Olympic National Park

Olympic National Park covers 922,651 acres of the Olympic Peninsula in north-west Washington. Of that, 95% is designated wilderness. The Park Service describes three landscapes in one park: forest, coast and mountains. There is temperate rainforest in the western valleys, 73 miles of wild Pacific coast, and 32 named glaciers on the peaks around Mount Olympus. In 2025 it had 3,584,187 recreation visits, the ninth most of any national park.

No road crosses the park, so a visit is a series of drives in from US-101 as it circles the peninsula. We checked every figure below on 27 October 2026 on the park's own pages, the state transport department's, the lodge operators' and NOAA's normals.

What does Olympic cost, and does it need a reservation?

Olympic charges $30 per car for seven days, $25 per motorcycle and $15 per person on foot or bicycle. There is no one-day pass, and the park takes cards only. Children under 16 enter free.

Olympic is not on the 2026 list of eleven parks with a $100 surcharge for non-residents. Visitors from abroad pay exactly what Americans pay. The $250 non-resident annual pass therefore only pays off on a trip that also takes in surcharge parks. Our guide to national park fees for international visitors lists them.

You need no reservation to enter the park. Instead, when the car parks at Hurricane Ridge and the Hoh are full, rangers hold cars at the entrance stations. In summer the wait can reach one to two hours.

How do you get around a park with no road through it?

Olympic's entrance roads to Hurricane Ridge, Sol Duc and the Hoh each end after 15 to 18 miles. US-101, one lane each way, loops round the peninsula outside the park. Moving between areas takes from half an hour to four hours or more. Most visitors therefore base themselves in two places.

The distances in the table are the park's own. The Park Service suggests Port Angeles or Lake Crescent as a base for Hurricane Ridge and Sol Duc, and Forks for the Hoh and the coast.

Since 14 July 2026 US-101 has crossed the Hoh River on a single lane with traffic lights and a 25 mph limit, until a permanent repair. You reach the Hoh Rain Forest from Forks, north of the bridge. When the bridge closes, the detour adds at least four hours.

What is the Hoh Rain Forest like?

The Hoh Rain Forest, on the west side of the park, gets about 140 inches of rain a year. The Park Service calls it one of the finest remaining temperate rainforests in the United States. Sitka spruce, western red cedar and bigleaf maple hung with club moss line its trails. About 400 to 500 of the park's Roosevelt elk live in the valley.

The Hall of Mosses is a 0.8-mile loop and the Spruce Nature Trail a 1.2-mile loop, both from the visitor centre. The Hoh is under an hour from Forks and about two hours from Port Angeles. There is no petrol or food there, and dogs are not allowed on its trails.

In summer the car park can fill by 10 a.m. Arriving between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. means a wait of one to two hours at the single-lane entrance. At either end of the day the wait is 30 to 45 minutes. The visitor centre opens daily in summer and on Fridays to Sundays in spring and autumn. It closes from January to early March.

Is Hurricane Ridge worth the drive after the lodge fire?

Hurricane Ridge, 17 miles up a paved road from Port Angeles at 5,242 feet, is the easiest mountain area of the park to reach. The day lodge burned on 7 May 2023. Only temporary trailers stand there now, with toilets and a ranger contact point but no food, no drinking water and no gear rental.

A new building is being designed for the same site. Construction may start in 2028 at the earliest. Hurricane Hill, a rough paved trail of 1.6 miles each way with about 700 feet of climb, starts at the end of the road.

In summer the car park is busiest from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and cars are held at the Heart O' the Hills entrance when it fills. In winter the road has opened from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Fridays to Sundays, with chains required for every vehicle from 1 November to 1 April. The 2026–27 schedule had not been announced by 27 October. The ridge gets 30 to 35 feet of snow a year.

Which beaches and lakes should you see?

You reach Olympic's 73 miles of wild coast and its lakes from US-101 without long walks. Ruby Beach, with its sea stacks, is 0.2 mile from the highway. Rialto Beach, near Forks, is the start of a 1.5-mile beach walk to Hole-in-the-Wall, a sea arch.

Several headlands on the coast can only be rounded at lower tides, and some stay impassable in daylight for days at a time. Carry a tide chart from a visitor centre. Storms raise the tides, especially from autumn to spring, and phone signal on the beaches is weak or absent.

Lake Crescent, about 18 miles west of Port Angeles, is 624 feet deep and 11.8 miles long, the largest lake in the park. Marymere Falls is 0.9 mile from the Storm King Ranger Station. At Sol Duc, the falls are 0.8 mile from the end of the road, and the resort's three hot mineral pools, at 99 to 104°F, cost $19 an adult for a session of an hour and a half.

Where do you stay inside Olympic?

Olympic has four lodges inside the park, each with its own season, and 14 developed campgrounds. A new company, Explor Olympic, took over Lake Crescent Lodge and Log Cabin Resort on 1 February 2026.

Lake Quinault Lodge, which marks 100 years in 2026, stands in Olympic National Forest, not in the park. Campgrounds cost $15 to $24 a night, and the Hoh, Kalaloch and Mora campgrounds, among others, take reservations in summer on Recreation.gov.

How close can you get to the elk?

Keep at least 100 feet from Roosevelt elk, the Park Service's rule for the largest fully wild herd in the Pacific Northwest. The park counts 3,000 to 4,000 elk, and bulls of up to 1,100 pounds are aggressive during the rut in September and early October.

Mountain goats are not native to the peninsula. After a visitor was killed by one in 2010, the park moved 325 goats to the Cascades between 2018 and 2020 and removed 548 in all. It now asks visitors to report any sighting. Store food securely at all times, and bear-resistant canisters are mandatory in the wilderness.

How wet is the Olympic Peninsula?

The Olympic Peninsula is wet on the west and much drier on the north side, in the mountains' rain shadow. Forks, the town nearest the Hoh, averages 120 inches of rain a year, four and a half times as much as Port Angeles.

The table gives NOAA's 1991 to 2020 average highs and lows and rainfall. July and August are the driest and warmest months, and August is the park's busiest.

How do you get to Olympic from Seattle?

Seattle–Tacoma International is the closest major airport, and most of the park is not reachable by public transport. By road, Port Angeles is about 125 miles and three hours from the airport through Tacoma, by our own routing.

The Washington State Ferries cut the drive: Seattle to Bainbridge Island takes about 35 minutes, and Edmonds to Kingston about 30, with an hour and a half to two hours' drive to Port Angeles after either. From Port Angeles, the Black Ball ferry crosses to Victoria in British Columbia in 90 minutes, for $25 an adult or $88 for a car and driver. From 1 November 2026 Victoria stays on daylight time, an hour ahead of Port Angeles.

The park is on Pacific Time, and it is one of the places in our guide to Washington. The other national parks in Washington are Mount Rainier National Park and North Cascades National Park.