Fine Art Photography Blog

Sitting in the northwestern-most corner of the continental United States, Olympic National Park is a vast swatch of pristine wilderness across the Sound from Seattle. The park itself occupies much but not all of the peninsula, generally surrounded by national forest, rivers, sloughs, and archipelago.

Half the reason I moved to Seattle was these mountains, and as beautiful as they are from a distance, I had been waiting too long to actually hike here.

Crescent Lake

Like Glacier’s Lake McDonald, Crescent Lake is a nearly endless pool bound in by mountains at the edge of a national park. Roadside along US 101, the seemingly endless aquifer is easily accessible to anyone intrepid enough to venture this far.

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It’s bitterly ironic that the Pacific Northwest is home to one of the world’s remaining pockets of linguistic diversity - the others are in the Amazon, Siberia and Oklahoma - and at the same time home to the quietest place in North America. It should come as no surprise that both are in danger from the Brave New World.

One Square Inch of Silence is a research institution, independent of the National Park Service. Gordon Hempton traveled the country measuring soundscapes and their makeup. His projects don’t quiet with silence; the results of the national survey showed the quietest spot in continental America to be in the Hoh rain forest. Woodpeckers, owls and eagle, bear, caribou, and other wildlife aren’t exactly abundant, but they aren’t rare either. However, in the northwestern corner of the Continental US, with almost no roads into the park, the isolation is extreme. Combined with a usual blanket of fog and deep forest, the entire peninsula feels like a sanctuary from the modern world.

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