Welcome to today's deep dive. We are incredibly
thrilled to have you with us. Yeah, we've got
a really phenomenal subject to dig into today.
We absolutely do. Today we have a very specific
mission and we're drawing all our insights from
a single intensely comprehensive source, which
is the complete historical and geographical breakdown
of the Olympic Mountains. Right. And when you
start looking at the raw data and the human accounts
compiled about this region, you quickly realize
this isn't just a standard. story about rocks
and trees. No, not at all. Our goal today is
to basically shortcut your way to being a Pacific
Northwest geography and history expert. We are
going to extract the most surprising, mind -bending
aha moments about how extreme geography creates
entirely bizarre ecosystems. And how it drives
some truly wild human history, too. It's really
a story of absolute extremes and how those extremes
force everything to adapt or just completely
fail. Extremes is definitely the perfect word.
Just to tease some of the wild facts we're going
to unpack for you today. We are talking about
a mountain range that was literally scraped off
the ocean floor. Yep. The geology is wild. And
we will look at ancient rainforests where the
undisputed kings of the ecosystem are giant banana
slugs that actually outweigh all the mammals
and birds combined. That is still one of my favorite
stats. It's crazy. And later, we're going to
recount a disastrous 19th century winter expedition
that involved dragging a handmade boat through
25 feet of snow. So to really appreciate how
all of this chaos happens, we first need to set
the geographical scene for you. Right. Paint
the picture. If you picture Washington State
in the upper left corner of the country, the
Olympic Mountains sit out on a peninsula. Completely
surrounded by water on three sides. It's practically
an island. Basically, yeah. You've got the open
Pacific Ocean to the west, the Strait of Juan
de Fuca to the north, and Hood Canal and Puget
Sound to the east. Now, these mountains aren't
incredibly high. Mount Olympus tops out at 7
,980 feet. Which is tall, but not like the Rockies.
Exactly. But they rise precipitously, almost
straight out of the sea. Okay, let's unpack this
geology right away because it is definitely not
what you might expect from the Pacific Northwest.
Not at all. Like if you look at the neighboring
Cascade Mountains, Mount Rainier or Mount St.
Helens, those are famously volcanic. Right, the
Ring of Fire. But the Olympics. The geological
records show they are not volcanic at all and
they contain absolutely no native granite. Which
is incredibly rare for a massive mountain range.
It seems bizarre. So where did they come from?
Well, instead of granite or volcanoes, they are...
They're primarily made of ancient Eocene sandstones
and basalt. Okay, translate that for us. Sure.
We're talking about ancient seafloor sand and
heavy volcanic rock that was formed underwater
tens of millions of years ago. Wow. Yeah, and
to understand how ocean floor became a mountain
range, we have to go back about 35 million years.
As the Farallon tectonic plate moved eastward,
it collided with the North American continental
plate. And as it collided, it subducted. Right,
like it jammed underneath the continent. Exactly.
It jammed right underneath. This is my favorite
part of the geology. It's exactly like a tectonic
snowplow. A snowplow is a great way to look at
it. Like imagine a massive snowplow pushing down
a street. Most of the pavement gets cleared,
but a huge layer of the snow and ice gets scraped
off the top and jammed into a massive crumpled
pile in the corner. That is spot on. That's what
happened to the seafloor. It got jammed into
a corner between Vancouver Island and the North
Cascades, literally scraped up into a giant crumpled
dome. And all of this scraping and crumpling
happened completely underwater. Which is so hard
to wrap your head around. It really is. The Olympic
Mountains didn't even rise above the surface
of the sea until 10 to 20 million years ago.
What's fascinating here is how this specific
origin story, this scraped up dome shape, creates
one of the steepest reliefs globally. Because
it just shoots straight up. Right. Because it's
a dome sitting right on the coast, it acts as
a massive, immovable weather wall. Okay, so if
this dome is acting as a massive weather wall
right on the coast, intercepting all those Pacific
storms, what does that actually look like in
terms of rainfall? It's intense. Are we talking
a heavy Seattle drizzle or something more extreme?
Oh, it is vastly more extreme than Seattle. Because
they are only about 35 miles from the ocean,
they catch essentially all the incoming Pacific
moisture. All of it. Yeah, Mount Olympus itself
gets pounded with an estimated 240 inches of
rain and snow every single year. Let's just ground
that number for you for a second. 240 inches
is 20 feet of water. It's massive. Imagine a
two -story house completely submerged in precipitation.
That is what falls on Mount Olympian every single
year. And the western slopes, like the Horaine
Forest, get up to 170 inches annually. That actually
makes it the wettest place in the contiguous
United States. But wait, if the mountains are
just scraped up seafloor dirt and rock, how do
they support anything, let alone massive old
-growth forests? Wouldn't the soil be terrible?
That is a great question. Initially, yes, it
was. But over millions of years, that staggering
volume of water mechanically breaks down the
rock. Exactly. Add in pioneer species like lichens
and mosses that thrive in the wet, and over millennia,
you build up incredibly rich, deep soil. But
here's the crazy part about that weather wall.
The rain shadow? Yes. Because the mountains are
a dome, they cast a massive rain shadow on the
other side. Just a few miles away, to the northeast,
the city of Sequim gets a mere 16 inches of rain
a year. That is wild to me. You have temperate
rainforests dripping with moss on one side and
an area so dry it literally requires irrigation
on the other. It's a land of total contrast.
And that level of moisture doesn't just shape
the rocks. It completely dictates the flora and
fauna that can survive there. Which brings us
to a really bizarre ecological monopoly in these
forests. The conifers. Right. The hardwood to
conifer timber volume is 1 to 1 ,000. It is almost
entirely evergreen trees. Syctus, Bruce, western
hemlock, Douglas fir. Why is there absolutely
no balance? If we connect this to the bigger
picture, the dominance of conifers over deciduous
trees, the ones with broad leaves, is a direct
result of the timing of the precipitation. The
wet winter. Right. The area has incredibly wet
winters and very dry summers. Deciduous trees
can't grow much during the dry summer and they
drop their leaves in the fall so they completely
miss out on the winter rains. Oh, that makes
sense. But conifers, the evergreens, keep their
needles and can photosynthesize right through
the fall, winter, and early spring. And because
the Pacific Northwest doesn't get frequent tropical
cyclones or hurricanes to knock them down, these
trees just sit there and keep growing for centuries.
They get massive. Every coniferous genus represented
in the Olympics features its largest and longest
-lived species. They are absolute giants. But
when you walk through these rainforests, like
the Ho or the Quinau, the forest floor is surprisingly
open. Yeah, it's not what you'd expect from a
rainforest. It's almost like a manicured park.
It's not a dense, impenetrable jungle. And that
open structure isn't entirely natural. Or rather,
it isn't just the climate doing the work. The
real ecosystem engineers of the Olympic rainforests
are the Roosevelt elk. I love this part. Olympic
National Park actually protects the largest population
of Roosevelt elk in the world. So they are basically
thousand -pound landscapers. Precisely. They
graze heavily on the hemlock saplings and the
dense understory shrubs, but they leave the Sitka
spruce alone. So they are literally weeding the
forest. Exactly. Without the elk constantly browsing
and clearing the brush, the forest floor would
become an... impenetrable tangle but the historical
relationship between humans and these elk is
fascinating and often incredibly tragic very
tragic by the early 20th century commercial hunters
had decimated the herds bringing the population
down to fewer than 2 ,000 animals which is Terrifyingly
low for a keystone species. Right. And this crisis
actually prompted Theodore Roosevelt to create
the Mount Olympus National Monument in 1909 specifically
to protect them. And the herds did rebound from
there. Which sounds like a great conservation
success story. But then I was reading about what
happened next when the authorities decided to
manage this booming population in 1937. Oh, the
1937 hunt. They opened up a hunting season in
the Ho River Valley and it was a total disaster,
right? It was a logistical nightmare. of epic
proportions. The authorities severely underestimated
the public response. How many people showed up?
An estimated 2 ,000 to 4 ,000 hunters descended
on a completely wild area with no infrastructure
to support them. Into a rainforest. Yes. And
then the extreme weather turned on them. The
details from the source are just shocking. The
Ho River flooded, completely washing away massive
hunting camps. People were hopelessly lost in
the deep woods. It was pure chaos. One hunter
was accidentally shot to death by another. Another
hunter drowned in the freezing river. A pack
horse was even shot by mistake. Just a mess.
Forest Service personnel literally had to abandon
their posts just to run emergency rescue operations
for the hunters. And by the end of it... Over
800 elk were killed with some just left lying
rotting in the forest because it was too chaotic
to pack the meat out. It's awful. It's pure chaos,
yeah. But historically, it was a crucial turning
point. How so? Proponents of creating a permanent
national park used the sheer disaster of that
1937 hunt as their primary argument for why the
area needed strict federal protection from hunting
and logging. Okay, so the elk are the heavy -duty
landscapers, but they aren't the undisputed kings
of this forest in terms of sheer mass, right?
Not even close. I want to talk about the real
rulers of the damp shade. You're talking about
the banana slug? Yes. This completely blew my
mind. They thrive so incredibly well in this
damp, cool environment that if you were to gather
them all up and put them on a scale, their combined
mass outweighs all the mammals and all the birds
in the Olympic forests combined. It really is
a staggering insight into how extreme ecosystems
function. It completely flips our traditional
understanding of the biomass hierarchy on its
head. Because usually you think of bears or elk.
Right. In most places, you think of large mammals
or apex predators dominating the landscape. But
in an ecosystem thoroughly soaked in moisture,
it favors organisms that would dry out and die
almost anywhere else. That makes total sense.
The true kings of the Olympic rainforest are
the detritivores, the slugs, quietly recycling
the forest floor. Here's where it gets really
interesting, though. We've talked about how extreme
the landscape is, the weather walls, the giant
trees, the endless rain. So how did humans actually
navigate it? For a long time, they just didn't.
Right. The short answer for European settlers
was they didn't. But the indigenous peoples of
the peninsula had a completely different relationship
with this land, didn't they? A profoundly deep
relationship. Tribes like the Skokomish. Quinault
and Elwha Clallam navigated and utilized this
extreme landscape for over 7 ,000 years. That's
older than the pyramids. It is. Archaeologists
have found stone tools and intricately woven
baskets high up in the subalpine meadows. They
had specific well -worn trails they used for
hunting, trading across the mountain passes,
and undertaking spirit quests. Which proves it
wasn't impossible to navigate if you respected
the rhythms of the environment. I even read that
their oral history specifically described the
highest peaks of the Olympics as the only refuges
during the great floods at the beginning of time.
They knew this land intimately. They understood
how to exist within the extremes. But when European
settlers arrived much later, they looked at this
tangled, wet, mountainous interior and found
it virtually impenetrable. It was basically a
terrifying black spot on their maps. It wasn't
until 1889 that a group of settlers managed to
cross the interior. And the story of that crossing
is just... Wild. The infamous press expedition.
Oh, yes. Sponsored by a Seattle newspaper called
The Press. It was led by a Canadian named James
H. Christie. He took five men, four dogs, and
two mules. And for some unfathomable reason,
they decided to cross these mountains in the
dead of winter. Why winter? Makes no sense. Pure
ego and glory. They wanted to beat a formal military
expedition that was planned for the summer of
1890. So they just rushed it. Yeah, but attempting
this in winter in a place that gets 20 feet of
precipitation, it quickly devolved into a comedy
of errors and sheer, unbelievable endurance.
I can only imagine. Their very first mistake
was attempting to navigate the freezing Elwha
River by boat. Right. They built a heavy wooden
boat from scratch to tow their cargo upriver.
But the water was freezing. and deep snow covered
all the boulders and fallen trees along the banks.
So they were basically dragging it. They spent
two weeks of agonizing, back -breaking labor
pulling this boat through the ice and rapids.
And in those two weeks... They had only advanced
four miles. Four miles? You could literally crawl
faster than that. Why on earth didn't they just
turn around? Extreme stubbornness. They finally
abandoned the boat, but their two mules didn't
fare much better. Mules in 25 feet of snow sounds
like a bad idea. Deep snow and steep ravines
are not meant for pack animals, and both mules
died in separate incidents relatively early on.
So these men had to carry everything on their
backs. And they packed super light on food, right?
Remember, they brought very minimal food. because
they assumed they'd just hunt game along the
way. Which would have worked in the lowlands.
But the heavy winter snows had driven all the
elk and deer down out of the high country. So
they were carrying heavy packs with nothing to
eat. For long stretches in the deep mountains,
they had absolutely no meat. They survived for
weeks on what they desperately called flour soup.
Just the name is depressing. Literally just flour
and water boiled together, and occasionally a
few beans. At one point, Christy climbed a peak
to scout their route, and he estimated the snow
was 25 feet deep. They were dealing with daily
avalanches. How did they even get over the passes?
To cross the massive divide between the river
systems, they hit a sheer vertical cliff. Christy
literally had to free climb up to a ledge, lower
a rope, and then they hauled the men, the heavy
packs, and their dogs up the vertical cliff.
Face by hand. Just incredible desperation. Truly.
They finally made it over the divide, managed
to shoot a bear, which saved them from outright
starvation, and reached the main stem Quinault
River. Foam stretch. They thought the worst was
over, so they built a raft to float down to the
coast. And what happens? They promptly crashed
the raft into a massive log jam. Unbelievable.
Just wrecked it. They saved the dogs, and they
saved exactly one pack that had their maps and
photos in it. But they lost everything else.
All their food, their guns, their shelter. And
all their hard -won scientific specimens at the
bottom of the river. They had to walk down the
riverbank, eating nothing but salmonberry shoots
and spruce bark, until a settler and a Quinault
indigenous guide found them and rescued them
in a canoe. It took them nearly six months to
cross the peninsula. Six months of pure misery.
You'd think the military expedition that went
the following summer, led by Lieutenant Joseph
O 'Neill, would have had an easier time. Because
it was summer. Exactly. But the summer brought
its own unique miseries. O 'Neill's men spent
their days hacking through incredibly dense brush.
And the bugs. Oh, the bugs. They were attacked
by swarms of hornets and yellow jackets daily,
which caused their mules to stampede. One even
fell off a cliff to its death. That terrain is
just unforgiving. The men waded through swamps
where they were impaled by toxic devil's club
thorns that broke off under their skin and festered.
So you either freeze in 25 feet of snow and eat
flower soup, or you get impaled by thorns while
fighting off hornets. Pick your poison. It feels
like whenever people who didn't understand this
landscape tried to foist their will on it, the
landscape fought back. It definitely did. But
humans did manage to do some real lasting damage
eventually, didn't we? Unfortunately, yes. This
raises an important question about the ecology
here. How sensitive it is. Right. Because this
ecosystem is essentially an island on land, surrounded
by water on three sides, and cut off by its sheer
ruggedness, it is highly sensitive to disruption.
Because things can't just easily migrate in and
out. Exactly. And human intervention over the
last century has repeatedly thrown this delicate
balance into chaos. For instance, by 1920, the
gray wolf had been trapped entirely out of existence
in the Olympics. And when you remove the apex
predator, the whole system shifts. Without wolves,
coyotes, which historically only lived down in
the lowlands, began moving up into the high alpine
elevations. That sounds like a bad shift. It
was. This unnatural migration is believed to
be the primary cause of population declines in
the Olympic marmot, a creature that exists nowhere
else on Earth. And then there is the story of
the mountain goats. I was stunned to learn that
mountain goats are not actually native to the
Olympic Mountains. They look so natural up there,
but they aren't. They were introduced in the
1920s by a coalition of the Forest Service and
the Game Commission purely so people could hunt
them. A classic case of unintended consequences.
Totally. The goats thrived in the rocky terrain,
but their hooves and grazing habits tore up the
fragile alpine vegetation and caused severe soil
erosion. And they got dangerous. Very. They lost
their natural fear of humans and became hyper
-aggressive toward hikers. Tragically aggressive.
In 1999, a goat gored a hiker, and in 2010, a...
a mountain goat actually fatally gored a hiker
on a park trail. It's awful. The problem got
so entirely out of hand that by 2018, the National
Park Service had to launch a massive operation
to literally airlift the goats out of the mountains.
Imagine being the pilot airlifting hundreds of
angry mountain goats out of a national park by
helicopter to relocate them to the Cascades.
It is an absurd image, but it highlights the
cost of meddling. It really does. We see a similar,
deeply impactful story with the rivers. The Elwha
River is one of the major waterways flowing out
of the mountains, acting like a spoke on a wheel.
And people decided to dam it. In 1910, and again
in 1927, massive concrete dams were built on
the Elwha to generate electricity for local industries.
But they were built with zero fish passage. Let's
dig into that for a second. Blocking that much
river in a place completely defined by its waterways,
that's catastrophic for the forest. Completely
catastrophic. Because salmon don't just stay
in the water. They are a massive nutrient delivery
system for the entire ecosystem. Precisely. Suddenly,
incredible runs of Pacific salmon were entirely
blocked from over 70 miles of their natural spawning
grounds. 70 miles of river just cut off. It devastated
the local fisheries. deeply harmed the indigenous
tribes who relied on them culturally and for
sustenance, and starved the forest of the marine
nutrients the salmon normally bring inland. But
they did eventually fix it. It took a full century
of fighting before the government finally began
the massive project of tearing those dams down
in 2011. And removing a dam isn't just blowing
up concrete. Oh no. It's carefully managing millions
of tons of trapped sediment. to restore the river's
natural flow. It seems like for decades it was
just a cycle of chaos. Unregulated timber grabs,
trapping out the wolves, disastrous hunting seasons,
blocking the rivers. Just constant pressure on
the ecosystem. But all of this ecological damage
did eventually trigger a massive public outcry.
And that led to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
actually traveling out to the peninsula in 1937
to see it for himself. It was a highly contentious
political visit. The logging industry was fighting
it, right? Hard. You had the Forest Service lobbying
hard to keep the land open for lucrative logging
and hunting, while the Park Service and conservationists
desperately wanted to protect it. But when FDR
arrived in Port Angeles, he was greeted by more
than 3 ,000 local schoolchildren, holding signs
and begging him to give us our Olympic National
Park. And it worked. The next year, in 1938,
he signed Olympic National Park into law, permanently
protecting the high country and those ancient
rainforests. And over the years, the park was
expanded to include the wild coastal strips,
eventually becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Which is an incredible designation. It really
is. It stands today as one of the largest continuous
blocks of untouched old growth forest left in
the country. So what does this all mean for you
today? When you take a step back from all these
incredible details we've unpacked, the Olympic
Mountains are really a masterclass in extreme
interconnectedness. Everything relies on everything
else. Exactly. You have tectonic plates scraping
the seafloor into a crumpled pile. That specific
dome shape creates a massive rain wall. That
endless rain grows towering ancient trees. The
trees feed the massive elk. The elk shape the
structure of the forest. And the slugs recycle
it all. And whenever humans have tried to outsmart
or conquer this landscape, whether it's dragging
a boat through winter ice or dropping mountain
goats onto the peaks, it usually ends in wrecked
rafts and emergency helicopter airlifts. The
mountain always wins. It is a landscape that
insists on operating entirely by its own rules.
Yeah. But there is a final forward -looking piece
of data from the geological records that really
refrains everything we've talked about. Oh, about
the glaciers. Yeah. We mentioned that the extreme
precipitation and cool climate allow glaciers
to exist at surprisingly low elevations here.
Right. There are about 184 glaciers and permanent
ice fields crowning these peaks. They are the
icy engines that carve the U -shaped valleys
and feed that radial network of rivers we discussed.
Right. They're the source of the cold water that
keeps the whole system moving. Exactly. But due
to warming global temperatures, these glaciers
are experiencing significant rapid decreases
in mass. Several have already disappeared completely.
And the current projections indicate that the
glaciers in the Olympics are expected to largely
vanish by the year 2070. Wow. It leaves you with
a really haunting thought. It really does. We've
spent this whole time talking about how the Olympic
Mountains are an unstoppable, immovable force
of nature. But when you look at the data on those
184 glaciers melting, you realize this immovable
landscape is actually operating on a ticking
clock. A very fast clock, relatively speaking.
If those glaciers vanish entirely by 2070, what
happens to the rivers that depend on that slow
release of cold meltwater? And the salmon. Exactly.
What happens to the salmon that need those freezing
rivers to spawn and the ancient giant trees that
rely on that moisture cycle? When the icy beating
heart of the Olympic Mountains stops, the entire
identity of this isolated peninsula will be forced
to change. It is a stark reminder of how fragile
even the most extreme and seemingly unconquerable
environments truly are. The connections are so
tight that pulling on one thread could unravel
the whole tapestry. That is a profound and sobering
thought to leave on. Thank you for joining us
on... this deep dive into the wild, wet, and
endlessly fascinating Olympic Mountains. We hope
you walk away with a few new aha moments to share.
Until next time, keep questioning the world around
you.