Currently, more elk are roaming the river valleys and ridgelines of the Olympic Peninsula than at any time in the last 20 years.

Five of the current record-book modern firearms Roosevelt elk and three of the archery records come from West End units. Photo by Windigo Images.

And for the last several seasons, hunters have tagged more bull elk in the peninsula's remote West End than they have in a decade. Yet far fewer hunters pursue these elk than they did 10 or 20 years ago.

The reason is simple: During the late 1980s and '90s, the elk population in the Olympic Peninsula's celebrated rain forest units declined significantly. From an estimated 12,000 elk outside Olympic National Park in the early '80s, the numbers fell to around 6,000 by the mid-1990s.

Harvest success rates fell just as dramatically. Legendary Region 6 Game Management Units like Quinault Ridge and Sole Duck, units that had reliably given up more than 50 elk every year, produced only a dozen or so during the late 1990s.

Even the celebrated Clearwater Unit, where hunters killed more than 200 elk in 1991, gave up only 17 bulls in 2000.

It took hunters a while to accept that things were really as bad as they seemed. As recently as 1995, the West End's more popular units still attracted between 500 and 1,000 hunters. But the word eventually got out. In 1991, the Sole Duck and Clearwater units attracted 1,030 and 2,947 hunters, respectively.

By 2005, those numbers had fallen to 350 and 462. Since the depths of the early 1990s, however, elk populations in the West End units have actually increased substantially. Between 1996 and 2000, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Olympic Peninsula's fall elk population outside the park grew from 6,000 to 8,610 -- a 34 percent increase.

"There are certainly plenty of elk," said Bob Gooding, the long-time proprietor of Olympic Sporting Goods in Forks. "Elk are in pretty good shape in the Sole Duck and Clearwater and all our units."

For hunters, more elk has translated into increased harvests and better success ratios. At the same time, the rain-forest valleys are nowhere near as crowded as they were during elk seasons 20 years ago. As a result, the 2008 season may be your best time in a long time to hunt Roosevelt elk on the Olympic Peninsula's West End.

ROOSEVELT ELK COUNTRY
Roosevelt elk have been an integral part of the Olympic Peninsula's ecology for as long as humans have inhabited this rain-soaked northwest corner of the country.

The word Elwha, which is also the name of the peninsula's third largest river and a band of the S'Klallam Indian Tribe, means "elk."

In the 19th century, when Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt created large federal reserves in the Olympic Mountains, it was primarily to protect elk. And in 1938, when Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation establishing a national park in the Olympics, it was almost named Elk National Park rather than Olympic National Park.

Until the recent decline of its elk populations, the peninsula's western river valleys had also always been one of the Pacific Northwest's most popular elk-hunting destinations.

A combination of features makes the West End such an attractive place to hunt elk:

• Hunting is allowed on extensive areas of public land.
• The vast majority of the land outside the national park is managed timberlands with a high road density. This gives hunters without guides excellent access to the elk's range.
• An active timber harvest rotation creates a patchwork of age-classes of forest that can support large elk populations.