Olympic National Park | Why is quiet so hard to find?

You can close your eyes. There is no such thing as an earlid.This episode is about the quietest square inch in the United States, and what it has to teach a kid whose ears take in too much. We talk with Matt Mikkelsen of Quiet Parks International about One Square Inch of Silence — the spot 3.2 miles up the Hoh River Trail that Gordon Hempton marked with a small red stone on Earth Day 2005 — and about why a quiet place and a silent place are not the same thing. We explain how the Olympic Mountains are made entirely of uplifted ocean floor with no volcano anywhere in the story, why no road crosses the middle of this park, and how trees in the Hoh grow new roots out of their own branches to drink from the soil in the canopy. We stand at Cape Flattery, the farthest northwest you can get in the continental U.S. without a boat, and go to Ozette, where a mudslide five hundred years ago buried a village so fast that the baskets kept their shape. We find out what 75 mph winds and thirty to fifty feet of snow do to a wildflower's schedule on Hurricane Ridge, and meet a marmot that lives here and nowhere else on Earth. And we get to what the episode is really about: your body is telling you the truth about a room, and you're allowed to believe it. Leaving is always allowed.Do the listening experiment in the first two minutes with us. You'll understand why by the end.Park guide: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/olympic/ All episodes: https://roamschoolfamily.com/learn/podcast/ Quiet Parks International: https://quietparks.org