Olympic National Park

Every once an a while I.m going to post an out of the region report in the blog as they don’t happen very often. My wife and I spent one day last week in Olympic National Park located in the NW corner of Washington state. From the glacier capped peak of Mt. Olympus (el 7980… BTW, Zeus says “Hi”) to the west facing rain forest valleys that average about 150 inches of rain per year it’s one of the more spectacular places I’ve ever seen and we were there only 6 hrs and saw a very small portion!

The short time frame only allowed for us to visit a couple of locations to look for butterflies so of course I picked the high elevations. We “lep’d” the area around Hurricane Ridge and then out towards the end of Obstruction Point road. Most of the species encountered were lifers. The scenery was off the charts and the weather was stunning! In fact during our entire week spent on Vancouver Island, British Columbia the weather was stunning. Now is the dry season in that area. Victoria, BC has not seen any rain since June. The fields were brown and the butterflies were few…. So, on a day in Victoria when I was running along the shoreline of the Strait of Juan de Fuca I glanced to my right and saw Mt. Olympus about 30 miles away. I thought to myself “Snow = water, water = wildflowers and green vegetation”. Thus, we took the trip to the high mountain meadows and melting snow fields in Olympic. BTW, the wildflowers were resplendent in a myriad of colors. We didn’t go to any lower elevation locations so that will be a good excuse to go back.

The following photos were all lifers and represent some of the high elevation specialties found in Washington. In fact a couple are uncommon; Common Branded Skipper (never trust the word “common” in anything) and Vidler’s Alpine (very restricted in its range). We spent the entire time between 5,200 and 6,400 ft. I am indebted to Caitlin LaBar and Jonathon Pelham for confirmation and corrections/clarification on a few of the species I had called wrong. Caitlan has a wonderful blog site at: Northwest Butterflies. You should check it out. Hovering your mouse over the image will identify the species. My personal highlight was seeing my first Parnassian of any kind, in this case Rocky Mountain Parnassian. (As always you can click on an image for the larger size)