Talk About the Peninsula

Article from National Geographic Traveler

In Search of the Authentic, On the Road

By Andrew Nelson

Finding Middle-earth

Whenever I visited Seattle, and the weather was good, I'd be captivated by a mountain range dominating the western horizon. The snow-topped peaks were a mercurial vista, vanishing in fog and rain only to reappear again when the skies cleared. They were aloof and apart from the kinetic city wired on espresso and MSN, and they intrigued me. I grew to think of them as the nearest I'd come to finding the Misty Mountains of Middle-earth—and perhaps an errant Hobbit.

These were the Olympics. First explored by non-natives only in 1890, when a Seattle newspaper sent over an expedition to do so, the Olympics and their peninsula of 3,600 square miles are still surprisingly, romantically wild. Even now no roads traverse the interior, which remains a redoubt of elk and old-growth forest, protected by Olympic National Park and the rugged, saw-toothed peaks of the Olympic Range.

They now offered me a challenge. If I could not drive through them, I would drive around them. I wanted to discover if their heart remained truly wild. I hoped so. The Olympics could not be, like the Misty Mountains themselves, only a popular bit of fiction.

I expected a photogenic coastline and a green landscape that smelled like Christmas. But crossing the Hood Canal Bridge I see and smell nothing. A dense fog renders everything a smoky, sodden gray. As I approach Sequim, a hole of blue appears in the sky, warming the retirees' RVs and lavender farms that cluster around the small town. I'm inside the peninsula's rain shadow—an effect created by the mountains, which drain the Pacific storms. As if cued by a stage manager, the clouds retract, and the Olympics materialize: an alpine watercolor framed by my windshield.

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