Like sails, these snowcapped peaks billow on the horizon—and they are often stained peach and violet by the sunset. A landscape this glorious has to triple-down on protection, so in addition to being conserved within Olympic National Park, the area is also designated both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Eleven major rivers flow from this range down into the hemisphere’s best and largest swath of virgin temperate rain forest. So undisturbed by humans are these woods, they were found to be the quietest place in the continental United States.
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Olympic Mountains
Like sails, these snowcapped peaks billow on the horizon—and they are often stained peach and violet by the sunset. A landscape this glorious has to triple-down on protection, so in addition to being conserved within Olympic National Park, the area is also designated both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Eleven major rivers flow from this range down into the hemisphere’s best and largest swath of virgin temperate rain forest. So undisturbed by humans are these woods, they were found to be the quietest place in the continental United States.
Olympic National Park
A World Heritage site since 1981
At the top of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, Olympic National Park contains a stellar temperate rain forest, the largest in the Western Hemisphere. The diversity here includes ocean coastline, glaciers, subalpine meadows, and coniferous forests. It became a national park in 1938.