Olympic National Park covers roughly 922,000 acres, about ninety-five percent of it designated wilderness with no roads at all. The highway and its short spur roads reach only the park's outer margins, while the vast mountainous interior, with its rivers, forests, and glaciers, remains accessible solely on foot by backcountry trail.
Here's a number to roll around in your head. This park is enormous, somewhere around nine hundred and twenty-two thousand acres, and roughly ninety-five percent of it is protected wilderness with no roads at all. No pavement, no power lines, just mountains and rivers and forest the way they've always been. The thin ribbon of road you're on right now only skirts the outside edge of it. Everything wild and untouched is out there to your left, stretching for miles past where any car can follow.
Photo: Dllu · CC BY-SA 4.0
