Olympic National Park is one of the West’s great hiking landscapes, with 191 trails spanning everything from easy forest rambles to punishing wilderness routes. The range is unusually broad: 92 easy trails make the park approachable for casual walkers and families, while moderate and difficult options open the door to deeper valley hikes, alpine viewpoints, and classic backcountry terrain. Then there are the extreme routes, which speak to Olympic’s wild core—steep, remote, and serious undertakings for strong, prepared hikers. That spread is exactly what makes the park so appealing: you can spend an hour under dripping moss and giant spruce, or disappear for days into a roadless mountain wilderness.
The standout hikes capture Olympic’s astonishing variety. In the Hoh Rain Forest, the Hall of Mosses is the essential short walk, a compact introduction to the park’s cathedral-like old growth, while the Hoh River Trail stretches deep into the interior through lush rainforest toward glacier country. Hurricane Hill delivers one of the park’s most rewarding mountain hikes, with sweeping high-country views that feel dramatically removed from the lowland forests. Around Lake Crescent, Sol Duc, and the Quinault valleys, trails lead to waterfalls, river corridors, alpine lakes, and some of the park’s most beloved backpacking country, including routes toward Seven Lakes Basin and Enchanted Valley.
What makes hiking here special is the sheer contrast packed into one park. Olympic is not a single landscape but a collection of them: temperate rain forest, glacier-carved peaks, salmon rivers, old-growth valleys, and rugged coastline, all tied together by trails. Much of the park’s interior remains roadless wilderness, so hiking is not just a pastime here—it is the way to truly enter the park. Few places in the country offer this kind of immersion, where a trail can carry you from fern-lined forest floor to open ridgeline, from hushed mossy groves to big, weather-shaped mountain country, all in the same national park.
