WASHINGTON: Mount Olympus Park

The Pilgrim Fathers first settled the northeast corner of what is now the United States. Spaniards were first in the southeastern and southwestern corners. But the Northwest Corner, as everyone knows, was first occupied by Paul Bunyan, the great logger. He went there to get milk of the Westernwhale to cure the mysterious illness of Babe, his blue ox. Puget Sound is the grave he dug for Babe when he thought the ox would die, and Washington’s Cascade Mountains are the dirt Paul and his loggers heaved up in their digging.

How the snow-mantled Olympic Mountains were formed, on the peninsula between Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean, is not precisely recorded. In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt had Mount Olympus (8,150 ft.) and some 800,000 acres around it set aside as a national “monument,” a refuge for a majestic strain of elk which roamed there, thereafter called Roosevelt Elk.

Roosevelt II visited there last year. It was raining, as it usually is on the west side of those mountains, but he saw enough to want the Mt. Olympus national monument expanded into Mount Olympus national park. Last week, a bill to do this having finally been passed by Congress after much wrangling between conservationists and lumber companies over the extent of the expansion. Franklin Roosevelt affixed the signature that brought the new park (898,292 acres) into being.

The last Democratic President was prevailed on, during the World War, to cut the original Mt. Olympus monument area almost in half so as to stimulate private prospecting for manganese ore. Some ores were found, but the real wealth of the Olympics is their mantle of giant fir, spruce, cedarand hemlock, their abounding game (trout, bear, cougar as well as elk), their scenery. Also during the War, the Government built a spruce production railroad there to get out special woods for airplane construction. The lumberingnow is mostly in private hands (Weyerhaeuser, Long-Bell, Northern Pacific) and the jagged boundaries of the new park (see map) reflect many compromises between private and public forest ownership.

Around the peninsula, but not penetrating to the extreme northwest corner of the U. S. at Cape Flattery, runs the “Olympic Loop” highway (Route 101 ), opened in 1931. As a motor trip for scenic-minded tourists, the “Loop” is not entirely satisfactory. The road is less than half paved; from it can be seen very little ocean, for long stretches on the southern end, no mountains. But 50 miles north of Hoquiam, after crossing the Humptulips River Valley, travelers come to scenic item No. 1, Lake Quinault. Up the Quinault River comes one of the great remaining U. S. salmon runs. Only Indians may take fish commercially, but sportsmen are welcome. Continuing north, travelers cross two more great rivers, the Queets and the Hoh, which pour their clear dark floods abruptly into the stormy Pacific. Between the river mouths, wide beaches (where natives gather razor clams) make motor speedways as fine as Florida’s. Heavy rains in all months but July and August (142 in. per year) have grown the luxuriant forests, which tower solidly up to 300 feet, as high as California’s redwoods. Vast swaths of burnt and cut-over land scar the peninsula and still to be seen are the tragic marks of the Big Blowdown of 1921, when a 60 m.p.h. wind raged in from the sea, to ruin $150,000,000 worth of timber.

North of Mt. Olympus lies Crescent Lake, the scenic high spot. Thence along the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Hood Canal, the “Loop” becomes dry driving. For on the northeastern side of the Olympics, rainfall averages only 15 in. a year and farmers have to irrigate. Further east and north lie the parts of Washington that make the most national news: Bremerton with its Navy Yard and colorful little Mayor Jesse A. Knabb, the fighting tailor (TIME, June 6), who last week was acquitted of blackmail; Tacoma and hard by it McNeil Island, one of the toughest Federal penitentiaries; the sites of the famed Mattson and Weyerhaeuser kidnappings; Seattle with its Boettigers, its Boeing airplane factory; its boss. Teamster Dave Beck, who on behalf of A. F. of L. is fighting to wrest the loggers’ and longshoremen’s unions from C. I. O. Boss Beck’s labor strongholds are at Bremerton and, on the peninsula’s northern edge, at Port Angeles. C. I. O. is strongest around Aberdeen-Hoquiam. Elsewhere the two are more evenly matched, for since Paul Bunyan’s time, no one man has succeeded in dominatingthe rugged, rain-drenched, river-drained, forest-clad Northwest Corner.