The Wild Olympics Wilderness and Wild & Scenic Rivers Act of 2012 would permanently protect critical rivers & streams and backcountry headwaters for Peninsula salmon, steelhead, elk and other fish and game. It would also protect and enhance access for sportsmen. 

 Core Backcountry Elk Habitat

This Roosevelt elk was inside a current wilderness area where hundreds of elk can be seen in a single day floating and fishing. While elk often forage in open lands such as old clearcuts and river beds, those of us who spend time in wilderness areas on the Olympic Peninsula see how elk also thrive inside remote forests and wilderness areas far from clearcuts, people, and roads. Protected places are especially important for calving. Wild Olympics proposes new wilderness designations to safeguard core backcountry elk habitat on Olympic National Forest from any future roadbuilding or development. Our hunting access is protected with wilderness boundaries drawn to not interfere with either existing road access or commercial thinning timber sales for enhancing elk habitat.

Headwaters, Rivers & Salmon Streams

In logging's heyday, the USFS built some roads on Olympic National Forest where they should never have been built.  As you can see from this picture, avalanche chutes from failing roads funnel dirt, rock, silt, and debris straight down hillsides thousands of vertical feet into salmon-bearing rivers below.  This photo was taken in the headwaters of the West Fork of the Humptulips River. You can see the old 0200 road, impassable by vehicle now, cutting across the ridge at 3,000 vertical feet. This crumbling old road is sending debris straight down through an old clearcut in to the Humptulips river below. 

The Humptulips is one of the highest producing sportfishing rivers in the state, in large part because of it's roadless headwaters on Olympic National Forest that were spared from the roadbuilding and clearcutting seen in other watersheds in the past. The Wild Olympics proposal would permanently protect these intact roadless parts of the Humptulips watershed that filter clean, cold silt-free water in to the river below.



Threats

These remote headwaters on Olympic National Forest like Moonlight Dome are the critical spawning grounds for salmon, cutthroat, summer steelhead, bull trout and other species. Sadly, the dangerous "Public Land Transfer" &  "Logging Without Laws"bills advancing in Congress & the small-hydro project proposals brewing in the Cascades are grim reminders that our priceless backcountry lands & salmon streams are still at risk. They are threatened by small hydro power developers, corporate polluters and their friends in congress, trying to rollback safeguards on our public lands to open these sensitive spawning grounds to small hydro development, industrial clearcutting and roadbuilding once more.  That's bad for fish, game and sportsmen.



Only the full, Congressionally-designated safeguards in the Wild Olympics Wilderness and Wild & Scenic River Act would permanently protect critical backcountry headwaters, salmon streams & rivers like the Humptulips on Olympic National Forest.

As Sportsmen for Wild Olympics Co-Founder Dave Bailey (Gardiner, WA) says;

"What used to be the salmon capital of the world, for example, has become barely productive enough for any sport or commercial industry. We must protect our rivers in every possible way, and the watersheds that feed them!"