There is no place on Earth quite like Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Winds coming in off the Pacific dump vast amounts of rain here, making the place a true temperate rainforest and giving rise to some of the biggest trees on the planet. Though it has endured decades of logging, the peninsula is one of the few places where you can still see old-growth Douglas-firs, western hemlocks, western red cedars, and Sitka spruces growing at low elevations, where they grow to even larger size than their kin in the North Cascades.

Yet, the future of the peninsula is still far from certain–as I was reminded during a visit there with my partner this past weekend. A core area of forest is now protected in Olympic National Park and a few, relatively small wilderness areas on Forest Service lands that border it. However, outside of those protected areas much of the peninsula has been given over to industrial timber production. Timber growers boast that they replant–and mostly they do–but what they don’t mention is that the young Douglas-fir monocrops they grow and harvest again and again will never be the ecological equivalent of an old-growth forest.

We were camping on the western side of the peninsula, near the community of Forks and some of the coastal segment of the National Park. The landscape along the highway we drove down was full of signs of logging, including recently cut areas and places where densely packed young trees were coming back after replanting. It made me feel more appreciation than ever for the work that’s gone into ensuring some of the temperate rainforest is protected. But, it also left me feeling anxious about the fate of tracts of land whose future is still up for debate.

For years, there has been an ongoing effort to establish new wilderness areas on National Forest lands on teh peninsula with protections conferred by what’s known as the “Wild Olympics bill.” Year after year, this bill makes some amount of progress through the relevant Congressional committees before having its passage be stymied in the end. Washington lawmakers like Senator Maria Cantwell have done an admirable job pushing this legislation forward–but we need more members of Congress to support her. Last year, the bill cleared a key Senate committee. However, it’s unlikely to fare well in the current House.

It’s a reality that the Olympic Peninsula will continue to be a major timber-producing region in years ahead, but lands currently allotted for logging are sufficient. Those areas that still have potential to be protected as wilderness, but which lack crucial legal designation as such, should be preserved before it’s too late.