Olympic National Park

Native peoples lived on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington before European settlers arrived, and today the Hoh live at the mouth of the Hoh River and the Quileute at La Push, at the mouth of the Quileute River. Heavy logging began in the late 19th century. In the 1890s the expeditions of Lieutenant Joseph P. O'Neil and Judge James Wickersham led to the first formal proposal for a park, and on 22 February 1897 President Grover Cleveland created the Olympic Forest Reserve.

In 1909 Theodore Roosevelt declared Mount Olympus National Monument, mainly to protect the calving grounds and summer range of the Roosevelt elk. Public pressure grew after people saw clear-cut hillsides in the 1920s, and on 29 June 1938 Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the bill that made it a national park. The Pacific coastline between the Queets and Hoh rivers was added in 1953, and in 1988 Congress designated 95 percent of the park as wilderness.

The park became a biosphere reserve in 1976 and a World Heritage site in 1981. On the Elwha River, two dams had kept salmon out of about 105 km of river for more than 95 years. The 64 m Glines Canyon Dam and the 33 m Elwha Dam were taken down, and the work was completed in 2014. The number of glaciers in the park fell from 266 in 1982 to 184 in 2009.