By Alex Day, Marketing & Communications Director
What do you get when you mix curious kids, passionate park rangers, a couple of buses, and some truly epic landscapes? You get the kind of memories that stick with someone for life.
Thanks to donor support, Olympic National Park has been welcoming young people into the park not just as visitors, but as scientists, explorers, and future public lands champions. Two long-running education programs — Adventures in Your Big Backyard and Middle School Science — are helping students see the park as a place where they belong, a place where they can learn, and maybe even a place where they’ll work someday.
For many kids on the Olympic Peninsula, Olympic National Park is nearby but not always accessible. Transportation, gear, and experience can all be barriers. Enter “Adventures in Your Big Backyard.”
This summer, Olympic’s education staff partnered once again with the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Olympic Peninsula to bring weekly programming to youth in Port Angeles and Sequim. Rangers kicked things off with clubhouse visits in early July, building relationships and excitement, followed by experiences out in the field.
Throughout the summer, rangers facilitated seven full-day park adventures, reaching 236 participants. Each trip incorporated Leave No Trace principles and introduced kids to different ranger roles:
Add in canoeing with NatureBridge and kayaking with Elevate Outdoors, and suddenly “summer program” becomes “core memory.”
One of the most powerful shifts this year was consistency. Weekly clubhouse visits meant more face time with rangers not just for kids who could attend field trips, but also for those who couldn’t. That steady presence built trust and confidence, increasing participation in the park outings themselves.
Through Adventures in Your Big Backyard, youth who might not otherwise step foot in the park got hands-on experiences, real conversations with rangers, and a sense that Olympic National Park is for them. That sense of belonging is how future park supporters are made.
If Adventures in Your Big Backyard is about discovery, Middle School Science is about connection — linking what students learn in school to the living, breathing landscape around them.
This donor-supported program is available to all 7th and 8th grade students at Stevens Middle School in Port Angeles, combining classroom lessons with field-based science in Olympic National Park. It has two parts:
Students participate in hands-on data collection, work alongside rangers and scientists, and see first-hand how the park protects resources their families rely on, from clean drinking water to resilient river systems. Throughout the year, park rangers made nearly 750 meaningful connections with the students.
For many of the Snow Science students, it is their first time visiting Hurricane Ridge in winter, when access can be tough.
The Elwha program goes even deeper. Eighth graders collect real scientific data at multiple river sites and add their findings to a long-term ecological monitoring dataset that dates back to 2006.
They then turn that work into scientific posters that are shared during a school-wide Science Symposium. After visiting three distinct sections of the river and seeing how much it has changed over time, the experience makes the science feel “real” for many students.
This year, the park was also able to offer cultural history lessons in collaboration with the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. The young participants weren’t just learning about ecosystems — they were learning about the history of the land and the people who have long been connected to it.
And they got to work alongside a Scientists in Parks intern (another WNPF-supported position), showing that careers in science and public lands are real paths they could follow.
Olympic National Park’s education program receives significant funding from grants and donations. Simply put, these programs wouldn’t exist without donor support.
And the impact goes far beyond a single field trip. These experiences help young people see themselves as scientists and stewards. By building relationships with rangers, they gain confidence, curiosity, and a sense of responsibility for the places that sustain their community. Today it’s a snowshoe walk or a kayak trip on Lake Crescent. Tomorrow, it could be a career protecting public lands.
Washington’s National Park Fund is the official philanthropic partner of Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks. Your gifts directly support vital projects in trail maintenance, science and research, youth and family programs, and more.
We’re grateful to our friends at the Keta Legacy Foundation and Tulalip Tribes Charitable Contributions Fund for their generous support of these park programs. You can join the movement by giving back at wnpf.org/donate.
Photos courtesy of the National Park Service.