Washington   
Evergreen State

Motto, By and By

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State bird, willow goldfinch.   State flower, Western rhododendron
State tree, Western hemlock.

Washington is well known for: Shipping, ship Building, Apples, The famous Walla Walla Onions, Grapes, amoung other things.

Seattle is one of America's most likeable and lively cities, worth a few days of anybody's time, perhaps its greatest asset for visitors is its close to the glorious  scenery of Puget Sound . The islands here are stepping stones to the Olympic Peninsula to the west, whose mountains are home to elk and lush vegetation that merges into rainforest, and whose wilderness beaches have remained unchanged for centuries.

Seattle is one of America's most likeable and vibrant cities, well worth a few days of anybody's time, perhaps its greatest asset for visitors is its proximity to the glorious rural scenery of Puget Sound . The islands here are stepping stones to the Olympic Peninsula to the west, whose mountains are home to rare elk and lush vegetation that merges into rainforest, and whose wilderness beaches have remained unchanged for centuries. The Olympic National Park , which occupies the bulk of the peninsula, is dazzling, and a hike along one of its clearly laid-out trails can be a highlight of any trip. Just make sure that you don't mind the wet, often stormy weather of western Washington, which only offers predictably warm temperatures and blue skies during the summer.

Not quite as rainy as the mountains to the northeast, the southern coast is flatter and more accessible but not as appealing, littered with industrial towns and glum holiday resorts. The nearest worthwhile destination lies a few hours east, where you can marvel at the wasted volcanic scenery of Mount St Helens .

Much drier and more desolate, the sprawling prairie-plateau that makes up most of eastern Washington is a long, slow grind with little of interest, though if a cross-country trek takes you through Spokane , the Grand Coulee Dam is worth a detour. Otherwise you're only likely to come out here if you're traveling the Cascade loop, a memorable 400-mile round-trip through the stunning Cascade Mountains .

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 wellbeing, 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 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 increasingly nightmarish 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. However, its new-found affluence jars uncomfortably with a visible street community of teenage runaways and homeless people - as well as a growing radical scene that splashed across the world's newspapers and TV screens with the WTO trade conference in 1999, an event that saw black-clad anarchists rioting amidst peaceful protesters in turtle outfits.

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

Vancouver is located on the Columbia just across the river from Portland, OR. Vancouver is a smaller city and has a very relaxed atmosphere, some nice seafood restaurants, and you can fish for sturgeon or salmon in the river.

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.

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.

When Mt. St. Helens erupted it blew ash for more than 100 miles, Harry Truman owned the lodge and refused to leave, he was there  when it erupted, and he's still there, and always will be at the Mountain he loved. there was a movie made about the eruption.
Washington has many snow capped peaks in the Cascade Mountain range.

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.

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