Answer the questions. Each one tells you why. Big and Little wrote them.
Olympic Park Quiz
Question 1 of 5
Olympic National Park has three very different worlds inside one park. Which three?
Olympic packs three ecosystems into one park: the alpine ridges up around Hurricane Ridge, the mossy rain forests of the Hoh and Quinault, and a long strip of wild Pacific coast. No road crosses the middle, so you drive US 101 around the outside.
The Hoh Rain Forest is one of the rainiest places in the whole country. About how much rain falls there in a year?
The Hoh gets roughly twelve to fourteen feet of rain a year. All that water grows the thick moss that hangs off the bigleaf maples in the Hall of Mosses and the ferns that cover the ground.
Before we walked out to the sea stacks, our family checked a tide table. Why does the tide matter so much on the Olympic coast?
On beaches like Rialto and Ruby, an incoming tide can cut off a rocky headland and leave you stuck with no way around. Rangers say to carry a tide table and start back before the water rises.
The biggest land animals in Olympic are Roosevelt elk, and the park was set up partly to protect them. What is a group of elk called?
Elk live in herds. Olympic protects one of the largest wild herds of Roosevelt elk anywhere, and the animals are named for President Theodore Roosevelt, who helped protect their home.
We camped on the far northwest coast, on Makah land next to the park. What did we watch a bald eagle do there one morning?
A bald eagle dropped from its perch, grabbed a fish from the water, and carried it to a shore tree to eat. The Makah have lived and fished along this coast, on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, for thousands of years.