Commerce, which still sells Northwest Forest Passes.
Other Washington towns near entrances of the forest include Port Angeles, Sequim, and Amanda Park.
Read more about Olympic National Forest: Points of Interest
Famous quotes containing the words olympic, national and/or forest:
“Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.”
—Joseph Heller (b. 1923)
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)