Washington

Washington begins, for most, with Seattle, the emerald city wedged between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, where coffee culture, tech fortunes, and a thriving music legacy meet beneath the ever-present silhouette of Mount Rainier. The city’s markets, waterfront, and hill neighborhoods reward exploration on foot, but it is also the launching point for a state whose real drama lies beyond the skyline, in the mountains and forests that ring it on every side.

Those mountains are the state’s defining feature. Mount Rainier rises alone and immense, an ice-clad stratovolcano whose wildflower meadows and glaciers draw hikers all summer, while to the north the jagged, remote peaks of the North Cascades form some of the wildest alpine country in the Lower 48. South of Rainier, the blasted crater of Mount St. Helens still tells the story of its 1980 eruption in ash-gray slopes slowly returning to green, a landscape of geological memory unlike anywhere else in the country.

The state’s western edge belongs to the extraordinary Olympic National Park, a single protected wilderness that gathers glaciated peaks, wild Pacific beaches, and temperate rainforests dripping with moss into one improbable whole. The nearby Victorian seaport of Port Townsend makes a graceful base for exploring the peninsula, its waterfront frozen in a genteel nineteenth-century amber.

East of the Cascade crest, Washington transforms into something drier and sunnier. The Bavarian-themed village of Leavenworth perches in a mountain valley, while Spokane anchors the inland northeast and Tacoma and the wine country around Walla Walla round out a state that seems to contain several climates and half a dozen moods. To travel Washington is to cross from mist to sun in a single afternoon, and to find the wild waiting on the far side of every city limit.