Explore the best of the Olympic Peninsula with 73 incredible hikes in and around Olympic National Park, including Hurricane Ridge, the Elwha River, the Hoh Rain Forest, and Hood Canal. Featuring the lush rainforests, mountain vistas, waterfalls, and wild ocean beaches, each trail is rated from easy to extreme, giving first-time or veteran hikers the variety they want, as well as topographical maps, trail descriptions, and more. Includes complete information for 73 great day hikes, including: • Dungeness Spit • Elwha Loop • Green Mountain • Lena Lake • Marmot Pass • Olympic Hot Springs • Kalaloch Beach • Three Forks • and more! The Day Hike! series of full-color hiking guides was written for people who want to spend their days in the mountains and their nights at home. Other titles in the Day Hike! series include: Day Hike! Central Cascades Day Hike! North Cascades Day Hike! Mount Rainier Day Hike! Inland Northwest: Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, and Sandpoint "[Most guidebooks are by] backpackers who occasionally day hike. But most people are day-hikers, who occasionally backpack. And that's the key difference to this series." —Ron C. Judd "The series...earns points for rating each individual trip on a five-scale and for providing a comparative overview of all hikes in each book's introductory pages. For those of us who like to cherry-pick trails, ratings simplify our task." —Seattle Times "The presentation of basic facts (distance, elevation gain, maps, permits, etc.) is excellent and easy to follow. In addition to helpful topographical maps, the guides feature elevation profiles - an inspired addition!" —The Olympian "The Day Hike! series, published by Sasquatch Books is my favorite resource for finding a great hike to do with my girlfriends or family. The hikes are listed by location, with an overall rating, a rating for difficulty, the elevation gain, hike distance, best season and approximate hiking time. With colorful pictures and fun maps, even my six year old son loves looking at these books" —Northwest Healthy Mama SEABURY BLAIR JR. spent many years as the outdoor columnist for The Bremerton Sun , where one of his most popular features was the “Hike o’ the Month.” He is an avid backcountry skier and hiker, and lives in Spokane, WA. He is also the author of Wild Roads Washington; the Creaky Knees Guide series of easy hiking books (titles cover Washington, Oregon, and Pacific Northwest National Parks and Monuments); the Day Hike! series of easy hikes that you can do in a day (titles cover the Central Cascades, the North Cascades, Mount Rainier, the Olympic Peninsula, the Columbia Gorge, and Spokane/Coeur d'Alene) . Introduction Herb Crisler. Chris Morgenroth. Minnie Peterson. They were the lucky ones, the ones who pioneered on the land that is now Olympic National Park and Olympic National Forest. There were earlier explorers: James Christie and Charles Barnes. They were among the first to see the blue ice of Olympic glaciers; the massive cedar, fir, and spruce cloaking the valleys; the roiling rivers filled with fish. Their tracks were made a scant eighty-five to one-hundred-fifty years ago, and as far as anyone knows, they were the first human tracks in the interior of the Olympic Mountains. You may have heard of some of them. Herb Crisler filmed the 1952 The Olympic Elk for Walt Disney and in 1930—eight years before Congress created Olympic National Park—won a $500 bet he could spend 30 days in the Olympics carrying only a pocketknife, 75 pounds of camera gear and three carrier pigeons for what we might today call "real time" reports. When he returned from that adventure, Crisler told a reporter in 1977, "I fell in love with the animals, and I vowed that if I ever got out alive, I wasn't going to hunt anymore, only photograph them. The more I photographed, the more I fell in love." Crisler's name and tireless work to establish a national park on the Olympic Peninsula is largely absent from park history. Chris Morgenroth—some spelled his name "Morganroth"—was a pioneering forest ranger who homesteaded on the Bogachiel River in 1890. Minnie Peterson was a guide and packer in the Olympics for five decades whose family settled on the Hoh River in 1888. James Christie was the leader of the 1889-1890 Seattle Press Expedition of the Olympic Mountains and Charles Barnes was one of those first explorers who braved one of the worst winters in Olympic history to forge a trail up the Elwha River and out the North Fork of the Quinault, mapping such places as the Bailey Range, which still has no developed trails. In recounting the adventure in the July 16, 1890 edition of the Press, entitled "Found in the Olympics: A Resume of the Natural Resources of the Explored Region," he recorded wildlife the expedition members had seen. There were elk, deer, and bear, he said, and concluded his report by writing: "One goat was seen by the party." That was about a quarter-century before Port