Olympic Mountains at Sequim Rare Plants

Olympic   Coast  Garden
the Olympic Peninsula and its Mountains

  Olympic Mountain Range on the Olympic Peninsula

This photo was taken at the Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center, that is part of the Olympic National Park. It shows the Olympic Mountains as viewed from the north, with the waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the foreground. (The Pacific Ocean would be to the right, just beyond the edge of the picture, and Seattle would be to the left.) Our town of Sequim, Washington is marked by the small orangish dot (left of center) in the flat alluvial valley that is also in the foreground. The higher peaks in the mountain range that are colored white are the peaks that have year-around glaciers on them.

If you wanted to, you could drive around this entire mountain range within a single day, so the range is not terribly large. To give you some idea of scale, the distance from our town to the city of Port Angeles to the west of us (the larger orangish dot to the right in the picture) is fifteen miles.

The mountains are tall enough that the winds blowing in off the Pacific Ocean drop most of their moisture on the southwestern slope (at the upper right of this picture). As the air rises to get overtop of these mountains, it cools off and forms clouds that unloads much of its moisture. So by the time the air has reached the far northeastern side of the mountains (the ones closest to Sequim), it is much drier.