Our final stop of our summer road trip takes us to the West Coast, and to Olympic National Park.
Olympic National Park is the park that made me fall in love with national parks. My senior year of college I spent a week backpacking along the coast through Olympic National Park. There was something about the crashing waves, the ocean air, and the moss-covered trees that captured my heart.
At nearly a million acres, in the temperate rain forests of northwest Washington, Olympic National Park contains the largest concentration of life found on the planet. The moss covers so much of the forest floor you may begin to think that if you pause anywhere too long it might just envelop you as well! There are trees that have been standing here since before Galileo peered at the heavens through his telescope, trees with a girth of up to 40 feet that reach 250 feet up into the sky.
Salmon from the Pacific ascend waterfalls like staircases to move upstream, swimming toward their birthplace to reproduce the cycle of life that spawned them. Glacial snowmelt feeds arctic-cold and clear blue streams that quench the thirst of the elk meandering below Mount Olympus’s rocky shoulders.
The miles of coastline are a testimony to the power of the ocean, which has left behind broken remnants of cliffs that once tried to constrain its tides. Along these beaches, the Pacific spits out driftwood composed of entire tree trunks, as if they were the spent toothpicks of some mythical giant. The churning waters are a marine sanctuary. Above the banks in the mountain meadows, wildflowers toss in the winds, while marmots chew on lupine leaves and glacier lilies.
The beauty and diversity of Olympic National Park It gives credit to the playful imagination of a Divine Creator.
The astute observer will quickly become aware of how fragile the web that knits all of this life together really is. None of this is capable of existing without the other seemingly unrelated and distant parts of the whole. Within the park there is a high concentration of exceedingly diverse life living interdependently, resulting in unrivaled beauty. It is abundance and sufficiency that allows this environment to flourish, a delicate balance that should not be confused as excess. Nothing is wasted, as even that which falls to the forest floor in time becomes the renewing for growth to be sustained.
To see all this is to come face-to-face with the knowledge that life itself is a gift and that our own lives are connected in some marvelous and mysterious way to all other life on earth.
When have you thought about your life as a gift? In what ways might you express gratitude for this gift?
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