Olympic National Park

Olympic National Park

142 stops· 2 hr 8 min· 233.0 mi

A self-guided driving and walking tour of the ENTIRE Olympic National Park — three worlds in one journey: glacier-capped mountains, the wettest temperate rainforest in the Lower 48, and seventy-plus miles of wild Pacific coast, all driven on the great horseshoe of Highway 101 from Port Angeles down to Lake Quinault. Ranger Quinn guides you up every spur — Hurricane Ridge and Mount Olympus, the freed Elwha River, blue Lake Crescent, Sol Duc Falls, the Hoh Rain Forest, Rialto and Second Beach, Ruby Beach, the Kalaloch coast, and the Valley of the Rain Forest Giants — while Ranger Boone Merrick tells the tales that matter: the Lower Elwha Klallam who freed their river in the largest dam removal in American history, the Lady of the Lake, the Quileute's Move to Higher Ground, the Makah village the sea kept at Ozette, the two Roosevelts who built the park around its elk, and the world's largest spruce. This is the ancestral homeland of eight living, sovereign nations who steward it with the park today. The park interior is roadless, so you drive the perimeter and turn up the spurs; the tour plays whichever end you start from, by GPS. Around thirty dollars a vehicle gets you in for a week; cell signal dies past Port Angeles, so it works fully offline. On the coast, the tide can trap you and rolling drift logs kill — carry a tide chart and never turn your back on the ocean. 2026 note: some roads are gated by washout or fire (the Elwha beyond Madison Falls, Rialto's Mora Road in late season, the Quinault South Shore loop, Staircase) — the tour routes what's open and tells you the rest honestly; check the park's road line before you go.