Because Olympic National Park protects an unbroken gradient from alpine peaks through rainforest to coastline, wildlife can migrate seasonally across the full range of elevations and habitats without encountering major development. This connectivity, increasingly rare among protected areas fragmented by roads and settlement, helps sustain the park's exceptional biological diversity.
Think of this whole peninsula as a kind of ark. Because the mountains, rainforest, and coast are all protected together in one unbroken piece, animals can move freely through every elevation as the seasons turn, up to the meadows in summer, down to the valleys in winter, never having to cross a highway or a town to do it. That's rarer than it sounds. Most wild places have been chopped into islands. Here the whole machine still runs intact, top to bottom, and you're driving the one road that threads the edge of it.
Photo: Dllu · CC BY-SA 4.0
