Olympic National Park Bingo

Find a long yellow slug gliding on the wet trail. We saw one on the way out to Cape Flattery.

A banana slug breathes through a hole in its side. That round opening near the front, called a pneumostome, opens and closes to let air into a simple lung inside the slug's body.

Look for a white head in a shore snag over the water, or a splash as one drops for a fish.

A bald eagle's nest is the biggest tree nest in the world. A pair adds sticks year after year until the nest can weigh a ton or more, as heavy as a small car.

A loud deep-blue jay with a black crest, working the campground for dropped crumbs.

The tall black crest on its head goes up and down like a mood flag. It stands up tall when the jay is excited or alarmed and lies flat when the bird is calm.

Hear the rattling chatter overhead, then find the little squirrel scolding you from a branch.

A Douglas squirrel doesn't wait for cones to ripen and fall. It cuts them green, while the seeds are still tucked in tight, and lets them drop to the forest floor with a thud you can hear from the trail.

Watch the meadows and river flats at dawn for elk, the biggest land animals in the park.

Only the bulls grow antlers, and they grow fast, up to an inch a day, then drop off each winter and start over in spring.

Scan the kelp beds offshore for an otter floating on its back, maybe cracking a shell to eat.

A sea otter's fur holds up to a million hairs per square inch, more than any other animal, trapping a layer of air against its skin instead of relying on blubber.

At low tide, find an orange or purple sea star gripping the rocks in a tide pool.

It eats by turning its stomach inside out, pushing it through its mouth and into a mussel shell to digest the animal in place.

In a tide pool, touch the sticky green center of an anemone gently, with one finger.

Its brilliant green comes from tiny algae living inside its tissue, not from the animal itself. Individuals in dark caves with no sunlight for the algae turn pale and colorless.

A small fast seabird that nests high in old-growth branches. Listen for its keer call at dawn.

No one had ever seen a marbled murrelet nest until 1974, when a tree worker climbing an old-growth tree found a single fuzzy chick sitting on a bare, mossy limb. Ornithologists had been looking for almost two hundred years.

A slow brown newt with a bright orange belly, crossing a damp trail. Look, do not touch.

One rough-skinned newt carries enough tetrodotoxin in its skin to kill an estimated 25,000 mice, or, on record, one adult human who swallowed one in 1979.

A deer with big ears and a black-tipped tail, browsing quietly at the forest edge.

Its tail is solid black on top, which is the easiest way to tell it apart from a mule deer's white-tipped tail or a white-tailed deer's brown-and-white one.

An orange-and-black bird like a robin in a mask, whistling one long note in the mossy woods.

A varied thrush's song is a single sustained whistle, but the bird rarely sings the same pitch twice in a row across a singing bout, which keeps neighboring males from tuning it out.

Walk the short loop where club moss hangs off every bigleaf maple branch.

The shortest old-growth walk in the park: bigleaf maples hung with club moss over a forest floor of fern and nurse logs.

Drive up early for the alpine view of the Olympics, still holding snow in summer.

The one place in the park where you reach alpine meadow without a long hike.

Climb around sea stacks and driftwood, and check the tide table before you head out.

The easiest coastal access in the park: a short walk from the US 101 pullout drops onto a beach of sea stacks, driftwood, and tidepools at low water, named for…

Short walk to a falls that splits and drops in more than one place at once.

A three-channel fall on the Sol Duc River, reached by a 1.6-mile round-trip that is mostly flat through old-growth forest, one of the easier waterfall payoffs i…

Walk the Ozette boardwalk out to the coast on Makah land, and watch for sea stacks and old cedar.

The wild-coast viewpoint at the west end of the Ozette Triangle, reached on a cedar-boardwalk-and-beach loop of about 9 miles, per the NPS Ozette Loop page.

Hike to Marymere Falls, then sit by the deep blue-green water at the lodge.

A glacially carved lake on US 101 west of Port Angeles, 624 ft deep and unusually clear because the water is low in nitrogen, which starves the algae, per NPS.

Find a fallen log with young trees growing straight out of it in a row.

At low tide, crouch by a pool and count how many kinds of animals live in it.

Slip into the warm mineral pools at Sol Duc Hot Springs and smell the faint sulfur.

Photograph the Kalaloch spruce holding on over a hollow bank with its roots in open air.

Get a photo of a branch so loaded with moss the whole forest looks underwater.

Catch a photo of a bald eagle in flight or perched above the shore.