The Boulder Creek Road in Olympic National Park soon will be no more. Park officials have made the decision to remove the remaining vestiges of the road and rehabilitate the corridor for hikers and stock travel and restore the Boulder Creek Campground.

Olympic National Park, which has been beaten and battered in recent years by powerful storms, lost a 100-foot section of roadway leading up to Hurricane Ridge when soil saturated by recent heavy rains spurred a mudslide.

They might not be the economic draw that wolves are to Yellowstone National Park, but fishers seem to be taking to Olympic National Park just about as favorably as the larger predators did to Yellowstone in their recovery program. This week a third batch of the cat-sized predators will be set free in Olympic to build on two successful years of a recovery program designed to repopulate the park with fishers.

Lichens, which sprout throughout the National Park System, are the Rodney Dangerfield of the natural world. They just don’t get any respect. Lichenologists likewise don’t garner much recognition for their lifetimes spent poking around the crusty grey stuff on tree trunks. Among others, one intrepid man in California is taking steps to remedy both of those deficiencies.