Top 10 national and state parks in Washington state — theguardian.com

If you only have time to visit one park in Washington, make it Olympic. Located out on the Olympic Peninsula in the north-west corner of the state, this massive wilderness offers everything from tide pools to mossy rain forests to glacier-capped mountains. Jutting out into the Pacific and separated from the mainland by the Puget Sound and the Straight of Juan de Fuca, the Olympic Peninsula receives more rainfall than any other place in the US except Hawaii. High in the 2,000-metre-plus Olympic mountains, much of that precipitation falls in the form of snow, which feeds more than 250 glaciers, making this the most glaciated US terrain outside Alaska. The extensive ice fields flow into a number of major rivers, which wind their way down through temperate rain forests to the Pacific.

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