They also changed what archaeology on this coast could even ask.

Stone tools and bone fragments survive in many sites.

Almost nothing else does.

At Ozette, the mud had preserved the rest.

Where the Land Meets the Open Pacific

The Makah homeland sits at the farthest northwestern corner of the contiguous United States, where the Olympic Peninsula thrusts into the meeting of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the open Pacific Ocean.

This is not a landscape that apologizes for itself.

The weather systems that build across the Pacific hit the coast here with accumulated force.

Annual rainfall can exceed 140 inches in the mountains immediately inland.

Fog rolls in and holds.

The coastal forest, Sitka spruce and western hemlock dominating, grows dense and enormous.

The shoreline is a mix of rocky headlands, cobbled beaches, and the mouths of rivers that carry glacial runoff from the Olympics.

Cape Alava, where the Ozette village site is located, is the westernmost point of the contiguous United States.

It sits at the end of a three-mile trail that is the only foot access to the cape.