• Cascade Mountains
• Eastern Washington
• Olympic Peninsula
• Puget Sound
• Seattle
The idyllic beauty of the snowcapped and pine-covered
Cascade Mountains actually conceals awesome volcanic power - as
demonstrated by the 1980 explosion of Mount St Helens . But away from
the truncated, rocky stump resulting from the blast, the Cascades offer
mile upon mile of forested wilderness, stretching from Canada down to
Oregon, traversed by a skein of beautiful trails - which, for all but a
few summer months, you'll need snowshoes to follow. The most popular
access point is Mount Rainier , set in its own national park some ninety
miles southeast of Seattle, while the protected zone around Mount St
Helens also rewards a visit for its eerie scenery. Further north, the
North Cascades National Park demands more time; Hwy-20, the high
mountain road that crosses the Cascades, is by far the most spectacular
route to eastern Washington.
Big, dry and hot, eastern Washington has little in
common with the green, western side of the state: faded olive-colored
sagebrush covers many acres, and massive red rocks loom over the
prairies, while huge bare patches of basalt and torn-away groundcover (from
centuries of Ice Age floods) give the area the unattractive geological
moniker of the " channeled scablands ." Further south, the lower Yakima
Valley is a vast agricultural belt with miles of orchards and farms that
flank the Yakima River. With over 300 sunny days a year, this region is
the largest producer of apples in the world, though that claim is
increasingly threatened by cheap fruit imports from the Far East. In the
last 20 years, however, this has also become one of the Northwest's
major wine regions. The area towns are agricultural and commercial
centers, and only Spokane has any degree of cultural life. Nevertheless,
some are excellent bases for winery tours or outdoor activities such as
rafting, fishing, hiking, paragliding and skiing.
The broad mass of the Olympic Peninsula projects
across Puget Sound, sheltering Seattle from the open sea. Small towns
are sprinkled sparingly along US-101, which loops the peninsula's coast,
but at the core the Olympic Mountains thrust upwards, shredding rain
clouds as they drift in from the Pacific and drenching the surrounding
area. In the western river valleys, the dense vegetation thickens into
rainforest, and the forests and unspoiled Pacific beaches provide
habitat for a huge variety of wildlife and seabirds.
Although much of the peninsula is now protected land, and large areas of
national forest surround the rugged and verdant preserve of Olympic
National Park , the legacy of timber clear-cutting provides an all-too-visible
scar on the landscape, especially if you venture off the main roads into
an ecological dead zone riddled with ugly stumps and uprooted vegetation.
The lumber trade brought the first Western settlers here in the
nineteenth century, and while almost every town has a sawmill, the
industry is in crisis and ecologists favor tourism as the lesser
environmental evil.
The broad and deep Puget Sound hooks far into
Washington, a clutter of tiny islands and ragged peninsulas teeming with
yachts, oceangoing ships, fishing trawlers and even nuclear submarines.
At first, the dense forest deterred homesteaders, but soon small logging
communities sprang up, and the Sound became a vital waterway. As more
settlers arrived, the demand for land grew, and in the 1850s treaties
confining Native Americans to reservations were put before tribal
leaders. Some signed, including Chief Sealth of the Suquamish, but
others refused and accusations of forgery flew. A legacy of injustice
was created, with which modern courts still struggle.
The southern end of the Sound is increasingly urban, and from the
colorless vantage point of the I-5 freeway, this is all that less
inquisitive visitors see of it. Although there's little to attract
visitors to industrial Tacoma or the small state capital of Olympia ,
all around are appealing mountains, forests and lakes. Popular weekend
escapes include rural parts of Whidbey Island , and the beautiful San
Juan Islands further north.
Curved around the shore of Elliott Bay, with Lake
Washington behind and the snowy peak of Mount Rainier hovering faintly
in the distance, SEATTLE has a magnificent setting. The insistently
modern skyline of glass skyscrapers gleams across the bay, an emblem of
three decades of aggressive urban renewal.
Seattle's beginnings were inauspiciously muddy. Flooded out of its first
location on the flat little peninsula of Alki Point, in the 1850s the
town shifted to what's now Pioneer Square, renaming itself after the
Native American Chief Sealth (hence Seattle). This was soggy ground, and
the small logging community built its houses on stilts. As the
surrounding forest was gradually felled and the wood shipped out,
Seattle grew slowly until the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 put it firmly
on the national map. World War I boosted shipbuilding, and the city was
soon a large industrial center. Trade unions, based around the
shipworkers, grew strong, and the Industrial Workers of the World, or "Wobblies,"
coordinated the US's first general strike here on February 6, 1919.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the Boeing airline
corporation was crucial to the city's well being, booming during World
War II and employing one in five of Seattle's workforce by the 1960s.
The prosperity that Boeing and more recent success stories such as
Microsoft and internet shopping site Amazon.com have brought the city is
obvious, reflected in a restored old center, a nationally acclaimed arts
scene with vibrant movie and music industries, and a flood of coffee
houses and excellent seafood restaurants. No longer overshadowed by the
two big California metropolises, Seattle now regularly tops magazine
surveys of desirable places to live, attracting migrants across the
social and economic spectrum, which has led to both exponential growth
and increasing traffic jams. As if to round out the turbulent decade, a
February 2001 earthquake shook Seattle's foundations, and reminded its
resi dents that they're just as prone to Pacific Rim tremors as their
southern counterparts in the Golden State.
Despite the dizzying expansion, the city's more established
neighborhoods remain distinctive, and Seattle has a pleasantly down-to-earth
ambience.
The City
Downtown Seattle's main attractions are the busy stalls and cafés of
Pike Place Market and the restored nineteenth-century Pioneer Square ,
lined with restaurants and taverns. A stroll along the more touristy
waterfront lets you enjoy fabulous views of Elliott Bay. At the Seattle
Center in the north, the Space Needle presides over cultural
institutions and carnival rides, as well as the city's latest draw, the
Experience Music Project . Several outlying districts are often livelier
than downtown: Capitol Hill 's cafés and bars are the heart of the
city's hipster and gay scene, and the University District is a student
area with inexpensive cafés and uptempo nightlife.
|
