Seattle is now the most livable city in the U.S., according to several national studies, including a survey by Money Magazine.
People who were born there, or who have lived in the Northwest for as long as two years, regret the designation. They fear it will bring new residents.Our Iranian-born taxi driver complained the hordes of Californians moving to serene Northern Washington are driving real estate up and clogging freeways. On the bus, we met a young mother (New York native) who said the same thing.
But visitors to the Northwest this fall won't have to worry much about the freeways, and not at all about real estate prices. Without actually living there, they can enjoy what what makes Northern Washington so livable: mild weather, exciting art, good food and, above all, the mountains and the sea.
Seattle is only a scenic ferry ride away from the Olympic Peninsula or the San Juan Islands.
The air is cool and heavy from the sea, but the sun is shining. It's the right kind of day for riding a bike on the San Juan Islands.
The loop around San Juan looks long. Our map shows it divided into two rides, but we have only a day on this island so we'd like to see it all. "We'll see how it goes," we tell ourselves. "We'll turn back if we get tired."
And we do get tired, but we don't turn back, because we never tire of what we are seeing.
The ferry docks at Friday Harbor, a tidy little fishing village/tourist town. We ride our bikes up the hill, turn left, and before we've gone a mile we're in the country.
First we see the farms. Green fields stretch to the sea. The wildflowers amaze us: Roses, daisies, raspberry bushes, pink and purple clover, poppies and foxglove spill into the road. Occasionally we see a barn, a white clapboard house, some cattle grazing.
There are no cars, no sound at all, except the birds. We wonder if we've stepped back in time - to the 1930s, perhaps. The San Juan Islands are nothing if not pastoral.
The vistas keep changing. We round the bend and ride along a little bay, looking out across the ocean. Then we pass through a pine forest, and instead of flowers, damp ferns brush our legs. Then it's farms again. Then the ocean.
Later in the day we do see cars and other cyclists. When we stop to look for whales at Lime Kiln State Park, there are already more than a dozen people watching. They sit silently, alone or in small groups along the rocky shore. We catch their mood and sit silently, too, for an hour. The whales don't come and we ride on.
The next day, on Lopez Island, we have better luck. We ride along the Shark Reef Road, hike a short trail overgrown with raspberry bushes, find the shore and perch atop a rock to eat lunch and look for seals.
We've read that seals live in the rocks offshore. But for a long time we can't see anything in the water except rocks.
Suddenly a plane flies over, low. Five gray "rocks" lift their heads and stare skyward.
And now that we know what we are looking at, we can see seals everywhere. They slip through the water with only their noses showing. They dive smoothly and soundlessly. We could watch them all day, these seals are such graceful creatures - until, that is, they try to beach their blobby bodies.
Laboriously, they pull themselves out of the water up onto a rock. They thrash, struggle and shuffle before finally finding a comfortable spot. Then they collapse. When they aren't eating, the San Juan seals seem to spend the day sleeping in the sun.
Theirs is the pace of the islands.WHEN WASHINGTON became a state in 1889, the Olympic Peninsula was a mystery, largely unexplored.
An Army expedition saw the interior, first, in 1885. Lt. Joseph O'Neil's men explored for a month, trekking from Port Angeles through the tangled forest to Hurricane Ridge - 17 miles away.
The Seattle Press newspaper commissioned the second exploration during the winter of 1889-90. James Christie led the Press Expedition - six men, two mules and four dogs. In rain and snow and more rain, they climbed up through the glacier-tipped Olympic Mountains. The men's boots, wet and worn, fell apart. They stitched new ones from their blankets. Finally, they crossed over. A tumbling river led them out of the mountains, down to the cold sea.
They'd spent six months traveling the Olympic range from north to south. Their reports revealed to the rest of America a huge forested wilderness, full of elk and bear, with the continent's only tropical rain forest and other forests, too: lowland, montane and subalpine.
In 1897, Grover Cleveland made the peninsula a forest preserve. Theodore Roosevelt declared it a national monument. And President Franklin Roosevelt saved forever, in 1938, 908,720 acres as Olympic National Park.
Now a two-lane road cuts through the wilderness to Hurricane Ridge. The strip of pavement brings 3 million visitors a year into the park, but neither it nor they do anything to dispel the wonder and mystery of the peninsula.
There are many ways to enjoy it:
You can stand on the ridge on a clear morning, staring across to the 8,000 foot peak of Mount Olympus and down the rocks to the sea. You can set out on a hike in the sunshine, watching clouds form out over the ocean and within the hour the mist will come boiling up the steep valleys, turning the blue world grey, obliterating the parking lot and visitors center and all the tourists who are on the trail with you.
You can walk through the dripping green forests, listening to birds and frogs. Western red cedar, Sitka spruce and Douglas fir up to seven centuries old, grow to 12-feet in diameter and 300 feet high. Below them are bigleaf maples, cottonwoods and an undergowth of vine and shrubs.
Moss floats from the trees. Moss muffles your steps. The ground springs and squishes underfoot, even when it's dry. It's rarely dry.
You can go down to the sea. Let your nose revel in that air. Watch the water whip the shore, molding trees and rocks, filling tide pools with wriggling treasures.
Later, you can sit on the porch of the romantic lodge at Crescent Lake, drink something cool, and debate about renting a canoe. If you debate long enough a storm will rise, turning the water mean and steely, and you can go back to your room for a sweater and a book.
You can see some of the peninsula in a day - it's only a 45-minute drive from the shore to the glaciers - but you'll probably want to stay longer. In fact, especially if you visit in the sunny months of late summer or fall, you might start thinking the Northwest would be a good place to live.