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Ace Hotel
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The Ace is how you want to travel- simple, stylish, and not too expensive.
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United States: Search for areas
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Olympic National Park
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Olympic National Park is located in the U.S. state of Washington, in the far northwestern part of the state known as the Olympic Peninsula. The park can be divided into three basic regions: the Pacific coastline, the Olympic Mountains, and the temperate rainforest. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt originally created Olympic National Monument in 1909 and after Congress voted to authorize a re-designation to National Park status, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the legislation in 1938.
Olympic's coastal strip is a rugged, often fog-enshrouded stretch of sandy beach and a small area of adjacent forest. It is over 50 miles long (just a few wide), interrupted only twice at the mouths of principal rivers, each with resident native communities. The Hoh are on the Hoh River and the Quileute live in the town of La Push at the mouth of the Quileute River. The Hoh are a branch of the Quileute. Unbroken stretches of wilderness range from 10 to 20 miles, but often seem much farther removed from the familiar.
While some beaches are luxurious sand, others are covered with difficult heavy rock and giant boulders. Brush, overgrowth, slippery footing, tides and rain forest weather all act to limit speed, even for strong hikers. Travel-time estimates should be doubled.
The most popular piece of the coast is the Ozette Loop. The Park must run a registration and reservation program to control usage levels.
Within the center of Olympic National Park rise the Olympic Mountains whose sides and ridgelines are topped with massive, ancient glaciers. The mountains themselves are products of accretionary wedge uplifting related to the Juan De Fuca Plate subduction zone. The western half of the range is dominated by the peak of Mount Olympus, which rises to 7965 feet (2,428 m). Mount Olympus receives a large amount of snow, and consequently has the greatest glaciation of any non-volcanic peak in the contiguous United States outside of the North Cascades. It has several glaciers, the largest of which is the Hoh glacier, nearly five kilometres in length. Looking to the East, the range becomes much drier due to the rain shadow of the western mountains. Here, there are numerous high peaks and craggy ridges. The tallest summit of this area is Mount Deception, at 7,788 feet.
The western side of the park sports a temperate rain forest, including the Hoh Rain Forest and Quinault Rain Forest, the wettest area in the continental United States (the island of Kauai in the state of Hawaii gets more rain). Because this is a temperate rainforest, as opposed to a tropical one like the Amazon Rainforest in South America, it isn't dominated by tropical ferns, but rather contains dense timber, including spruce and fir, and mosses that coat the bark of these trees and even drip down from their branches in green, moist tendrils.
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