Shelter Establishment Criteria Olympic National Park

Olympic National Park

ORIGINS AND HISTORY The U.S. Forest Service initiated shelter construction in what was formerly Ollympic National Forest and Mount Olympus National Monument in the late 1920's. A number (Happy Four, Sourdough, etc.) of these shake-sided, high-pitched roof shelters are still standing today in various states of repair. During the 1950s, the National Park Service embarked on a program of building small, log-sided shleters, mostly in the higher country where none existed before. The Lunch Lake, Round Lake, Upper Cameron and Sundown Lake shelters are examples of structures built during this period. The last spurt of systematic shelter construction occurred in the early 1960s with an advanced, hewn-log design. Most of these later structures were constructed in the lowlands--Happy Hollow, Olympus Guard Station, Twelvemile--are examples. More recently, a few shelters have been built in new locations by various Student Conservation Association groups (Norwegian Memorial, Low Divide, Flapjack Lakes, Cedar Creek). The SCA has also rehabilitated a number of shleters in conjunction with remedial maintenance of patrol cabins. The most recent, new and major shelter construction occurred in 1971 when a Youth Conservation Corps group built a large A-frame at Jackson Creek near Toleak Point (South Wilderness Coast Area). The foregoing are what are often termed as "official" shelters, as opposed to those structures that have had different origins and uses, but are now public shelters. The most outstanding example of this de facto condition is the Enchanted Valley Chalet, a three-story log cabin that started out as a pre-Park hunting lodge in 1930, but now serves a summer backcountry ranger station and sometimes houses up to 50 people. At one time, abandoned World War II Coast Guard cabins along the coast were used as shelters.