Heart O’ The Hills
During the 1910s and 1920s, mountaineering and hiking clubs formed and made regular hiking expeditions into the Olympic Mountains. The Klahhane Club of Port Angeles formed in 1914, and each year an outing was planned to some point in the Olympics. Klahhane Club leased from the National Forest Service an abandoned two-story cedar log cabin built by Louis Williams as a summer retreat, located on a bench at the foot of Mount Angeles. When the Williams Cabin burned to the ground in the early 1920s, Klahhane members relocated to the north shore of Lake Crescent before finally constructing a new clubhouse at Heart O'the Hills in the early 1930s. A portion of the new Klahhane Club building stands just inside the Olympic National Park boundary.
By the 1940s, Claude Spencer owned and operated Heart O'the Hills Resort near Lake Dawn at the present northern boundary of Olympic National Park. During Spencer's proprietorship of this mountain lake resort, six furnished cabins were available for guests. A small store selling staples and supplies was on the premises. Vacationists at Heart O'the Hills Resort partook of fishing, hiking and horse packing.
In the early 1970s, buildings associated with the Heart O'the Hills Resort were removed. More recently constructed, individual resort cabins remain standing but are located just north of and outside the present Park boundary. Still, towering trees and rushing water greet visitors to Olympic's old growth forests. Heart O' the Hills offers an old growth forest on the northern peninsula.
