At the start of the tour
Welcome to Olympic Hurricane Ridge Road
Welcome to Olympic National Park. This tour follows Hurricane Ridge Road from the visitor center in Port Angeles up to Hurricane Ridge, a little over seventeen miles, climbing more than five thousand feet from near sea level into the mountains. There are five stops: this visitor center, three overlooks along the road, and the ridge itself.
People have lived on the Olympic Peninsula for more than thirteen thousand years. Eight tribes have traditional ties to the lands that are now this park: three Klallam tribes, the Lower Elwha, Jamestown and Port Gamble, along with the Makah, the Quileute, the Hoh, the Quinault and the Skokomish. You'll hear a little of their story along the way.
Here's how the tour works. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there. In between, I'll stay quiet, so you can watch the forest change as the road climbs.
Point 1 · At the stop
Olympic National Park Visitor Center
You're at the Olympic National Park Visitor Center, on the hill above Port Angeles, at about three hundred seventy feet above sea level. Hurricane Ridge Road starts just outside, and everything on this tour lies uphill from here.
This shoreline was home long before the town. In 2003, construction of a dry dock on the Port Angeles waterfront uncovered an ancient village of the Lower Elwha Klallam people. The Tribe has lived in this area since time immemorial, and today its home is in the river valley and on the bluffs just west of town. In the Tribe's own language, its name means the Strong People.
The town's name came in 1791, from a Spanish explorer, who named the place Our Lady of the Angels. When an army lieutenant named Joseph O'Neil came here in 1885 to lead the first well-documented exploration of the mountains, Port Angeles had about forty inhabitants, a hotel, a sawmill and two stores. He chose it because it was so close to the mountains.
Those mountains are where we're going. Rangers at the visitor center can tell you what the road and the weather are doing today. Take what you need here: up on the ridge, there is no food, and no drinking water.
History, on the way there
On the way: Heart O' the Hills Overlook
Next, we're heading to Heart O' the Hills Overlook, the first viewpoint on the road.
This lower part of the road is younger than the rest. The park service built these first five miles in 1969, on a narrow strip of federal land that links the main body of the park with its visitor center in town. Before that, visitors reached the park boundary on a county road that ran beside White Creek. It was dusty, and it became infamous for its condition, as more and more people came to see Hurricane Ridge. In 1962, the state bought a corridor of land for a better road, and seven years later this one opened. For the first time, you could travel all seventeen and a half miles from the visitor center to the ridge on one paved, well-engineered road.
Look at the forest around you. Down here it's lowland forest, with Douglas fir, western hemlock, bigleaf maple and red alder. The road climbs steadily, but never steeply. Its grade never passes seven percent. The trees will change several times on the way up, and by the top, they'll be shaped by snow and wind.
Point 2 · At the stop
Heart O' the Hills Overlook
This is Heart O' the Hills Overlook. The view looks out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the northeastern corner of the Olympic Peninsula.
That side of the peninsula is surprisingly dry. The mountains you're about to climb into catch the storms coming in off the Pacific. On the far side of the range, the Hoh Rain Forest gets almost twelve feet of rain a year. Here, on the northeast corner, the peaks cast a rain shadow. The rain shadow reaches across the strait as far as Victoria, in Canada. The town of Sequim, east of Port Angeles, averages only about sixteen and a half inches of rain a year.
So the same mountains that soak one side of the peninsula keep this side dry. From here, you're looking out over the rain shadow.
History, on the way there
On the way: Morse Creek Overlook and Lookout Rock
Next, we're heading to Morse Creek Overlook and Lookout Rock. The park's entrance station is at Heart O' the Hills, and the story of this road really starts there.
In the 1950s, Heart O' the Hills was the edge of the park. When Congress created Olympic National Park in 1938, it was meant to be a wilderness park, and its first plan called new roads entirely unnecessary. The superintendent warned that if road proposals weren't strongly resisted, the park's wilderness values could be lost. Others disagreed. Port Angeles businesses wanted roads, lodges and ski areas, and they found a champion in their congressman, Henry Jackson.
The park service chose one road, to Hurricane Ridge, partly to head off demands for others. In 1949, Jackson secured six hundred sixty thousand five hundred dollars to start it. Clearing began in April 1950, and because the money came in small yearly amounts, the work went slowly. Paying an entrance fee here was part of the bargain. When the station opened in 1958, it was the first place in Olympic National Park to collect one, to help pay for the road.
Today, the park is about ninety-five percent wilderness, and no road crosses it. This is still the only new road the park service has built inside the park since it was established.
Point 3 · At the stop
Morse Creek Overlook and Lookout Rock
This is Morse Creek Overlook, also known as Lookout Rock, at about two thousand eight hundred feet. From the parking area, the view runs north to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and northeast toward the Cascade Mountains on the mainland.
A paved path, about two hundred feet long, leads to Lookout Rock itself, an outcrop that looks straight down into the steep, forested valleys of Morse Creek. In 1943, twenty thousand acres of this watershed were added to the park. Morse Creek supplied water to Port Angeles, and people in town had lobbied to protect it from logging.
Long before the road, a homesteader named Aurin Cox cut a trail through here in the late eighteen hundreds or early nineteen hundreds. It passed just above Lookout Rock and carried on toward Mount Angeles. Game wardens used it, and later the Forest Service drove stock along it. Road building probably wiped most of it out.
In 1959, the park asked visitors what they thought of the new road. They loved it, and the view they singled out was this one.
History, on the way there
On the way: Double Overlook
Next, we're heading to Double Overlook. First, the road goes through Burnt Mountain.
When engineers looked for a way up to Hurricane Ridge in 1943, they studied two routes. One followed the Little River. It was too steep, the forest too dense, with miles of solid rock in narrow canyon walls. The other went above Morse Creek, around Burnt Mountain and along the ridge beyond it, at a reasonable grade, with no switchbacks. It had only one section of cliff to get past, on the side of Burnt Mountain, and the rock there was softer and easier to blast. That's the route you're on.
The cliff got three concrete tunnels, built between 1953 and 1956, along with two viaducts. The first tunnel is about four hundred feet long, the second about three hundred, and the third a little over five hundred. The slope between the second and third tunnels was trouble from the start. In 1958, the road agency reported that the mountainside showered the road with rocks, and that near misses had become common. Rather than lengthen the tunnels, crews stabilized the slope and sprayed it with concrete. When you come out of the last tunnel, the forest starts to change, from the montane zone toward the subalpine, with more and more subalpine fir as the road gains height.
Point 4 · At the stop
Double Overlook
This is Double Overlook, two viewpoints joined by a sidewalk, behind a stone-faced wall built in 2008. These overlooks were first called Station three thirty. Park staff know them as Double Overlook.
Look at the rock on the slope above the road. Some of it is pillow basalt: lava that erupted underwater and hardened into rounded, pillow-like shapes. So the rock beside you, high on a mountainside, was once on the sea floor.
That's the story of the whole range. The Olympic Mountains were born in the sea. Underwater volcanoes poured out lava that cooled into basalt on the ocean floor, and sediments piled up offshore. About thirty-four million years ago, a collision between the plates off the old coastline began crumpling those rocks and pushing them up. The Juan de Fuca plate is still sliding under North America, and the mountains are still rising, though erosion wears them down almost as fast.
The bare strips running down the slopes here are avalanche chutes. Snow builds a road like this one, too. It closes and opens it all winter.
History, on the way there
On the way: Hurricane Ridge
Next, we're heading to the end of the road, Hurricane Ridge.
You're not the first to make this climb from Port Angeles. In the summer of 1885, Lieutenant Joseph O'Neil led a party of soldiers and civilian engineers into these mountains, on a route much like this road. They cut a trail through dense forest and fallen timber, and it took them about a month to climb to Hurricane Ridge. From the ridge, some of the party explored the Elwha valley, while O'Neil pushed southeast, nearly to Mount Anderson. Then a messenger arrived with orders sending him to Kansas, and the expedition ended early.
The road you're on came out of a different ambition: skiing. In the 1930s and 40s, the park's ski area was at Deer Park, to the east, at the top of a steep, narrow dirt road where drivers often broke their tire chains. The new road was meant to bring skiers somewhere safer. In 1957 the park moved three rope tows from Deer Park to Hurricane Ridge, and on New Year's Day 1958, the road opened to the public for the first time, along with the new ski area and a lodge. It opened daily that August.
The next year, more than eighty-five thousand people came up here. The park surveyed them about building a loop road, and found they didn't want one. Most people, it noted, simply drove back down the way they came.
Point 5 · At the stop
Hurricane Ridge
This is Hurricane Ridge, at about five thousand two hundred feet, nearly a mile above the sea. The park calls it the easiest place to see the Olympic Mountains on a clear day. On a clear day, the view reaches into the heart of the range, and the Bailey Range is among the peaks you can see from here.
The name is earned. Gusts of more than seventy-five miles an hour hit this ridge, and thirty to thirty-five feet of snow falls here in a year, lingering into summer. That snow is part of why the meadows stay open. In spring and summer, look for black-tailed deer grazing in them, and listen for a sharp whistle. That's the Olympic marmot, a housecat-sized rodent found in these mountains and nowhere else. It's Washington's official endemic mammal, and it sleeps away seven or eight months of the year.
The lodge that stood here from the 1950s burned on May seventh, 2023. For now there are temporary restrooms, and no food or water.
One last story. In 1993, a family hiking near Hurricane Ridge found a piece of woven material at the edge of a snowfield that a warm summer had melted back. It was part of a basket, two thousand nine hundred years old, proof of the mountain journeys that the people of this peninsula have described for generations.
That's the end of the tour. Thank you for riding along. Whatever the weather shows you today, people have been coming up here, and coming back down with stories, for a very long time.