Having just returned from the Great Northwest, suffering from jet lag and unpacked luggage, I take this time to share one indisputable fact. The most beautiful place on this continent has to be the Northwestern United States. From the Olympic and Cascade Mountains to the Strait of Juan De Fuca with views to Vancouver Island, one runs through their adjectives fairly quickly. Quite simply, the Northwestern United States and the adjoining area of British Columbia is stunning.
It is largely untouched mountains, straits, shorelines and forests that were discovered in the 18th century by the Spaniards and then the English. A treaty affixed the border between Canada and the United States at the 49th parallel. Though there is a boundary, one country drifts into the next seamlessly, with Vancouver island visible all along the Olympic Peninsula within the state of Washington. It is separated by the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
In the evening, sitting on my brother's rear deck, we could look across the Strait and see the lights of Victoria, British Columbia. Behind us, we could look up and see the Olympic Mountains. Directly behind the house, is the Olympic National Forest. Raccoons would come in at night, deer in the early morning, foraging for food. The whole northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula, from Port Townsend in the east, to Cape Flattery in the west, is full of unique vistas, quirky townships, fishing villages and sturdy souls.
Driving the mountain roads, one is reminded of the resistance of nature to man's intrusion. In some places, roads are often closed, with wash-outs leaving the driver to negotiate temporary gravel roads and watching circumspectly for one of the house-sized boulders perched atop sheer cliffs to suddenly come tumbling down. None did on our journey, thankfully. This is also the area of the world to see the whales play in the vast waters of the Pacific as it enters the fiords and straits along the U.S. and Canadian border. There are a multitude of ferries hopping between islands and countries from which to watch for whales, seals and other aquatic life.
One unsettling road sign of note was the "Tsunami Evacuation Route". Lest we forget, this is a very active seismic area and a quake of sufficient magnitude could send a wall of water into the low-lying areas. All of the evacuation routes led straight up into the mountains, a short distance away, which relieved one of the panic of thinking about running from a tidal wave on a Sunday drive. Graham and Diane, my brother and his wife, wisely had taken a house 60 feet above sea level, out of the path of any possible rush of water.
As a sign of the economic malaise gripping the rest of the country, we pulled into a village, Clallum, sitting at the water's edge along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, stopping for lunch. We thought it odd that every single business in that stretch of the town had a realtor's "For Sale" sign on it. We engaged the waitress to ask why everyone seemed eager to leave such a magnificent part of the world. She explained that the Wildlife authorities had instituted strict fishing limits, logging was dead due to the lack of demand for lumber and tourism had dropped off to almost nothing. The only employer left was the State's penal institution located somewhere behind us in the mountains.
The logging industry has left a scarred landscape in the far Northwest corner of the Olympic peninsula, and though never a tree-hugger, I ached for someone to tell me that there was a better way to harvest our resources. Vast areas were abandoned stumps and piles of debris gone gray from age. As we drove further west into the Makah Indian reservation, it was easy to see how the area must have looked to the early explorers. Untouched and lush, the forest swallowed the sky along the road as we made it to Cape Flattery, the northwestern-most point in the continental United States. We looked out from a bluff that has been used for centuries to view the ships that came to this area of the world. The Makah used it as a look-out for the whales that were their life. In the surrounding forest, cedar trees the size of our largest oak trees in the south shot up into the sky. The ocean buffeted the shoreline and had created huge caverns in the limestone cliffs.
This is an area of our nation that everyone must visit at least once in their lifetime. It was one of my top-ten of places I wanted to see in mine. I was not disappointed.
Posts
