[Cyclopath]

[Luc]

Thanks for posting. I was fortunate to be able to help work on that video piece, among others that McMillan is a part of. I haven't met him but all b-side footage depicts him as you describe. Very compassionate and real about conservation.

Maybe next up is Klamath removal?

[RodF]

[Anne Elk]

Thanks for that reference, Rod.  When I was still a pretty fresh arrival in the PNW, I took a drive up there after one of my first trips to the beaches.  I hadn't done much reading ahead about the peninsula, so it was quite a shock to come up on the first dam.  "What the heck is that doing here??" It was like encountering an intrusion from Mordor while on a picnic in the Shire.

[RodF]

The federal government established Olympic National Park long after the peninsula had been settled.  The original 634,000 acres set aside as the park in 1938 surrounded approximately 1,250 privately owned tracts.  Many were homestead farms dating back to the 1890s.  Additions to the Park in 1940 through 1974 doubled the number of privately owned parcels within the Park to about 2,500.  Today, approximately 220 private parcels remain within the Park.  - "American Eden: An Administrative History Of Olympic National Park", by Hal K. Rothman, National Park Service, 2006.

The history of Olympic NP is more similar to Great Smoky Mountains NP than to true wilderness NPs such as Yellowstone or Glacier.  First, thousands of native Americans were displaced by Federal policy, then over a thousand settlers were displaced by a later reversal in Federal policy, so visitors today may imagine the Park was created of primeval wilderness devoid of human history.