Trail through Hoh Rain Forest,
Olympic National Park.
Photo © PhotoDisc

Explore one of the world's last great quiet places at Olympic National Park with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, the force behind the park's One Square Inch of Silence, which is marking its first official anniversary with Earth Day 2006. Join us we celebrate the sights and sounds of the park and April 22's Earth Day.

EXCLUSIVE SIGHTS & SOUNDS

Download the One Square Inch charity album from iTunes here. All profits will go toward preserving Olympic National Park’s pristine soundscape. Enjoy images of Olympic National Park’s amazing biodiversity with our exclusive new screensaver and photo gallery.

One Square Inch is as much a state of mind as it as a location. A pinprick of audio perfection in the fern-covered hillsides of Olympic National Park, the site is deemed the quietest place in the United States. The epitome of backcountry escape writ miniature, all there is here is a small red marker surrounded by an infinite expanse of audio solitude. It's just you, the windblown canopy of the ancient Hoh Rain Forest, the gurgle of Mount Tom Creek, and the chirrup of birds in the treetops. (Plug map coordinates 47 ° 51.959N, 123° 52.221W into Google Earth to whet your appetite.)

It's hardly surprsiing that One Square Inch found its home in the amazingly diverse 922,651-acre park on Washington's westerly Olympic Peninsula. Unlike other national parks, such as Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, or Hawaii Volcanoes, air tourism is undeveloped and roads do not divide park lands. There are a wide variety of soundscapes including mountain glaciers, rainforests, lakes and streams, and miles of wilderness coastline.

Over a decade in the making, the premise of One Square Inch is simple: to preserve a 100-percent noise-free space and illustrate how the acoustic protection of one small parcel of land ripples outward like a pebble thrown in a pond. The flip, of course, is that the drone of a passing aircraft, say, is equally disturbing to such a pristine soundscape.

Olympic National Park contains the largest and best example of virgin temperate rainforest in the Western Hemisphere, the largest intact stand of coniferous forest in the contiguous 48 states, and the largest truly wild herd of Roosevelt elk. It features 57 miles of spectacular coastline (the largest section of coast in the lower 48 states) and numerous offshore islands combined with heavily forested mountain slopes, alpine parklands, and jagged, glacier-capped peaks rising nearly 8,000 feet above sea level. Two hundred inches of precipitation fall annually on some of the higher peaks.

View of Second Beach, Olympic National Park.
Photo © PhotoDisc