While many explore the Pacific Northwest as part of one big road trip, it pays to slow down in Washington state, where the lush islands, windswept sea stacks and rainforest offer a wild hit of west-coast USA

Words Jacqui Agate

I stood on a gnarled bluff above the Haro Strait and watched a bald eagle soar overhead. It hovered a moment, mighty wings turned out as if deciding whether to dive for dinner, then it disappeared behind a lighthouse guarding the coast. A few beats later, another emerged. It swirled above a huddle of Douglas fir trees before spiriting away behind the same beacon. I’d been promised a natural bounty, and here it was on a silver platter.

Plenty of travellers rush through Washington state, parcelling it into an itinerary that explores parts of Oregon and south-west Canada too. But I was slowing things down with a full week in the Evergreen State, beginning with the San Juan Islands, a wildlife-rich archipelago in the Salish Sea that butts up against the Canadian border.

It’s no wonder that nature is king here. San Juan County – comprising 172 named islands carved by glacial erosion – has more marine shoreline than any other county in the US. The isles unfold in a bucolic jigsaw of wildflower-stitched meadows, bird-filled forests, wetlands and rugged coast. There are no fast-food chains, no traffic lights, no single-use plastic bags. The landscapes are unspoilt and the pace is slow.

What the islands do have is one of the highest densities of breeding bald eagles in the contiguous US. I even spied a third bird before tearing myself from a spot at Lime Kiln Point State Park on the eponymous San Juan Island. But now the water was calling.

Birdlife aside, this archipelago offers some of the finest orca watching on the planet. I ventured out with San Juan Safaris, based in Friday Harbor, in hope of a sighting. The waters stayed calm as the town’s crayon-coloured buildings melted behind our boat. Ahead, the shadow of the Cascade mountains decorated the horizon. The odd house peered out from the tree-lined beaches, but civilisation was otherwise forgotten.

The Salish Sea is home to both whale species and different populations of orca (southern and northern residents, as well as the transient Bigg’s), explained our naturalist guide, Kelly, who examined the water’s surface through a pair of binoculars. But while this remote sea should be a safe haven for marine mammals, orca populations here have plummeted over the decades.

The problem was previously down to a booming marine park industry that began in the 1960s: breeding mothers were plucked from Pacific Northwest waters in great numbers and trained to do tricks for paying crowds. These days, dams on the Snake River – which provide substantial hydropower to the Pacific Northwest – are the issue, making it harder for the large, fatty Chinook salmon that the southern residents feed on to reach their spawning grounds, leaving the orca hungry and critically endangered. It’s estimated that today’s southern resident population numbers between just 70 and 76 orca.

Salmon are also of great cultural importance to the Indigenous Coast Salish peoples, the San Juan Islands’ original inhabitants. I’d previously spotted a sign bearing the words ‘Snake River Dams’ with red protest marks plastered across it. Now I began to understand why.

An hour or so passed without any wildlife activity, though views of peaks and richly forested shores were rewarding enough. Then Kelly lowered her binoculars and told everyone to turn their attention to the three-o’clock position. There, in the distance, the mighty fins of four orcas broke through the water. They travelled in unison, their bodies moving in graceful arcs as they ploughed through seafoam-green surf. I realised I was holding my breath.

“Sightings never become less magical,” said Kelly as she raised the boat’s whale-warning flag, featuring a giant tail set against a yellow-and-red background. Time seemed to stop with our boat as we watched these mammals surface for air again and again before eventually disappearing into the deep. Our final journey shoreward gifted us views of Steller sea lions, harbour porpoises and a bounty of birdlife. I was decanted back into Friday Harbor in a daze.

Glimpsing a giant

It’s hard to believe that Seattle shoots skyward just a 50-minute seaplane ride away. It was ranked as the nation’s fastest growing city in 2021/2022, and the metropolitan area is the birthplace of commercial heavyweights ranging from Amazon and Starbucks to Microsoft. But the Emerald City also anchors some of the USA’s greatest wildernesses.

I first glimpsed Mount Rainier from my hotel room window. The peak is embarrassingly large, one of the tallest in the Lower 48, spiking to some 4,392m. Its snowy mass hulks over Seattle’s Elliott Bay like a deity holding the city in judgement.

“In Seattle, we just call it ‘the mountain’,” said Karen Woodworth, a born-and-raised Pacific Northwesterner and my tour guide with Evergreen Escapes. “It’s like a beacon for us – it’s so often visible from the city.”

Now it was time to see it up close, as our day-long tour took us into Mount Rainier National Park, a forested oasis dominated by its namesake peak. The mountain was named by British Navy officer and explorer Captain George Vancouver after his friend, Rear Admiral Peter Rainier, who had never actually visited the region; now there are calls to reinstate the peak’s Indigenous name, Mount Tacoma. The park’s boundaries spread across the ancestral homelands of the Puyallup, Cowlitz, Muckleshoot, Yakama, Nisqually and Squaxin Island peoples.

Washington was one of the last states to be colonised and was admitted into the Union less than 150 years ago, in 1889. Just ten years later, in 1899, Mount Rainier National Park was formed, showing the extent to which conservation is embedded in the state’s psyche.

Old-growth forests thick with Douglas firs, western hemlocks and western red cedar characterise the region. Just outside the protected park boundaries, these gangling trees once supported a booming lumber industry; however, the decline of logging in the region is largely down to a single species: the northern spotted owl.

This bird once thrived in Washington’s old-growth forest, but was declared ‘threatened’ under the Endangered Species Act in the 1990s. It led to a halt in logging within areas that included the forest habitat critical to the owl’s survival – a victory for environmentalists and conservationists but a blow to the mill workers whose livelihoods quickly evaporated. Today, the northern spotted owl remains on the brink of extinction.

As we passed through the gates of the national park, the contrast between the human-impacted tracts of forest and those that have been long protected is blinding. In the park, the trees spit towards the sky, with mighty trunks forming dense thickets and broad canopies that explode like emerald fireworks. My neck ached from looking upwards.

“This is what a mature forest without much human interaction – apart from this road – looks like,” said Karen as our tour bus snaked along the woodland-fringed park byway. “Some of our oldest trees are 1,000 years old. We’re lucky to have a place that has been preserved for more than 100 years; it would have looked very similar back then.”

Last year, Mount Rainier was the 18th most-visited national park in the US system, and visitation has risen by about 40% over the past decade. This year, for the first time ever, timed reservations are being tested throughout the summer months.

“It’s a trial run to help combat overtourism,” Karen explained. “With COVID, and even the year or two before that, many national parks became overwhelmed… We’re hoping this will ease some pressure.”

My early spring visit meant I was outside of the reservation window, and the summer crowds were yet to descend. As we drove, Mount Rainier played a perpetual game of peek-a-boo with us, winking from between soaring old-growth stands before disappearing once more.

My ears crackled as we gained in elevation, eventually reaching the aptly named Paradise area. Here, the muscular flanks of Mount Rainier were still plastered in snow, so we donned snowshoes for a waterfall hike. The trail unfolded in a string of Alpine-esque vistas: cedar trees heavy with ice, the rippling ridges of the Cascades, and finally Myrtle Falls, a waterfall that tumbles 18m and has Mount Rainier’s summit as a backdrop.

Blown away

Snow still lingered in Olympic National Park, too. I had reached it from my base in Seattle, crossing the Puget Sound on the ferry to Bainbridge Island and cruising north towards Port Angeles, a key gateway. As I drove, views of the mirror-like Sequim Bay revealed themselves in flashes.

I met Tommy Farris, owner of the Olympic Hiking Company, and we pushed into the park, the Olympic Mountains spiking around us as we followed the Hurricane Ridge Road, a byway leading to one of the park’s most popular viewpoints.

“I grew up here. Back then, I really had no idea how lucky I was to call this place home,” said Tommy as the road rose and the ground dropped beneath us.

“Diversity is really what makes this place so special: you essentially get multiple national parks in one visit – there’s the mountains, the coast and the Hoh Rainforest, which could be its own unit entirely. Then there are lakes and rivers and waterfalls; all those different ecosystems are within a few hours of Port Angeles.”

Originally designated as the Mount Olympus National Monument in 1909, the site was awarded full national park status in 1938 after then-president Franklin D Roosevelt explored the wilderness for himself. We saw one piece of the park’s natural jigsaw as we reached Hurricane Ridge, a scenic area so named for its propensity for gales, where flower-embroidered meadows rush out beneath skyscraping peaks. I watched as a marmot chomped on grass right in front of us. “He probably just woke up,” Tommy said.

“This is a place that can be explored pretty much all 12 months of the year,” Tommy added as we climbed back into the van. “It’s not like they just close the gates in September. Come in December and go storm-watching on the Pacific Coast, or see raging, swollen waterfalls like Marymere Falls.”

The latter was our next stop, reached via a relatively mellow (though stair-filled) hike through sweeping tracts of old-growth forest. Early evening sunlight melted through the trees and the paths were blissfully quiet.

“This is the perfect time to be on the trail,” Tommy mused as we made our final ascent to the 27m-high falls, whose roar filled the hushed forest.

Gathering moss

It was into the woods again the next day, this time with Olympic Hiking Company guide Oscar Hammer, who shared an encyclopaedic knowledge of the ecosystem as we walked the Hall of Mosses Trail in the Hoh Rainforest.

“All that moss needs is a surface to adhere to and a constant source of moisture. As long as it’s warm enough and wet enough, moss will grow – and that’s why it’s so prolific here,” explained Oscar.

Almost 3.6m of rain is recorded in the rainforest each year, turning the leaves of the spruces, hemlocks and maples an acid-green colour that looks almost man-made. Mosses crawl across the forest floor and scramble over gnarled trunks, while lichens hang like bunting from twisted boughs. Life and death is laid bare in the rainforest too. The sea of green is occasionally interrupted by a white and weathered stump, while new growth sprouts from fallen giants.

Our final stop was Ruby Beach, a windswept strand where driftwood scattered the pebbles like bones. The Pacific waters were staked with sea stacks, their summits circled by gulls. With his boot, Oscar gently tapped a weathered wooden board studded with nails.

“That’s possibly from a shipwreck,” he said. “All kinds of treasures tend to wash up on this beach. Each little part of this park tells its own story.”

That’s true of Washington as a whole, I thought, staring out across the Pacific Ocean, its white-capped waves curling over the shore. Each pocket of this state – from its mountain-jewelled national parks to its mellow islands, to its orca-filled seas – tells its own distinct tale of the wild. They’re stories of conservation, of growth and renewal, and of humankind’s ongoing dance with nature. For me, Ruby Beach was the dramatic epilogue. I’m keen to return for another chapter.