The Specific Environment Of The Manis Site

The Olympic Peninsula in the late Pleistocene was a landscape in transition — not yet the rainforest it would become, but already shaped by the specific geography of the Pacific Coast and the Olympic Mountains.

The northeastern Olympic Peninsula, where the Manis site is located, sits in a climatic anomaly created by the mountains themselves.

The Olympics intercept the Pacific storms that move in from the west, wringing most of their moisture out before the air crosses the range.

The northeastern corner of the peninsula — the area around Sequim — receives far less precipitation than the western slopes, creating what is locally called the Sequim rain shadow.