Pacific Northwest links
This is going to be just certain selected interesting stuff outside the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene area but within the greater Pacific Northwest.
- The Mountaineers (Puget Sound cities)
http://www.mountaineers.org/
- Huge active outdoors/conservation club, founded 1906/7, with thousands of dues-paying members. Activities divisions include: Climbing, Alpine Scrambling, Backpacking, Hiking, Navigation,
First Aid/MOFA, Backcountry Skiing, Snowshoeing, Sea Kayaking, Whitewater Kayaking, Bicycling, Sailing, Singles, and Foreign Outings. That Singles division has fun stuff from a lot of the other divisions, but earmarked for single folks, and trust me, you will meet people. Branches: Bellingham, Everett, Kitsap, Olympia, Seattle, Snoqualmie Foothills, and Tacoma.
- North Cascades National Park
http://www.nps.gov/noca/
- The Washington Cascades get taller and more jagged the farther north you go. The name of the range comes from the way the meltwater comes roaring out of them in the spring. There's a high-country tributary of the Skagit River called Thunder Creek, whose name has nothing to do with weather.
- North Cascades Highway
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/passes/northcascades
- Washington Route 20 actually crosses the extreme north of the whole state, but the spectacular section in the Cascades between Rockport and Twisp is what people think of as the North Cascades Highway. I'm told it looks like Switzerland.
- Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest
(Whatcom County WA) http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/mbs/
- Mount Baker is the northernmost of Washington's Cascade volcanoes.
- San Juan Islands
Visitors Bureau (San Juan County WA)
http://www.visitsanjuans.com/
sanjuanweb.com
http://www.sanjuanweb.com/
- Three large and many smaller beautiful islands in far northwest Washington state. Great for sailing, cycling, or just getting away. The three larger islands (San Juan, Orcas, and Lopez) can be reached by car ferry, the smaller ones only by boat or air. The San Juans tend to benefit somewhat from the rainshadow effect of the Olympic Mountains. I've been on Sucia, Stuart, and Lopez.
- Rosario Resort & Spa
(San Juan County WA) http://www.rosarioresort.com/
- Built in 1906 as a retirement mansion by shipping magnate Robert Moran, this is now a high-end resort with all the amenities, located on the east shore of East Sound, which almost bisects Orcas Island.
- Glacier Peak
(Snohomish County WA)
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/GlacierPeak/framework.html
- The Cascade volcanoes Glacier Peak and Mount Adams are both sort of buried in the interior and mostly hard to see from west of the range.
- The Cascade Loop
http://www.cascadeloop.com/
- Promotional site; the loop drive they're pushing is basically US2/Stevens Pass plus the North Cascades Highway, with connections via Whidbey Island on the west and US97 and Lake Chelan on the east. This would make a nice road trip though, especially if you had a week or so.
- Lake Chelan National Recreation Area (Chelan County WA) http://www.nps.gov/lach/
- A 50-mile-long, 1500-foot-deep glacier-carved "inland fjord," extending from the little settlement of Stehekin in the heart of the Cascades to the town of Chelan in semi-arid Eastern Washington. The upper part of the lake and the Stehekin River valley beyond are only accessible by boat, air, or on foot or horseback.
- The Lady of the Lake
http://www.ladyofthelake.com/
- A largish passenger motor vessel that makes daily scheduled trips the length of the lake, from Chelan to Stehekin and back. Apparently June-September there's also some sort of 50mph high-speed service now.
- Olympic National Park
http://www.nps.gov/olym/
- One of the more isolated US national parks, on Washington's mountainous Olympic peninsula; temperate rain forest on the southwest Pacific-coast side and a moderate rainshadow climate on the northeast. Most of the park is wilderness area.
- Mount Rainier National Park
(Pierce County WA) http://www.nps.gov/mora/
- Largest of the Cascade volcanoes at 14,410 feet; used extensively for training by Himalayas climbers, not for the altitude obviously, but this mountain will throw some serious weather at you on occasion.
- Mount Adams Wilderness (Yakima County WA)
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/recreation/wilderness/wilderness-mount-adams.shtml
- Mount St Helens National Volcanic Monument (Skamania/Cowlitz Counties WA)
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/mshnvm/
- Mount Hood National Forest
(Clackamas County OR) http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/mthood/
- Spectacular viewed from eastern metro Portland OR, on a clear day.
- Cascades Volcano Observatory
(Vancouver WA) http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/
- Intensively monitors all the Cascade volcanoes, which are part of the Pacific rim "Ring of Fire" caused by oceanic plate subduction.
- Ice Age Floods Institute
http://www.iafi.org/
- Glacial Lake Missoula formed 12,000-15,000 years ago in northwestern Montana, behind an ice dam near present-day Clark Fork, Idaho. At peak it's thought to have contained up to 520 cubic miles of water, all of which drained out to the Pacific in a few days when the ice dam failed, at 60 times the flow of the Amazon. Lake Missoula may have re-formed and drained catastrophically like this as many as 100 times over 2,000-3,000 years, drastically re-sculpting much of the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, including the "channeled scablands" of the Columbia basin, and the Yakima, Walla Walla, and Willamette river valleys. There's a proposed
Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail spanning the four-state area to help people understand the magnitude of these events.
- Grand Coulee Dam
http://users.owt.com/chubbard/gcdam/
Wikipedia
- The largest concrete structure in the US, 5,223 feet long, 11,975,520 cubic yards of concrete; generates up to 6,500 megawatts (fifth largest in the world as of 2008) and irrigates half a million acres. The down side: before the construction of this and the other nine dams on the American part of the Columbia River, ten more on the Snake River, and others, the Columbia watershed was home to the biggest salmon run in the world.
- The International Selkirk Loop
http://www.selkirkloop.org/
- A loop drive that encircles the Selkirk Mountains in northeast Washington, north Idaho, and southeast British Columbia, mostly alongside rivers and lakes.
- Hells Canyon National Recreation Area (Snake River, Oregon & Idaho)
http://www.fs.fed.us/hellscanyon/
- The deepest river gorge in North America; fishing, whitewater rafting and jet boating.
- Hells Canyon Visitor Association
http://www.hellscanyonvisitor.com/
- Hells Canyon Preservation Council
http://www.hellscanyon.org/
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- Gorge Ampitheater (Grant County WA)
http://www.livenation.com/venue/the-gorge-amphitheatre-tickets/
- Spectacular large outdoor music venue in central Washington, near where I-90 crosses the Columbia; the stage backdrop is sunset over basalt cliffs of the Columbia Gorge. You don't even need a flashlight to find your car anymore.
- Suck Amps EV Racing (Port Townsend WA)
http://www.suckamps.com/
- Ready for the next big boys' toy? Electric muscle cars, forsooth! As seen on
The Discovery Channel.
- evparts.com (Port Townsend WA)
http://www.evparts.com/
- Components for performance electric vehicles (EVs).
- National Electric Drag Racing Association (NEDRA)
http://www.nedra.com/
- Seattle Hostel
http://www.hiusa.org/seattle
- Cheap communal living; part of the
Hostelling International system. See the home page for locations of other hostels.
- Bob's Red Mill (Milwaukie OR)
http://www.bobsredmill.com/
- Stone-ground quality whole-wheat flours and other whole-grain foods. You've probably already seen Bob's Red Mill products, in their eco-friendly clear plastic packaging, in your local supermarkets. Online or in their catalog you can browse all the cool stuff your local store didn't buy. In the late 1970s they started in a red building about the size of your average barn; in mid-2007 they moved into a new 320,000 square foot production and distribution facility.
- Ubuntu mirror at
PNNL in Richland
http://mirror.pnl.gov/releases/
- Good resource for Ubuntu distribution downloads in the Inland Northwest.
- Schooner Zodiac
(Bellingham & Seattle WA) http://www.schoonerzodiac.com/
- A beautiful 120-foot gaff-rigged Grand-Banks-style schooner, originally built in 1924 for the
Johnson & Johnson heirs, by Hodgdon Brothers in East Boothbay, Maine, a yard that's still building high-end wooden boats. She's been a working boat all her life. She may have been a rum-runner for a while. Under the name California she was the pilot boat for San Francisco harbor through the WWII years; Zodiac was her original name. During cruising season she homeports in Bellingham next to the San Juan Islands, and you can sail aboard her.
- The Lady Washington
(Aberdeen WA) http://www.ladywashington.org/
- A 1989 replica of an 18th-century brig (mostly square rig) that figured in the history of Puget Sound. Aberdeen is on Grays Harbor on Washington's Pacific coast. She portrayed the brig Enterprise in the 1994 film
Star Trek Generations. 1989 was the centennial of Washington statehood.
Contrary to some peoples' assumptions, square rig is not necessarily more primitive than fore-and-aft rig. Square rig is optimum for sailing downwind, to follow the trade winds around the world. Fore-and-aft rig is better for inshore work, because it can point closer to the eye of the wind. Square-rig sail changes require crew to climb the rigging; on a 100% fore-and-aft rig like Zodiac all sail adjustments are done from the deck. Fore-and-aft rig was known and used all through the age of sail, and many smaller and coastal vessels used some combination of square and fore-and-aft. The historic shift from square rig to fore-and-aft has more to do with sailboats becoming mostly pleasure craft and commemoratives, versus blue-water commercial and military vessels through the 19th century.
The Grand Banks schooner form, that the Zodiac was based on, was used for competitive fishing on the Grand Banks. The idea was to fill the hold with saleable fish, then get back to harbor quick, to get the best prices. Zodiac was built with living space instead of fish holds.
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Gaff rig is a particular type of fore-and-aft rig, in which the primary sails are four-sided rather than triangular, and the head of the sail is attached to a spar called a gaff, one end of which pivots around the upper mast. Gaff rig isn't seen in new designs because of two halyards per sail instead of one, some other added rigging required, and because the shorter, wider sail and longer boom can be tricky to sail downwind. When the non-gaff rigs now usual were first being introduced, people called them Marconi rig, because they thought the taller masts and rigging looked like radio towers.
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