Olympic National Park

Salamander
Fri 20 Sep 2019 17:41

A tough one to do as the mountains are impassable to all and climbed by only the most skilled. So you end up driving round and travelling into the centre or out to the coast.

We started at Heart o’ the Hills in the forest, where strangely there lives a seabird the Marbled Murrelet. This bird lays its eggs in the old growth forest on moss and then flies to the Pacific Ocean to feed every day: good job it flies at 65mph!

This park has more glaciers than Glacier National Park and we really wanted to walk Hurricane Ridge but we couldn’t because they are lifting the introduced mountain goats out. North Cascades NP goats have been hunted almost to extinction so it is a good place to send them. Two problems exist with the non-native goats in Olympic NP. The first being that they are destroying the mountain meadow flora which has no defence against them. The other problem is that Olympic has none of the natural mineral salt licks that the goats crave. Unfortunately, the best source of salt in the park is sweaty walking socks or human urine. This means that walkers and park staff have been followed by aggressive goats for miles and sometimes assaulted. Both reasons are sufficient for the decision to remove the goats.

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