The Creating of Game Refuges 



has a glorious future before it. Superb firs 

 towered hundreds of feet above our heads, and 

 archaic-looking cedars, a thousand years old, thrust 

 their sturdy shoulders firmly against the storms 

 and the winds. But the valleys, the trees 

 and the glaciers, were only the mise-en-scene 

 of that which constituted primarily the rea- 

 son of my visiting this peninsula. Here is 

 the only wild herd of elk of any consider- 

 able size outside of the Yellowstone National 

 Park, a most beautiful elk now separated from 

 the Rocky Mountain species. Besides this herd 

 there are only a few survivors of the once innumer- 

 able herds of the Pacific Coast, one little bunch in 

 California, and a few scattered individuals in the 

 mountains of Oregon and Washington. It is ex- 

 cessively hard to form any correct estimate of how 

 many remain; probably there are at least a thou- 

 sand, possibly several times that number. At all 

 events, there is a scattered herd large enough to 

 insure the existence of the species if they might 

 now be protected. Unfortunately the sentiment 

 of the community in the vicinity of the Olympics 

 is just about what it was in Colorado in 

 the seventies and in the early eighties almost 

 complete apathy, so far as taking effective precau- 

 tion is concerned, to prevent the killing of these 



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