Northwest Travel

Architectural Gems That Are Vacation Rentals

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:00:00 -0800

La Conner, Washington
$220–$250 per night; boutique-homes.com/vacation-rentals

Glass Cabin
Josh Brevoort and Lisa Chun, the husband-and-wife architects of Seattle firm Zeroplus, built Poppy, Artusi, Spinasse—some of Capitol Hill’s most striking restaurants. The glass and steel construction they imagined for a remote half acre was for a client just as significant: Mom.

Peggy Brevoort purchased a waterfront lot near La Conner and loved that it hadn’t been logged in more than four decades, so her son and daughter-in-law designed a cabin that had oodles of visual access to the surrounding trees. The pair devised an interlocking series of steel beams that come together like Tinker Toys to support the clear walls. “It only works when it’s completely assembled, like puzzle pieces; it’s tricky that way,” says Josh. On the day the contractors erected the metal web, the few neighbors on the small road came over to rubberneck (and, says Peggy, to make bets on whether it would work). The result is a stunning glass pavilion, and even the shower has a nature view.

The two bedrooms and loft are in a central cocoon, while the living room and kitchen are open to the elements. Outside, a spindly staircase leads down to the waters of Skagit Bay, not far from Deception Pass. Vacation renters, when they’re not enjoying the indoor wood stove and outdoor view, head to historical La Conner, Anacortes, and Whidbey Island.

As Mom puts it, “We really gave our kids total creative freedom to try out their ideas.” Josh, who credits the contractor for pulling off the project, has no complaints about having her as a client. His tack: “Just listen to Mother,” he says.

Image: Courtesy Stephen Tamiesie

Hood River, Oregon
$195 per night; vrbo.com/132726

Neal Creek Retreat
Architect Paul McKean doesn’t have a business card; he has a sustainably built cabin in Hood River. Okay, sure, he has business cards, too, but the house he built in 2006 is a much better ad for his work. He and his wife designed the boxy abode to be simple and modern. “People have called it Scandinavian, I’m not quite sure why,” he says.

At only 930 square feet, the home manages to sleep six people in two bedrooms. The raised rectangle is plated in western red cedar siding, sitting atop a concrete block that keeps the living quarters a full nine feet in the air. The idea is that the house is impervious to brush fires and flooding, and so only storage and mechanical systems are kept inside the flood-ready concrete.

The nearby Columbia Gorge offers a full recreational spread—windsurfing, hiking, bird-watching—but McKean’s rental overlooks what he calls “a very close, intimate kind of landscape.” The house faces a creek and a steep hillside the architect considers “unbuildable”; the view should be as sustainable as the materials he used for construction.

Like other unique projects that go up in rural areas, McKean’s creation saw crowds gather during construction. Since there was no front door until the project was completed, gawkers wandered the site almost every day. Theirs wasn’t the only attention: The cabin received the Built Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects in 2007.

Image: Courtesy Tom Chudleigh

Qualicum Bay, British Columbia
$135–$225 per night; freespiritspheres.com

Free Spirit Spheres
Tom Chudleigh isn’t an architect. He’s a biologist by training, was a power engineer in his day job, and used to be a boatbuilding hobbyist. It took every bit of his expertise—not to mention his father’s teachings in millwrighting and machinery—to birth the Free Spirit Spheres, handcrafted globes that hang from the trees in Vancouver Island.

“They’re more like pieces of art,” says Chudleigh. “They’re these little baubles that just hang out in the trees, and they’re really popular with renters.” The spherical tree houses take as much investment as an artistic masterpiece—in 20 years, Chudleigh has built only six. He calls their nutlike shape “biomimicry,” and each hangs 10 to 15 feet in the air, linked to three separate trees so as to be gentle to the arboreal supports (and minimize swaying).

One rental sphere is made of yellow cedar, one of Sitka spruce, and one of fiberglass, but all were crafted like boats: Each tree house is formed by a single curved wall making up the exterior and features yacht jointing inside. The smallest has a single narrow bed, but the largest sleeps three and has a small refrigerator and kitchen counter. The private retreat has picnic areas and a sauna, and the quaint town of Qualicum Bay isn’t far.

When Chudleigh first saw how popular his rentals were with visiting architects, he feared one would steal his idea. Now, though, he doesn’t worry: “Most people don’t have the wherewithal to build these; you can’t go out and buy any part off the shelf,” he says. “There’s no shortcuts.”

Image: Courtesy Mark Wagner/Gravitas

Boise, Idaho
$59 per night; airbnb.com/rooms/181489

The Shed
Idaho’s capital city is one friendly town: Rent this backyard studio from day trader James Stead and you could end up invited to his weekly potluck dinner or borrowing wheels from his “tremendous collection of bikes.” It’s not usually what visitors expect of Boise, says Stead. “People are surprised by the friendliness of the community,” he says. “And the road trippers that come through seem to expect Iowa rather than Idaho—surprised there are any hills, let alone mountains right outside of town.”

The small shed is in the historic East End neighborhood, only a short walk to the town’s shops and restaurants. The butterfly roof is a signature of local architect Derek Hurd, who took Stead’s simple sketch and turned it into a loft-style getaway. In only 300 square feet, it contains a small but functional kitchen, an airy wood loft, and a walk-in shower with a window. Outside, the tiered lawn holds a fire pit set in native basalt stone and a native plant garden with plum and honey locust trees.

Boise’s burgeoning art scene is a huge draw for tourists, but Stead also sees business travelers in search of a unique workspace, some of whom stay weeks or even a month—though they may just be folks who really dig potlucks.

Published: January 2013

Northwest Travel Awards

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:00:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Tim Bies/Olson Kundig Architects

The Mobile Hotel (on Land)
Rolling Huts Herd
Winthrop, WA

Technically, you’re spending the night in an RV park. This “herd” is six 200-square-foot structures balanced on wheels, per the local zoning laws. But the huts are hardly Winnebagos: These steel-and-wood contraptions were designed by Seattle architect Tom Kundig, winner of some 37 American Institute of Architects awards. And the Corten steel wheels haven’t actually rolled since the 2008 opening.

The huts face the expansive Methow Valley, carefully positioned so each seems utterly isolated. Inside, morphing furniture units transform the narrow space from living room to bedroom. Wood for the sleek fireplace is sheltered under the unit, but Methow winters require additional electric heat—there’s enough snow here to allow cross-country skiing right from the front porch. As remote as the site feels, meals at Kelly’s restaurant are hardly provincial; the menu rotates Irish, Mexican, and Spanish specials. All the grub is organic, all the ice cream is housemade, and the bar mixes a mean cocktail. Not bad for an “RV park” on the North Cascades Highway.

18381 Highway 20, Winthrop, WA, 509-996-4442; rollinghuts.com

Image: Mel Brown photo courtesy BendBroadband’s Jazz at the Oxford series

The Lobby Soundtrack
The Oxford Hotel
Bend, OR

What’s a former president of the Portland Trail Blazers to do in a town without arena sports? Start a jazz series, naturally, as Marshall Glickman did by bringing scatting to a new ubergreen hotel in Bend. The third annual season of concerts, which runs October to March, expects to match past sellouts.

10 NW Minnesota Ave, Bend, OR, 541-382-8436; oxfordhotelbend.com/jazz-at-the-oxford.htm

Image: Ben Behrends Photo Courtesy Lois Greenfield

The Dance Revolution
Trey McIntrye Project
Boise, ID

Choreographer Trey McIntyre has won handfuls of dance awards (plus a spot on People’s prestigious “25 Hottest Bachelors” list in 2003), but he pointedly chose Boise for the home of his contemporary ballet company. The city loves them so much that dancers get free tuition at Boise State (score!), and locals come out in droves for the body-twisting hometown shows in November and February.

2201 W Cesar Chavez Ln, Boise, ID, 877-867-2320; treymcintyre.com

The Seaweed Search
Elakah Expeditions
Lummi Island, WA

Kelp! It’s what’s for dinner. On Elakah’s Wild Harvest kayak tours, ethnobotanist Jenny Hahn scours the seaweed patches around Lummi Island. When she sees something slippery, she reaches over the side of her boat and, with only a pair of kiddie scissors, expertly trims pieces of bullwhip kelp or sea lettuce. Hahn leaves the plant intact for future production, and not just because Elakah runs trips on almost every summer day, given favorable tides.

Beginning kayakers have to face little more than two-foot waves as they do their own gathering. After all the delicate snipping, Hahn whips up a shore-cooked meal full of the day’s spoils. Menus include salmon wrapped in salty seaweed or fettuccine with the tasty alaria variety. Hahn has been leading multiday excursions for more than two decades, overnighting in a Bellingham hotel; the day trips are newer. It doesn’t take long to develop a taste for kelp.

Lummi Island, WA, 360-734-7270; elakah.com

The Canadian Sophisticate
Rosewood Hotel Georgia and Hawksworth Restaurant
Vancouver, BC

Everything is shiny, because almost everything in the hotel and restaurant is new or renovated. In the lobby, it’s a glistening stone floor; in the driveway, it’s the reflections of the pool above (yep, you can see the water through geometric skylights). It took four years to restore the downtown Vancouver property to its 1920s glamour, but now it finally lives up to its neighbors, the castlelike Fairmont Hotel Vancouver and the neoclassical Vancouver Art Gallery. Katharine Hepburn once strode this dark-wood lobby, demanding room service—not available until the moment she asked for it.

Shiniest of all is Hawksworth Restaurant, where an oval art deco chandelier looks like a bathtub fashioned of crystal. The chatter of Vancouver’s young and fashionable fills the dining room, and even the menu sparkles with stylish wit: The “KFC” in the scallops starter stands for Korean fried cauliflower. Chef David Hawksworth has enough humor to mount a line drawing of his own backside in one of the restaurant stairwells (but keeping with his standards, it’s really an exceptionally drawn piece of art).

801 W Georgia St, Vancouver, BC, 604-682-5566; rosewoodhotels.com

Great Waterfalls

Image: Artifan/Shutterstock

Multnomah Falls
Thirty minutes outside Portland and with a parking lot that sits between lanes of traffic—viewing this skinny 542-footer is easy peasy. Corbett, OR

Snoqualmie Falls
Our local waterworks are all pretty foam on top but hide underground power generators below. Snoqualmie, WA

Shoshone Falls
Frankly, we don’t consider our roaring crescent the “Niagara of the West.” Niagara is the Shoshone of the East. Twin Falls, ID

Della Falls
Canada’s tallest falls, located in remote Vancouver Island, takes a lot of work, a boat ride and a hike, to see. Port Alberni, BC

Sol Duc Falls
The three-fingered wonder comes with a bonus, the mossy grandeur of the Olympic rain forest that surrounds it. Olympic National Park, WA

Image: Courtesy Pat Teglia

The Boathouse
Northwest Maritime Center
Port Townsend, WA

The home of the Wooden Boat Foundation is a real live boat shop, where shipwrights perform a craft straight out of Herman Melville as visitors look on and ask questions. The Chandlery sells a selection of nautical thingamabobs and whirligigs, and the docks allow for wistfully window shopping the wooden vessels parked there.

431 Water St, Port Townsend, WA, 360-385-3628; nwmaritime.org

The Terrifying Tunnel
Hiawatha Bike Trail
Pearson, ID

Imagine riding your bike down a 1.66-mile-long tunnel with a headlamp that’s weaker than a penlight. Water drips to your left and right into gutters you’re desperately trying to avoid. It’s as dark as a subterranean cave, cold, and clammy. Like being trapped inside a dehumidifier. You consider tailgating an eight-year-old on a tiny two-wheeler who seems to have the Bat-Signal attached to his helmet, just to make it out alive. Now you’re being overly dramatic.

The Taft Tunnel can catch even the most seasoned explorer by surprise, but with the proper gear, it’s a thrilling start to a 15-mile downhill ride from the East Portal trailhead in Montana to Pearson, Idaho, along the abandoned Milwaukee Railroad. The Hiawatha trail cuts a wide path through the Bitterroot Mountains with photo-op vistas around every bend. The route is challenging enough, taking bikers and hikers through nine tunnels and over seven trestles, but with a gentle grade and a shuttle that drops you back at the trailhead, so even an eight-year-old can do it. Sometimes better than an adult. —Laura Dannen

Exit 5 off I-90, Taft, MT, 208-744-1301; ridethehiawatha.com

Image: Courtesy Scott McKay/Flickr

The Tour Bus
Attractions Connector
Victoria, BC

The best thing about Victoria is that you don’t need a car, just a float-plane ride and a short stroll to a waterfront hotel. Until, that is, you realize that the quarry-built Butch-art Gardens are 30 minutes away. In a “geez, finally” move, a biodiesel-fueled shuttle has started ferrying summer sightseers from downtown Victoria to Butchart, as well as providing drop-off service to other Saanich Peninsula attractions.

attractionsconnector.com

The Selfless Stay
The Heathman Hotel
Portland, OR

Give back, and not simply through hotel taxes: The four new signature suites at the Heathman in Portland represent local literary, performing arts, visual art, or symphony organizations; each stay kicks back money to the group. Handwritten pages and signed first editions fill the Literary Arts Suite, where you can create your own masterpiece on the old Olympus typewriter (or just drink like a writer at the personal bar made of bookshelves).

1001 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, 503-241-4100; portland.heathmanhotel.com

The Mobile Hotel (on Water)
InnChanter
Hot Springs Cove, BC

In 1927 the ship was a coastal freighter; today it’s a floating B&B parked in Vancouver Island’s Hot Springs Cove. Pop into your room’s personal kayak to sneak into the hot springs in the middle of the night, then take a 15-minute floatplane ride back to Tofino the next morning. Flights depart a few feet off the bow.

Hot Springs Cove, Tofino, BC, 250-670-1149; innchanter.com

Image: Courtesy Shane Lin/Flickr

The Radioactive Tour
Hanford Nuclear Reservation
Richland, WA

It’s a marvel, an engineering marvel. Those words are repeated throughout the five-and-a-half-hour tour of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a free outing that’s open only to adult U.S. citizens without cameras. The B Reactor in the middle of the Department of Energy site truly is a marvel; the world’s first plutonium reactor was built in just over a year. Though it looks like a three-story telephone switchboard, the reactor represents a great leap forward in American science. Just don’t expect to hear much about why that plutonium was created—rare are the words “atomic bomb” or “Nagasaki.”

In the throes of World War II, the yellow high deserts near Richland were selected for a top-secret project that took 100,000 workers to complete. The plot of land is half the size of Rhode Island and ghostly, now dotted with cocooned—or shuttered—reactors that face the white bluffs of the Columbia River. Besides the B Reactor, the tour peeks at abandoned town sites and a pit that stores the nuclear reactor compartments of dozens of decommissioned nuclear submarines. Tours have proved so

Image: Courtesy Nicholas Blumhardt/Flickr

popular that some 2,500 spots for 2012 were filled in less than six hours; 2013 tours will be posted online in January. Proposed legislation would turn parts of the reservation into a national historic park, linking Hanford with other Manhattan Project sites in New Mexico and Tennessee.

History is only half of the story. After decades of producing power and weapons-grade plutonium, Hanford is dealing with its radioactive waste—and leaking underground containers, though you never get too close to those—with a $12 billion glassification factory. Dump trucks line up to make deposits into a massive new landfill. Peering at these new projects is fascinating; the scale and urgency of the cleanup age rival that of the nuclear age.

2000 Logston Blvd, Richland, WA, 509-376-2151; www5.hanford.gov/publictours

Great Northwest Plates

Image: Alex Staroseltsev/Shutterstock

Willows Inn
It’s pretty much unanimous; Blaine Wetzel’s locally foraged and farmed foods are worth the drive, boat trip, flight, or however you make it to his table. Lummi Island, WA, willows-inn.com

The Herbfarm
Still crazy good after all these years—Seattle’s closest culinary wonderland continues its superior homegrown meals. Woodinville, WA, herbfarm.com

Sooke Harbour House
This year the establishment that draws gourmands down a windy road from Victoria was put up for sale—so tuck into the slow-food meals quickly. Sooke, BC, sookeharbourhouse.com

Inn at Langley
With chef Matt Costello as top toque in the restaurant’s open kitchen, the Whidbey Island standby retains its high reputation. Langley, WA, innatlangley.com

Xinh’s Clam and Oyster House
You can’t get much closer to the muddy shores where Northwest shellfish are grown, and Xinh Dwelley successfully brings eager eaters to an otherwise industrial town. Shelton, WA, xinhsrestaurant.com

Image: William Anthony

The Parking Lot
LeMay – America’s Car Museum
Tacoma, WA

Bruce Wayne’s garage has nothing on the big silver worm parked next to the Tacoma Dome. Founder Harold LeMay had the largest car collection in the world, and now the new museum has 350 cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles, roadsters, coupes, hatchbacks, hybrids, and jalopies on display, plus three race-car simulators.

2702 East D St, Tacoma, WA, 253-779-8490; lemaymuseum.org

The Pit Stop
Adam’s Northwest Bistro and Brewery
Monroe, WA

The term “road food” almost sounds disrespectful when talking about the handiwork of owner Adam Hoffman. After all, he spent almost a decade at the culinary helm of Thierry Rautureau’s Rover’s, dispensing precise French techniques to one of the fine dining–est menus in Seattle. But freed of Francophile constraints, Hoffman is all about dispensing comforting Americana; his antler-and-cleaver-bedecked restaurant perched on the edge of Main Street Monroe, where Route 522 meets Highway 2, plies locals and a few savvy passersby with fried chicken and waffles, berry cobbler, and a colossal stuffed pork chop. In other words, ideal road food, devised by a man who comes from a background where making your own blue cheese dressing and smoking your own bacon for a wedge salad is standard procedure. He even brews the restaurant’s beer in the space next door.

Hoffman’s Rover’s days shine through in a lightly smoked salmon appetizer with local herbed goat cheese, perfectly fried latkes, a pile of lightly marinated fennel, and a delicate seafood stew. The Adam’s burger, piled with blue cheese, barbecue sauce, aioli, fried onion bits, and that house bacon, can hardly be described as delicate, but the balance wrought from all these big flavors makes it clear that a pro is running the kitchen.

Monroe’s location at the edge of Stevens Pass makes it a natural stop when heading out of, or back into, Seattle from points east. Though that burger, and the dessert menu, might warrant a special trip. —Allecia Vermillion

104 N Lewis St, Monroe, WA, 360-794-4056; adamsnwbistro.com

Image: LilKar/Shutterstock

The Newest Buzz
Salish Lodge Honey
Snoqualmie, WA

Last year the Snoqualmie Falls lodge enlisted 120,000 new staffers. They’re bees, producing golden honey for the hotel’s signature meals, cocktails, and spa treatments. And if that wasn’t sweet enough, the hotel has enlisted one Dr. Pepper—a relationship expert, not a can of soda—as a romance concierge. If you’re lucky (or sticky), she’ll even send a resident Bath Butler to your room.

6501 Railroad Ave SE, Snoqualmie, WA,
800-272-5474; salishlodge.com

Image: S.Borisov/Shutterstock

The Un–Tour Guide
Rick Steves My Way Tours
Europe

Just like Sinatra sang: He did it his way. Local travel guru Rick Steves embraced the Ol’ Blue Eyes philosophy for My Way tours, a new division of his guiding empire. No more hand-holding; the new programs provide hotel rooms and intercity bus travel over 11- to 14-day stretches, but little else. American tourists have responded in droves. What began with a single trip in 2011 has become a slate of almost two dozen 2012 departures to Western Europe.

Though city arrivals and departures are preplanned, My Way tourists have all day to sightsee by themselves. Rather than a guide, a Rick Steves representative holds “office hours” to recommend plans. Over a shared breakfast, independent couples sometimes pair up for the day; group bonding still happens during lengthy bus rides between, say, Venice and Lake Como. Hotels are selected for their proximity to local transport, so participants can still end up with a good story about how they survived the Paris metro. The My Way model extends to a Spain itinerary in 2013, since it turns out there are plenty of travelers loath to follow a pink umbrella.

425-608-4217; tours.ricksteves.com

The Shortest Course
Hotel 1000 Golf Simulator
Seattle, WA

Take a wrong turn in downtown’s Hotel 1000 and you’ll end up at Pebble Beach. Or Pinehurst. The screen and sensors of the virtual course transport two hitters at a time to famous greens—and even the real Pebble Beach doesn’t come with cocktail service.

1000 First Ave, Seattle, WA, 206-957-1000; hotel1000seattle.com

The Saltwater Soak
Shore Lodge
McCall, ID

Settle in to the granite walls of the saltwater immersion pools of Shore Lodge. Close your eyes and you’re in the Sun Valley of 20 years ago, or maybe the Lake Tahoe of 50 years ago. The time warp comes from the fact that McCall, Idaho, hasn’t yet hit resort-town overload, and the Shore manages to be both in the middle of town and somewhat remote.

A wooden boat available for rental is vintage too, dating back to the 1960s. The hotel’s name refers to its waterfront position on Payette Lake, and almost every room of the 77-suite lodge faces it. The spa’s saltwater pools run from inside to out, a better-than-real imitation of the springs that dot the Central Idaho Rockies. Skiing at nearby Brundage Mountain is as much a flashback as the uncrowded town; despite its powder, lift tickets are only $55. Take it from the moose head holding court in the Shore Lodge great room: Retro is back.

501 W Lake St, McCall, ID, 800-657-6464; shorelodge.com

Image: Courtesy Scott Thompson

The Room with a View
Maryhill Museum of Art
Goldendale, WA

There was a time when this stretch of Columbia Gorge real estate was, believe it or not, undesirable. Sam Hill tried to start a Quaker farming community on the sculpted bluffs but couldn’t recruit any farmers; good thing Folies Bergère dancer Loïe Fuller convinced him to convert his empty mansion into the Maryhill Museum of Art in 1940. Sixty years later, the museum had outgrown the concrete manor, leaving the room of Rodin sculptures battling for space with a coffee counter. Enter the $10 million Mary and Bruce Stevenson Wing last spring.

The shiny box and multiple stone terraces peekover to vineyards below and the rolling Columbia even farther below that. Plus, curators can now actually peruse their holdings, not leave them crammed in a closet. David Hockney’s Six Fairy Tales exhibit will visit the museum through November 15—turns out this Gorge-front property is in demand after all.

35 Maryhill Dr, Goldendale, WA, 509-773-3733; maryhillmuseum.org

Great Indie Bookstores

Image: Ethan Trewhitt

Powell’s Books
The granddaddy of all Northwest bookstores is renowned for its size, indie spirit, and solid city block of bookshelves. Portland, OR, powells.com

Elliott Bay Book Company
You don’t have to travel far for one of the Northwest’s best, a thriving business that survived a big move from Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill. Seattle, WA, elliottbaybook.com

Village Books
With artsy paper on sale and a regular local client base, the store represents the Fairhaven neighborhood it anchors. Bellingham, WA, villagebooks.com

Chapter One Bookstore
Hemingway once found a home in these snowy mountains; the shop still has a shelf devoted to him.Ketchum, ID, chapteronebookstore.com

Kidsbooks
Canada’s biggest children’s bookstore isn’t afraid to plaster itself with cool book posters or rave about teen favorites. Vancouver, BC, kidsbooks.ca

The Trippy Sleep
McMenamins Crystal Hotel
Portland, OR

It’s okay to feel off-kilter. Custom-painted ghostly trees, giant metronomes, even flaming race cars grace the headboards on the beds at Portland’s newest artsy hotel. Peek at your door for an explanation—every room is named for bands that performed in the nearby Crystal Ballroom. It’s fitting for a so-funky-it-hurts hotel where even the hallway lights are akimbo. Happy dreams!

303 SW 12th Ave, Portland, OR, 855-205-3930; mcmenamins.com

The New Minigolf
Skamania Lodge Putting Course
Stevenson, WA

Forget windmills, clown mouths, and loop-de-loops. The 18-hole putting course at Skamania Lodge is about perfecting your short game, even for neophytes who don’t know a sand wedge from a 9 iron. The scorecard says every real-grass tee is a par 2, but some of the trickiest holes are 60 feet long on hard-to-handle slopes.

1131 SW Skamania Lodge Way, Stevenson, WA, 800-221-7117; skamania.com

The Cheap Ride
BoltBus
Seattle; Portland; Vancouver, BC

“Bolt for a Buck,” reads the lettering on the back of the orange-red buses. One dollar? Yeah, right, says the skeptical traveler. But there really are rare $1 seats on BoltBus routes from Seattle to Portland or Vancouver, BC. Most fares are in the $10 to $25 range for each leg, dipping lower when booked more than a week out. The big draw is the free Wi-Fi—beat that, airlines—and car-free transport to city centers.

The Northeast import is based on the Chinatown buses that have popularized cheap motor links between New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. But our BoltBus is actually operated by its would-be competitor, Greyhound. BoltBus saves over that familiar carrier by skipping the, er, comfort of a bus station; the upstart picks up and drops off on street corners with little or no signage. It’s ideal for the last--minute cheap getaway, for when you’re willing to chance a nasty I-5 backup—the bus takes the same route as everyone else—but would rather update your Twitter feed than tap the brake yourself.

Fifth Ave S & King St, Seattle, WA, 877-265-8287; boltbus.com

Image: Courtesy Randall Statler

The Personal Souvenir
Postcardly
World Wide Web

Maybe your grandmother understands Instagram; maybe she religiously follows the vacation-photo Tumblr. But probably not. In a charming embrace of the old--fashioned, local company Postcardly turns emailed vacation photos into postcards—the real kind, made of actual paper and ink.

A Seattle quartet started the company for the most convincing reason there is, to alleviate grandmother guilt. In hopes of showing their older generations their smartphone baby pictures, they created a system where users simply register mailing addresses of family and friends, then email a message and a photo attachment to produce the hardcopy postcard. Stamps are included in the bulk or by-the-month packages, but cards cost about a dollar each. An app out this fall simplifies the process even further. Luddite grandmothers everywhere rejoice.

postcardly.com

The Sports Stop
Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena
Spokane, WA

It’s not the outside that counts—it’s the nonstop cheap sports being played inside Spokane’s biggest venue. Football tickets top out at $20 when the Shock play, and hockey seats start at $9. The Gonzaga men’s hoops team comes through every year, and when March Madness hits next year, women’s Elite Eight and Sweet Sixteen games will be played inside.

720 W Mallon Ave, Spokane, WA, 509-279-7000; spokanearena.com

Jim and Lou Whittaker

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 05:00:00 -0700

This much they agree on: The first time Jim and Lou Whittaker summited Mount Rainier, they both threw up. The twins were 16-year-old Boy Scouts in the summer of 1945, ascending via the Emmons Glacier with a few dozen others in the Seattle-based Mountaineers club. The sky was clear, but the two-day slog was harder than they expected. The underprepared boys were so dehydrated they melted snow in their mouths. Air is thin at 14,410 feet, and nausea is common “at elevation,” as climbers say.

But what happened next is still disputed some 67 years later.

“Mom had packed a bunch of grapes, and you’re so thirsty up there,” says Lou Whittaker, now 83. “I threw up the grapes, re-ate a few of them.” Gross, yes, but he was a teenage boy.

But Jim, his older-by-10-minutes brother, won’t confirm it, “You can’t believe everything Louie says. He wants to make a good story, and those are good stories.” In his own biography, in fact, Lou wrote that the gross anecdote was a “story [that] got around…but that’s not true.”

So did it happen? Who knows. For the Whittaker twins, two of the most prominent mountaineers the Northwest has ever produced, their reputation is paramount. The grotty summit story fits the mystique.

Jim’s and Lou’s lives have always been well documented, and they themselves are natural curators. Enter their spheres—Jim’s Port Townsend home, Lou’s Rainier-area motel—and they both point to photographs and say the same thing: “Know who that is?” For Jim it’s snapshots of him with John F. Kennedy, John Glenn, and Dwight Eisenhower. In Lou’s case, a framed photo of the twins with Robert Kennedy.

For all their similarities, the identical twins built Washington’s outdoor scene in two different ways. Jim, the more soft-spoken brother, was both the first American on Mount Everest and the quiet businessman who built REI. Lou, louder and happier in a crowd, was the king of Rainier climbing for more than 30 years. Whenever Northwesterners play in the mountains, they can thank the Whittakers.

Born in February 1929 to a Seattle alarm salesman and his homemaker wife, Jim and Lou lived a childhood that fell somewhere between Ozzie and Harriet and Peter Pan. With their older brother, Barney, they’d play in a sand pit on the shores of West Seattle, building rafts and lifting homemade weights made of concrete and coffee cans. “They were just normal, scrawny, screwy kids that did everything together,” says Barney, now 86. “Running madly around the yard wearing capes, pretending that they were Superman.” No, they didn’t fight over which one got to be the Man of Steel. “They were both Superman.”

All three took to the outdoors, prompted by a father who fished even while on sales trips. As teenagers, Jim and Lou were six-foot-five pillars, sharp-faced and slender, recruited by Seattle University with basketball scholarships. But ball sports were just a means to a tuition-paying end; by graduation they’d dropped hoops in favor of ski patrol work and Rainier guiding, profitable ways to live up to their mother’s mandate to “get outside and play.” They played outside so much that college took an extra year, but their mountain rescues earned them medals and letters of commendation.

Even then, they were managing their own reputation. They were horrified when Barney returned from the Pacific theater of World War II as a smoker; the twins wouldn’t allow him to stock up at the neighborhood grocery where they worked. “They didn’t want the store owner to know that their brother smoked cigarettes,” Barney says, laughing at the memory of his earnest little brothers.

The identical twins followed identical paths: both married young, within three years of each other; both graduated in 1952 and were immediately drafted. Instead of being deployed to Korea, the pair finagled teaching assignments at the Mountain and Cold Weather Training Command at Camp Hale in Colorado. Lou and Jim got a taste of following orders, but they weren’t taken with operating from the middle of a top-down system. “We learned to take orders from people who were not as competent as us,” says Lou. They didn’t like it, and eventually both found ways to avoid it. In doing so, the mirror twins—Lou right--handed, Jim left-handed—would split ways.

Jim

Though the same height as his twin, he’s known as Big Jim, and Barney considers him the more somber: “Jim is quieter and Louie is more gregarious, probably more life-of-the-party than Jim is.” That’s why the job offer he got from a climbing buddy in 1955 was so ideal. Five years previous, the twins had set off July Fourth bottle rockets with Lloyd Anderson from the edge of Rainier’s summit crater; now he wanted Jim to operate his outdoor gear store above a restaurant on Pike.

Jim and Lou as scouts in 1945

It was called the Co-op, a group Anderson had founded with friends, impatient with the shoddy domestic mountaineering gear in 1938 Seattle. The prices at Eddie Bauer were steep—a whopping $17.50 for a quality ice axe, while a similar tool could be ordered from Innsbruck, Austria, for only $3.50. It was the tail end of the Great Depression, and the mail-order collective was more akin to a CSA than a commercial enterprise. When the Co-op finally hired Jim to manage their tiny storage space and store, he would spend long hours alone among piles of down sleeping bags and boots shod with Tricouni nails. Drawn to the share-and-share-alike ethos of the co-op, Jim took $400 a month plus a half percent of gross sales. Within five years, the name morphed from the Co-op to Recreational Equipment Incorporated, or REI.

The outfitter was almost washed away in 1962, when during the World’s Fair a water main burst near the Co-op’s basement warehouse at Sixth and Pine. A settlement from the city helped, but a six-day Flood Sale righted the company, a forebear of the massive garage sales REI holds today.

Next to the pay and the access to gear, the best thing about the REI gig was that Jim could take time off. In 1963, he took a whopping four-month vacation, heading 7,000 miles to the highest point on earth.

They didn’t fight over which one got to be the Man of Steel. “They were both Superman.”

Mount Everest is 29,029 feet high—about as far above sea level as commercial airliners fly—and was especially daunting in 1963, when there were no ropes marking routes to the top. Acclimatization takes weeks, and the thin air causes more than a little vomit. Expeditions required hundreds of porters and dozens of skilled climbers to zigzag between remote camps for months. Those who actually made it to the top were less solo explorers and more like freelance astronauts; they reached summit orbit by a team effort.

Only two teams—one Swiss, one Chinese—had matched Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s 1953 summit feat. When Swiss filmmaker Norman Dyhrenfurth asked Jim and Lou to join an expedition to put the first American on Everest, both jumped at the chance. But while the team of 19 climbers, doctors, scientists, and documentarians trained, one key member dropped out: Lou.

Jim later wrote that he felt “betrayed” when his brother left the team. “It took a long time to get over it. Years,” he wrote. Lou was drawn more to a retail opportunity than the glory and, besides, he says, “I told Jim I’d take care of his kids if he didn’t make it, if he didn’t come back.” That moment, perhaps more than any other, set the mirror twins on separate courses.

After flying to Kathmandu and a monthlong hike to base camp, Jim and the team started endless trips up and down Everest’s ledges and ice falls, hauling dried rations and oxygen containers. “Salad. Green salad. Green salad was the one thing you dream of,” Jim says. “Women second.” One team member died in an early accident, putting them all on edge. After six weeks, Jim and Nawang Gombu, a nephew of Tenzing Norgay, reached the summit on May 1, 1963. The first American had made it.

Jim doesn’t think about that moment much; he’d rather picture the roof of the world through the eyes of his 27-year-old son Leif, who made it to Everest’s pinnacle for the second time this year. “They were sitting up there with no wind, no clouds,” Jim says. “You turn around, suck up air, and enjoy the view. You know, just sort of soak it in.” Jim had little time when he and Gombu summited, even though back then the South Col route was empty and otherworldly, not as crowded as a gold rush trail as it is today. But his two actions were ones of documentation: a photo, and picking up a rock to set in a signet ring.

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Stateside, Jim got a hero’s reception. He shook President Kennedy’s hand and received the Hubbard Medal from the National Geographic Society. Jim dates his political leanings back to that ceremony: “After Kennedy gave me that medal, I had to be a Democrat.”

JFK was assassinated several months later, but Jim guided his younger brother Robert up the northern Canadian peak that had been named for the president. A friendship was born, and soon Jim was running RFK’s Washington state campaign office. Robert reportedly talked of naming Jim as his Secretary of the Interior. Clusters of the Kennedy clan vacationed with both Lou and Jim, and the latter taught Caroline and John-John how to snowplow on skis. The families became chummy, Lou proposes, because “Bob was real enamored by athletes…[the Kennedys] were really competitive.” So were the Whittakers.

They were so close that when Robert was shot in the Ambassador Hotel, Jim flew to Los Angeles to hold the senator’s hand as he died. He was a pallbearer alongside astronaut John Glenn. In the rough months that followed, Lou took Robert’s son on as a guide at Mount Rainier as a favor to Robert’s widow, Ethel.

Other climbs followed for Jim, including two K2 expeditions where he played the role of coordinating team leader rather than summiteer. During that time, he divorced his first wife, then married Dianne Roberts, who accompanied him to elevations few women had ever achieved. On Earth Day in 1990, Jim led Soviet, Chinese, and American mountaineers on a Peace Climb up Everest. When they came to Rainier to train, the Tibetan Chinese climbers sauntered to Rainier’s top while smoking and chatting, wearing jeans and half-laced hiking boots.

Throughout the ’70s Jim’s day job was indoors at REI, where his notoriety brought attention to the fledgling retailer. By 1971 he was no longer the sole worker in a second-floor equipment shop; he was the president and CEO of a booming company. Seattleites bragged about their REI membership numbers—for those keeping score, Jim and Lou were members 647 and 648—and turned the synthetic fabrics of outdoor gear into a fashion statement. REI staffers numbered in the hundreds by 1975.

Jim made a major push toward environmental action, focusing on the trash outdoorsy people would leave behind. “I still get mad as hell that people are selfish enough to throw a beer can down in the middle of a nice day,” says Jim. He remembers the cleanups he helped organize more than the company growth, or the first branch store he opened in Berkeley. “I think every time somebody achieves something they owe a little bit somewhere, to something,” he says.

Jim retired from REI in 1979, at which point the co-op ethos had become a little less appealing; he left with no equity from the company. “I got $52,000 and a 30 percent discount for the rest of my life. That was my golden parachute,” he says. To this day, he visits the Seattle flagship for his preferred style of black turtlenecks, but he’s rarely recognized in the aisles. He and Dianne moved to Port Townsend where they devoted their days to sailing.

Jim’s boat is named for a philosophical French novel called Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures. The book, now out of print, is about trying to scale a mythical mountain much taller than Everest, one rooted in the real world but reaching into the heavens: “The Mountain is the connection between Earth and Sky. Its highest summit touches the sphere of eternity.” The name of the craft used to get to the peak, and Jim’s own sailboat, is Impossible.

Lou

In his compound in Ashford, just outside the confines of Mount Rainier National Park, Lou also quotes Mount Analogue. A passage from the book is engraved on a pillar that stands in front of his Whittaker’s Bunkhouse, a motel he built for the thousands of Rainier climbers who pass through the tiny town. His quote begins, “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again… So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below.”

Jim’s 1963 Everest summit

When Jim embraced REI’s co-op model and headed Everest-ward, Lou stayed with traditional retail. He worked at the prominent Seattle outdoor outfitter Osborn and Ulland, eventually opening his own store in Tacoma called Whittaker Chalet. But his heart remained where he and Jim had spent their college summers: Mount Rainier.

After serving as chief guide under the mountain’s main concessionaire for 14 years—being in charge on the glaciers but not in the front office—Lou formed Rainier Mountaineering Incorporated, or RMI, with a Tacoma lawyer in 1969. For more than 30 years, it served as the mountain’s sole professional guide company.

Lou himself was a monster on the mountain. He’d rope as many as a dozen clients behind him; today, in contrast, a crew of eight clients will ascend with a team of four professional guides. “Was it safer? There was nobody killed,” he says. “But the judgment calls you had to make were a little tougher, because I was alone.”

Those calls usually boiled down to one thing: when to turn around. “He just never climbed with a summit-at-all-costs attitude,” says Joe Horiskey, who was hired as a guide in 1968 and later became co-owner of RMI. “He’d just tell the clients, ‘Some days you eat the mountain, some days the mountain eats you.’”

When a single client was eaten by the effort of the two-day climb, Lou would stow him in a sleeping bag on the side of the mountain to wait for the rest of the party to return; after one client made a break downhill, the guides were known to confiscate a boot to discourage runaways. Lou’s sense of fairness dictated that those who hadn’t pooped out deserved a chance at the summit. Today strict park rules outright prohibit the “bag it and tag it” technique.

It was a fate met by hundreds, maybe even thousands, of RMI clients over the years, but Lou remembers one best. When he stashed one man just before the summit, the client burst into tears. He explained to Lou that he’d brought his lover’s ashes to be scattered from the top, but refused Lou’s offer to do it for him. When the party returned two hours later, the client—an artist, as it turned out—had sprinkled the ashes into a kind of snow mandala in the shape of a winged angel. “Just the detail, on the eyes, the wings with the feathers out. Oh god, it’s beautiful,” Lou says. “He was feeling that he failed, but I said, ‘You didn’t fail, this is beautiful. This is as pretty as the top.’” The anecdote is one of Lou’s go-tos; it’s in his book. But his voice still breaks when describing the ash angel.

For all his caution, Lou was cheerful, even adventurous, on the mountain. He climbed as an occupation, not for recreation, but could be playful on the job. During one overnight on -Rainier’s summit with clients, he explored the steam caves that honeycomb the top of the mountain. “[He] popped out on the north side of the crater with these stories about the passageways and rooms they had discovered under the crater,” says Horiskey. Few others would venture as deep as Lou, thrown by the dripping caverns that were as hot as a sauna on one side and freezing as ice on the other.

Sometimes mistaken for his brother—Horiskey stopped correcting clients who thought they were being led by the first American on Everest—Lou became his own kind of legend on Rainier. He showed off his agility on the glacier cliffs and ravinelike crevasses, sometimes leaping the same crevasse over and over again to allow each client to get a picture of him, legs bent like a long jumper and arms coiled with an ice ax in hand. He’d do it 20 or more times in a row.

Though the two were never as close as they’d been as children, the milestones of Lou’s and Jim’s lives ran parallel. They’d both married young; both divorced and married younger women. Jim had five sons, Lou two sons and a daughter.

When Lou bequeathed RMI on to his son Peter in the late ’90s, it was the only climbing concession on the mountain—people could climb independently, but no other guides could work Rainier’s flanks. The Whittaker dominance caused unhappy stirrings in the climbing community. “From the day I started work in June of ’68, you started hearing about ‘RMI guides think they own the mountain’ and ‘RMI’s a monopoly’ and ‘RMI herds clients to the summit,’” says Horiskey. “The idea that it was perceived as a monopoly couldn’t get out of some people’s craw, I guess.”

Former RMI guide Eric Simonson says, “There were always guides on the outside that were jealous, wanting a piece of the business.” The park opened the concession to bidding, and, in 2005, Simonson’s own International Mountain Guides, which he owned with climber George Dunn, got a slice of the pie, as did Seattle-based Alpine Ascents International. RMI was awarded the biggest piece, and still leads half of the paying customers who come to tackle Rainier.

In his retirement, Lou has settled into the role of Ashford’s godfather. Besides the Bunkhouse motel compound, his family owns cabins around town that he rents to RMI guides. Lou himself built a rock and log home that’s sunk several feet into the valley floor, equipped with shutters that secure it into a kind of bunker. The environmentally efficient design would also counter any destruction wrought by a Rainier eruption; Lou remembers the thick blanket of ash that coated the town when St. Helens blew in 1980.

His current project is a pond he built in the old-growth forest behind Whittaker’s Bunkhouse. It’s a memorial to RMI guides who’ve died over the years, most while climbing for fun. He traces the names inscribed on a boulder, reciting their fates: “Marty died on Everest in a fall, John in an avalanche on K2, Nancy in an avalanche…” It faces a bower made of rusting red and blue ice axes, where Lou has inscribed the names of climbers who met a noncalamitous end. There’s RMI Partner Jerry Lynch, Sherpa Nawang Gombu, even Ome Daiber, who first led Jim’s and Lou’s Boy Scout troop into the Cascades. The spot is the only American memorial for mountain climbers, at least that Lou knows of.

“You go out and do the adventures. And when it comes time to die, you know what it was to have lived. ‘You’ve warmed both hands by the fire of life,’” he says, quoting poet Walter Savage Landor. But Lou stresses his own addendum: “Not just one hand—you warmed both hands, and your buns, by the fire of life!”

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Jim and Lou at Paradise in 2009

The Twins

Lou summited Rainier some 250 times; Jim puts his own total at 79 or 80. Neither has made the climb recently, but both imagine a future attempt with their replacement knees. The record for the oldest summiteer is 84; “I could climb a mountain now, no doubt,” says Lou. “Maybe next year I’ll phone Jim and say, ‘Let’s do it now, beat the record.’”

It’ll be just one more appearance in the history books. Both have penned autobiographies, with Lou’s Memoirs of a Mountain Guide out in 1994 and Jim’s A Life on the Edge in 1999. Though both catalog professional lives, they address topics as personal as loss of virginity (why he married so young, wrote Lou) to temporary infertility (too much hot-tubbing for Jim).

“Don’t believe everything in it. There are 19 falsehoods in it that I counted,” says Jim of Lou’s tome; Lou hasn’t made a tally for his twin. Both do motivational speaking, with their respective stories calcified into teachable moments and crowd-pleasers. The publisher of Mountaineers Books, Helen Cherullo, notes that when one twin makes a book-signing appearance, he’ll find their books on the shelf and put his own cover out, turning his brother’s so only the spines show. “There’s a lot of playfulness, but you can see sparks of competitiveness,” she says.

On June 3, 2012, Jim and Lou Whittaker met at Paradise Inn, the century-old lodge on the skirt of Mount Rainier. They came to memorialize Sherpa Nawang Gombu, who after summiting Everest with Jim worked 18 seasons on Rainier with Lou.

There’s a slight curve to their shoulders—the brothers are on their ninth decade, after all—but Lou and Jim still stand above almost everyone in the hundred-person crowd. Lou is a little broader, perhaps, and Jim’s face a little leaner, but they have the same white hair, the same high forehead. They glad-hand their way through the tight fraternity of climbers and guides under strings of multicolored prayer flags. Both want to be liked and both tell stories while nudging the listener with a foot, a conspiratorial gesture.

Jim and Lou hustle as they did 60 years ago, when the two strapping young twins would hawk their guide services to the crowd of tourists in this hotel lobby. In crisp white button-ups and armbands that read “MOUNTAIN GUIDE,” one would stand on the other’s shoulders to demonstrate climbing techniques on these same wooden pillars and beams. They charged $28 for a two-day ascent to the summit, $5 for a tour of the Nisqually Glacier’s ghostly ice caves. In 1950, when the twins operated the Rainier climbing concession, only 238 people attempted to climb Rainier, with or without the guide service. The ice cave trips were the real moneymaker.

Those ice caves have long since melted away, and, in 2010, 10,643 people tried to summit Rainier. Spots in the guided climbs, with RMI and the other services, regularly sell out by March. At the Gombu tribute, almost everyone, including the Whittakers, wore the kind of synthetic vests and down pullovers popularized by REI. They don’t have to sell anything anymore—climbs, gear, themselves—but the twins are still working the room at Paradise.

Around 9pm, Lou returns from a peek outside and announces, “The mountain is out!” Everyone knows what that means, and the crowd dutifully files out to see the purple sunset reflected onto Rainier’s southern face. When the Whittakers tell you where to go, you go.

Road Trips 2012

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Patrick Kehoe

Luxbus provided and driven by Luke Dorny

The Northwest has the best stretches of blacktop in the world: We can cross mountain passes and trace deserted shoreline, even motor up to the world’s best farm-to-table feast. All it takes is a full tank.

British Columbia Road Trip

Such Great Heights

Central Washington Road Trip

Geology Rocks

Oregon Road Trip

The Solitary Coast

Alaska Road Trip

North on the Alcan

Lummi Island Road Trip

Destination Dinner at the Willows Inn

Golf Getaways

Central Washington Road Trip

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Scott Butner

Lake Lenore Caves

2 Days | 455 Miles Round Trip *

Let's get one thing out of the way: “The Scablands” is a terrible name. Central Washington’s most dramatic geology got the short end of the nomenclature stick when it was dubbed the Channeled Scablands by some unpoetic scientist. The nasty name labels an area of flood discharge routes carved by a post–ice age flood some 14,000 years ago. “They are channeled, and they look like scabs,” shrugs University of Washington earth scientist Mike Harrell. “It’s not the most attractive name, but it’s descriptive.”

Good thing these scabs are gorgeous.

Just after I-90 crosses the Columbia River and before it hits the plains for Moses Lake, take an unassuming exit at George and head northeast on a quintessential country highway—you can hit 80 miles per hour, but keep an eye out for anything John Deere green on the shoulder. When you’ve hit the town of Soap Lake, you’re at the beginning of the state’s best-kept geologic secret.

In the early 1900s, ailing pilgrims came to Soap Lake’s mineral waters for their healing properties. Frothy white suds gather on the lake’s shoreline like snowdrifts—the water itself has sodium, bicarbonate, sulfate, and ichthyol—but it was the goopy black mud that worked wonders on circulatory diseases. Mineral waters are pumped directly to in-room bathtubs at the hundred-year-old Inn at Soap Lake. To bring tourists back to Soap Lake, the town has undergone a decade-long campaign to erect a 50-foot lava lamp—no progress as yet.

From here the land speaks louder than anything groovy that humans could build. Crumbly cliffs line a valley heading northeast, with lakes or brushy land in between. There are few trees and fewer buildings to block the rocky shelf walls, which glow ochre in the sun. A partially paved trail climbs up one side to the Lake Lenore caves, a series of shallow indentations that dent the cliffs like thumbprints. People occupied them 5,000 years ago; envy their Scabland view.

Image: Andre Mora

Grand Coulee Dam

Between geologic wonders are small collections of retiree homes, farms, and small towns like Coulee City that sell farm threshers but no Big Macs. Weather-beaten roadside motels would be at home in an Eagles song or have been abandoned altogether. Eventually the land gives way to acre-wide rocks the shape of Southwestern mesas: Squint at the ravines at Dry Falls State Park and you’ll see a miniature Grand Canyon. This used to be a massive waterfall that put Niagara to shame; it wore down the basalt beneath itself, eroding a 20-mile indentation called a coulee.

A few miles north is the biggest coulee of them all, Grand Coulee, close to the state’s hydroelectric power-house. Webs of electric cable spread from the aptly named Electric City, but the Sunbanks Lake Resort is smartly positioned to get an unobstructed vista of flat-topped Steamboat Rock. Its tiny resort homes are the rare local accommodation above the level of RV park.

Finally you’re at the Grand Coulee Dam itself, a wide concrete wall squatting on the Columbia River. It’s a different kind of cliff, smoother than the dimpled surfaces of the Scablands. It’s wetter, too, with orderly lines of river water trickling down its face. The country’s largest single power generator is a mile wide and 550 feet high, and is one of the biggest things we humans have ever made out of concrete. Funny, then, that even this monumental achievement is dwarfed by geology. And it’s geology hardly anyone has even heard of, with a cruddy-sounding name like the Scablands.

Image: Andre Mora

Sun Lakes–Dry Falls State Park

SLEEP

Inn at Soap Lake
226 Main Ave E, Soap Lake, Washington,
509-246-1132; innsoaplake.com

Sunbanks Lake Resort
57662 Hwy 155 N, Electric City, Washington,
509-633-3786; sunbanksresort.com

Grand Coulee Dam
1 Stevens Ave, Coulee Dam, Washington,
509-633-9265; www.usbr.gov/pn/grandcoulee

Steamboat Rock State Park
51052 Hwy 155, Electric City, Washington,
888-226-7688; parks.wa.gov

Sun Lakes–Dry Falls State Park
34875 Park Lake Rd NE, Coulee City, Washington,
888-226-7688; parks.wa.gov

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Central Washington Side Trips

Gingko Petrified Forest State Park Besides the basalt walls of the Columbia Gorge, the view includes petrified wood and petroglyphs that are hundreds of years old. The peace sign is probably relatively new, though. 4511 Huntzinger Rd, Vantage, 888-226-7688; parks.wa.gov

Gorge Amphitheatre The hills are alive with the sound of Dave Matthews and other rock acts. The outdoor concert venue and its spectacular river views host the annual Sasquatch! festival, among others. 754 Silica Rd, Quincy, 509-785-6262; livenation.com

*All distances measured from Seattle.

Oregon Road Trip

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 05:00:00 -0700

Photo: Dennis Hallinan/Alamy

North Head Lighthouse

3 Days | 578 Miles Round Trip *

I PULLED UP to the edge of the world around seven o’clock. It was as dark as the inside of a trash bag, but thankfully, someone had left a light on—a big one. Cape Disappointment’s North Head Lighthouse twirled its beam just a quarter mile from my accommodations: a 110-year-old, three-bedroom home that once sheltered the lighthouse keeper and his family, but has since been renovated to outfit up to six guests.

But tonight it’s just me—and the ghost.

My Kia Sportage had been shaking like a popcorn maker all the way from Seattle, over uneven roads and up and down the hilly Pacific Coast Highway to the southwesternmost corner of the state. I didn’t panic until the car battery died right outside the lighthouse residence, with no cell reception and miles between me and another human being.

Sturdier souls would call this the perfect place for escape, quiet contemplation, and recuperation. I feel like I’ve checked into Tech Addict Rehab. The house is stately with its hardwood floors, crown molding, and tricked-out kitchen with an oversize Kenmore fridge that could hold a wild boar. Families arrive at the historic space with full grocery bags and their hiking boots, or with wedding planners and bouquets of flowers. I have half a turkey sub and a 24-ounce bottle of Corona from the gas station.

“Experienced a few bumps in the night,” reported one visitor in the journal on the coffee table. Another entry told of seeing a white flash fall from the lighthouse at midnight—allegedly the spirit of a woman who leapt to her death when she learned her love was lost at sea. Yet another more elaborate tale came from a man who recalled seeing the shade of a woman cradling a baby gliding down the stairs.

I slept with the lights on.

In daylight, Cape Disappointment is anything but. A gravel path cuts through a swath of ferns and Sitka spruces cling to the cliffside, where the North Head Lighthouse stands sentry. Grassy bluffs slope down to long, flat beaches, and, beyond that, miles of open water. A second, even older lighthouse is just south on the Columbia River.

Photo: Darrell Gulin/Getty

Cape Meares

The car eerily restarts without a jump, and I head for Highway 101 into Oregon, looking for a crowd. The so-called Graveyard of the Pacific—because of its countless shipwrecks—is always to my right, along with views that rival California’s Highway 1. Towering Haystack Rock (aka Goonies Rock) appears suddenly on a turn near Cannon Beach, and a 300-year-old “octopus tree,” with eight limbs rising from its base, lures drivers off the beaten path to Cape Meares. But a rock and a tree don’t make good company.

I find the perfect spot: a surfer’s cove at Cape Kiwanda in Pacific City, 100 miles south of empty Cape Disappointment. Solace comes in a pint of Tsunami Stout from the beachside Pelican Pub and Brewery. With my feet in the sand—yes, you can haul your beer to the beach—I finally relax. There’s nary a ghost around.

SLEEP

Cape Disappointment Lighthouse Keepers’ Residence
North Head Lighthouse, Cape Disappointment State Park, Ilwaco, Washington,
360-642-3078; parks.wa.gov/vacationhouses

Inn at Cape Kiwanda
33105 Cape Kiwanda Dr, Pacific City, Oregon,
503-965-7001; innatcapekiwanda.com

Photo: Courtesy Pelican Pub and Brewery

Pelican Pub and Brewery

EAT

Pelican Pub and Brewery
33180 Cape Kiwanda Dr, Pacific City, Oregon,
503-965-7007; pelicanbrewery.com

Haystack Rock at Tolovana Beach
One mile south of Cannon Beach, Oregon, off Highway 101,
oregonstateparks.org

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Oregon Side Trips

Heceta Head Lighthouse Breakfasts are seven courses at this B&B, housed in buildings that date back to 1894. 92072 Hwy 101, South Yachats, Oregon, 541-547-3696; hecetalighthouse.com

Oregon Coast Scenic Railroad The steam engine does a scenic tour of the Tillamook Bay area, with some rides offering a four-course meal along the way. Garibaldi Depot, 402 S American Way, Garibaldi, Oregon, 503-842-7972; ocsr.net

Three Capes Loop Forty miles, three capes, two lighthouses, and one octopus tree: It’s a winding half-day break from Highway 101. Start at Cape Meares, 10 miles west of Tillamook, Oregon, off Highway 101, 800-551-6949; oregonstateparks.org

*All distances measured from Seattle.

Lummi Island Road Trip

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 05:00:00 -0700

Photo: Courtesy Willows Inn

3 Days | 216 Miles Round Trip *

When a gastronome travels to Lummi Island through the fertile Skagit Valley, it’s not so much a road trip as it is culinary foreplay. Ditch I-5 north of Burlington to follow State Route 11 through Bow-Edison—a connoisseur’s dream of apple orchards and artisan cheesemakers and aromatic bakeries—to arrive at the ferry dock via the oyster-bedded Chuckanut Drive.

A person could work up a serious appetite driving to the Willows, the renovated inn and dinner house on sleepy Lummi Island. The place sits a bucolic 10 minutes from the ferry dock, along a road fringed with snowberries and rosehips and blissfully underpopulated with cars (whose occupants, perhaps from sheer novelty, wave at everyone who passes). It has housed guests under various ownership for a century, but finally seized a planet’s attention last winter when The New York Times declared it one of the world’s “10 Restaurants Worth a Plane Ride.” The reason was chef—and new co-owner—Blaine Wetzel, the 26-year-old wunderkind who apprenticed at Noma in Copenhagen, which San Pellegrino named the World’s Best Restaurant the last two years running.

We parked bags in our charming farmhouse guestroom and returned to the lobby to warm ourselves by its oversize fireplace. Once settled in the view dining room, out came the great chef himself to personally deliver our first course. It’s startling; he looks more like an apple-cheeked kid from Olympia than a world-class gastronome. As it turns out, he’s both.

Wetzel placed a cedar box before us, shyly describing the sustainable reefnet fishing methods of a local boat that yielded the contents, then swung open the lid to unleash a cloud of savory smoke from buttery slabs of smoked salmon. Mellow and rich, they rounded into sweetness on the palate; a luscious kickoff to the parade of eight or so unbilled Northwest “snacks” Wetzel has become so famous for.

A little plate of salmon roe, cured in house and served on a crispy crepe. Island-foraged shoots and herbs and island-harvested carrots and radishes served in a garden basket whimsically filled with “dirt” of hazelnut crumbles and toasted malt. Spot prawns dredged from the sea out the window, topped with a tart currant granita and a balancer of bitter greens from the beach across the road. Two quivering Shigoku oysters from Samish Bay—the bay you gaped at from Chuckanut—delivered in their smooth, deep cups on a bed of cold rocks beneath tender tears of lemony sorrel, that prolific Northwest weed.

Photo: Courtesy Willows Inn

Chef Blaine Wetzel

If the ancients slurped their oysters while foraging the forest floor, they tasted this very combination. As in a few rare places and moments in time—the seaside Sooke Harbour House on Vancouver Island, the Herbfarm’s original garden shed in Woodinville—dining at the Willows imbues diners with the heady illusion that they are not simply eating Northwest bounty; they are merging with its essence.

And we hadn’t even started in on dinner yet.

Two hours, five courses. Oh, the rods of roasted celery root with hazelnuts and horseradish mousse, the steaky braised radicchio with winter stems and bread salad, the slow-roasted Skagit River Ranch beef cheek with grilled onions and green onion sauce. Two unbilled pauses for bread and cheese and five expertly matched wines later, we understood the hype. This blushing chef not only landscapes each plate with the edible soul of Cascadia—by way of the smoked fish and pickled vegetables of Scandinavia—he does so with the instinct for balance and composition that marks the great ones. The remodel that closed the inn for most of this spring has brought a renovated kitchen and a new outdoor stone hearth and grill.

As we licked the last drops of rose hip ice cream from our spoons, a diner across the room leapt to his feet and burst into applause. Never in nearly 30 years of reviewing restaurants have I seen that. After, I pulled Wetzel aside to ask him about it; he replied with vague humility that it almost never happens.

Photo: Courtesy Willows Inn

“Oh, Blaine gets a standing ovation at least once a week,” the wine steward confided later. I’d call that worth a plane ride. I’d even call it worth a road trip.

SLEEP/EAT

The Willows Inn
2579 W Shore Dr, Lummi Island,
888-294-2620; willows-inn.com

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Lummi Island Side Trips

Nettles Farm A short uphill trek from the restaurant is one of the farms operated by the inn that feeds the Willows table. Kales and cabbages, leeks and herbs, squawking chickens and dormant beehives—it’s all there, along with “forage with the sous chef” outings for inn guests, at no extra charge. 4300 Matia View Dr, Lummi Island, 360-758-7616; nettlesfarm.com

*All distances measured from Seattle.

Golf Getaways

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 05:00:00 -0700

Photo: Courtesy Pronghorn Club and Resort

Pronghorn Club and Resort

BEND, OREGON

A Week at Pronghorn

Pronghorn Club and Resort  
65600 Pronghorn Club Dr, Bend, Oregon.  
866-372-1003; pronghornclub.com

656 Miles

THE AROMA THAT permeates Pronghorn isn’t gin, it’s juniper. The resort sits in the middle of 20,000 acres of the high desert trees, so the woody, tangy smell of it hangs in the air. On a clear day you can see past the outdoorsy mecca of Bend to Mount Bachelor, where ski lifts run to its peak.

Builders peppered the golf course with ghost juniper trees, dried and dead but beautifully twisted wood. Superstar designer Jack Nicklaus created lines so clean that groundskeepers trim the bunkers with scissors. The fairways on the par 72 are narrow and take no prisoners, but they’re entirely made of bent grass—every inch as lush as a putting green. A more rustic Tom Fazio–crafted course is open only to Pronghorn homeowners, but it’s worth a stroll to the exposed lava cave on its signature eighth hole.

Between the rocks and the juniper trees, you’ll never forget you’re in Central Oregon, a dry landscape that gets consistent sun (if not warmth). Pronghorn’s stone clubhouse, built in the booming -early 2000s, is a maze of dining rooms, fire-places, and locker rooms with subterranean hot tub chambers. Resort accommodations run as big as four bedrooms, complete with kitchens and dining rooms.

The six-hour drive from Seattle is a treat—once you get halfway, that is. Off of I-5 and crossing Mount Hood’s flank, drivers can watch the trees turn from western Douglas fir to eastern Ponderosa pine. Even after reaching Pronghorn property, there are still a few miles of twisty drive; this last stretch of road darts and weaves as though the path had been traced by a drunk cowboy. Never mind the disorientation. Just continue into the juniper, and you’ll hit a tee box eventually.

SHELTON

A Weekend  at Salish Cliffs

Little Creek Casino Resort  91 W State Route 108, Shelton, Washington,  
360-427-7711; little-creek.com

150 Miles

Do golfers and gamblers share a neurosis? Both pursuits require thought, patience, luck, and—admit it—a measure of masochism. So it’s perfectly reasonable that one of the state’s booming casinos would add a high-quality course to its offerings. The Little Creek Casino Resort complex is a 90-minute drive to the wooded lands of the Squaxin Island Tribe, just northwest of Olympia.

Already host to the usual Tony Orlando concerts and boxing tournaments, in September Little Creek opened its Salish Cliffs Golf Course to fanfare that included an appearance by Seattle golf legend Fred Couples. The links sprawl over 320 acres in the Kamilche Valley, so the shared double green at the ninth and eighteenth holes is to add a fun dash of deja vu, not to save space. Like most gambling halls, the casino itself is full of smoke and flashing lights, with postgolf dining available in a handful of casino restaurants. And you can always go hit the blackjack tables and keep an eye out for Tony Orlando.

TACOMA

A Day at Chambers Bay

Chambers Bay 
6320 Grandview Dr W, University Place, Washington,
877-295-4657; chambersbaygolf.com

82 miles

It's 39 months until Father’s Day 2015, when the U.S. Open will be played in our own backyard. Since it will mark the tournament’s first visit to Chambers Bay Golf Course, or even to the Pacific Northwest, the Pierce County–owned links were immediately catapulted into notoriety. Meaning it got a lot harder to score a tee time in University Place, though it’s far from impossible.

Chambers Bay sits less than an hour south of Seattle, built in 2007 atop a former quarry. You risk Tacoma Mall traffic just to reach the clubhouse, but the waterfront location offers views of Puget Sound and McNeil Island. Even before Open renovations, the public links are ideal for anyone who loses Titleists in the woods or bonks drives off tree trunks—the course has but a single tree.

Escape from Mount Rainier

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 04:00:00 -0800

Photo: Shutterstock

Courtesy of Chris Skiles

"THE CHOPPER SWOOPS back over us, and drops a coffee cup that reads: “A ranger has been shot shooter at large. Call on cell if able to Pierce Co sheriff.” So we hurry even more to get out. An hour later cup no. 2 comes: “Take road to falls and sheriff deputies. We will keep an eye on you. Do not drive from Paradise w/o armed escort….” At this point, we are all pretty worried, since we have nothing but snow shovels and we are having paranoid visions of a sniper bearing down on us. As we just turn the bend in the road, we run into the U.S. Forest Tactical team sent out to get us. They are all armed with assault rifles, camo and enough gear to keep them out for a few long days. As we meet them they get a radio call that the shooter has been found, facedown in a stream dead. They escort us back to the end of the road just above Narada Falls where the ranger’s truck is. Bullet holes and everything."

—Natalia Martinez-Paz, from a blog post on NWHikers.net, regarding the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Mount Rainier park ranger Margaret Anderson by Benjamin Colton Barnes on January 1, 2012

Storm Watching on the Oregon Coast

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0800

Photo: Courtesy Justin Larson

Terrible Tilly The Tillamook Head lighthouse bears the brunt of Oregon’s storm waves.

“IT IS GOING TO RAIN BUCKETS AND BLOW to 60 miles per hour.” How’s that for a vacation forecast? Perfect, actually, when you’re going storm watching.

One day later, I’m getting sandblasted on a deserted stretch of the Oregon beach, with nothing but dunes, waves, and a single pickup truck in sight. The wind whips my hair into a ropey mess, the rain falls in sheets from every possible direction. That forecast, from a local weather buff, was right on the money.

When You Go

Sleep

The Ocean Lodge
2864 S Pacific St, Cannon Beach,
253-238-8000; theoceanlodge.com

Stephanie Inn Hotel
2740 S Pacific St, Cannon Beach,
503-436-2221; stephanieinn.com

Eat

Dooger’s Seafood and Grill
1371 S Hemlock St, Cannon Beach,
503-436-2225; doogersseafood.com

Lazy Susan Cafe
126 N Hemlock St, Cannon Beach,
503-436-2816; lazy-susan-cafe.com 

Mo’s Restaurant
195 Warren Way, Tolovana Park,
503-436-1111;  moschowder.com

Newmans at 988
988 S Hemlock St, Cannon Beach,
503-436-1151;  newmansat988.com

Norma’s Ocean Diner
20 N Columbia St, Seaside,
503-738-4331;  normasoceandiner.com

Tsunami Sandwich Company
11 Broadway St, Seaside,
503-738-5427;  tsunamisandwiches.com

Do

Coaster Theatre Playhouse
108 N Hemlock St, Cannon Beach,
503-436-1242; coastertheatre.com

Oregon Storm Tours
oregonstormtours.com

Storm-watching vacations begin online, but not on Orbitz. The National Weather Service in Portland is the authority on the coastline, updating a color-coded map with conditions from Florence, halfway down the Oregon coast, to Washington’s Long Beach peninsula. Today it sports the hot pink of a Gale Warning, the dusty rose of a Small Craft Advisory, and the burnt orange of a High Wind Watch.

I’m 25 miles south of where the Columbia River dumps into the Pacific, in Cannon Beach. Once a struggling logging town sitting under picturesque Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach has adopted the art-colony feel of California’s Carmel-by-the-Sea. Its well-appointed beach houses would be at home on Cape Cod, and the flashiest spot is the tony Coaster Theatre Playhouse, which puts on crowd-pleasers year-round like Annie Get Your Gun and Boeing-Boeing. Eight miles north, Seaside bustles with all the trappings of a shore retreat—saltwater taffy purveyors, a boardwalk, fast food.

From May to September, the sands fill with the usual summer crowds, but in the wet winter months the towns settle into seasonal hibernation. To popularize winter travel on the stormy coast, local businessman David Posalski opened a guide business in 2010 called Oregon Storm Tours. He is optimistic that Cannon Beach and Seaside can become two-season towns, and he hopes to convince hoteliers to give away winter rooms to avid weather nuts. “All the news outlets head down here to report on just how bad the weather is,” he says, pointing out a news van setting up on the streets of Seaside. “If we can change the paradigm to just how good it is, we can really make this the center for storm watching.”

With gale warnings and a high-wind watch in effect, I scramble onto the leather seats of Posalski’s F150—an extended-cab behemoth of a truck—and he drives straight onto the abandoned beach. Oregon’s coastline is 350-plus miles of flat sand and imposing headlands (remember The Goonies?), and it’s all public land. What’s more, it’s a public road. In 1913, the state legislature declared the oceanfront a state highway. Now it’s technically a state recreation area, but it’s still perfectly legal to motor down the beach.

From inside the car, it’s hard to appreciate just how hard it’s blowing outside. The shore’s stout trees and shrubs are built for the wind, and they barely shiver in strong gusts. Exiting the truck, I have to hold the pickup’s door to keep from being blown over. “Don’t smile,” Posalski instructs as we wander over dunes to a shipwreck—an open mouth means a grill full of sand. But it’s hard not to light up at the sight of the Peter Iredale, the metal rib cage of a ship that grounded here more than a century ago.

This corner of Oregon is crowded, historywise; just inland is Fort Clatsop, the end point to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Best for storm seekers is the jetty at Fort Stevens, which emerges like a fingernail at the mouth of the Columbia River. On a viewing platform above the jetty, you’re almost a mile closer to the breaking waves than you would be on the beach. There’s a good reason this is the final stop on Posalski’s tours; it feels like being inside a hurricane. Spray reaches two stories into the air, and seals play in the surf.

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Photo: Courtesy Martin Hospitality/Stephanie Inn

Storm Proof The Stephanie Inn offers a dry view of Haystack Rock.

As yet, Posalski is the only one leading outings like this. Storm appreciation doesn’t require a guide, however, and from December through April, you can’t do much better—or much gustier—than the turnoff in the dizzyingly high heights of Neahkahnie Mountain, about a dozen miles south of Cannon Beach. Ecola State Park on Cannon Beach’s northern edge has the best view of the decommissioned Tillamook Rock lighthouse, perched more than a mile offshore on a tiny lump of rock. It’s at its most dramatic during storms, when crashing surf can cover the 96-foot-high structure. Terrible Tilly, as it’s called, was most recently a columbarium, a depository for cremated remains, so it belongs to the ghosts now.

NOT ALL STORM watching needs to be done in the rain. At the beach-facing rooms of the Ocean Lodge in Cannon Beach, gas fireplaces are ideally positioned for seaside cuddling. A bigger hearth in the lobby gives off the aroma of wood fire, a scent perfectly suited to the wailing winds outside. Next door, the Stephanie Inn is decked out in even swankier furnishings, plus it hosts nightly wine tastings and nightcaps. Bathrooms hold Jacuzzi tubs with the dimensions of a lap pool (okay, more like the size of a double bed), and both hotels boast bottomless cookie jars in the lobby.

Given all this wind and rain, these parts do strong trade in clam chowder. Some swear by Dooger’s Seafood and Grill, a local minichain with chowder that’s mostly meat. Others prefer the creamier consistency at Norma’s Ocean Diner in Seaside. Or you can bypass the two big guns in favor of Mo’s, as Bill Gates did on a solo shore jaunt last fall. Posalski, for his part, serves Ivar’s chowder in his Seaside sandwich shop, Tsunami Sandwich Company, to the glee of visiting Seattleites.

Fine dining in Cannon Beach is done at Stephanie Inn’s own restaurant or the continental Newmans at 988. Marion-berry scones are plate size at the Lazy Susan Cafe, a charming breakfast spot that welcomes diners, sort of, with a sign that reads, “Be Nice or Leave.”

STORM WATCHING IS NOT ALL CUTE rain boots and frolicking seals. Common sense dictates that cliffs are off limits during heavy winds. Not even kamikaze-crazy surfers should try the water during foul weather; pairs of so-called “sneaker waves” sync together and instantly double their height. Day-after walks reveal the coast’s best bounty, the flotsam and jetsam blown ashore. After the sneaker waves come the sneakers: Every local has found a running shoe or two in the sand. They’re lost cargo from ocean barges—a ship dumped 80,000 shoes once—but it’s hard not to imagine lost Nikes returning to their Oregon homeland like spawning salmon. Glass Japanese floats are the prized treasures of the beachcomber, especially those dating back to the early twentieth century.

On the sunny morning after my midsize storm, however, all I find on the foamy beach is a bottle of Chateau Ste. Michelle riesling. Empty—I checked.

Northwest Travel

Architectural Gems That Are Vacation Rentals

Northwest Travel Awards

Great Waterfalls

Great Northwest Plates

Great Indie Bookstores

Jim and Lou Whittaker

Road Trips 2012

British Columbia Road Trip

Such Great Heights

Central Washington Road Trip

Geology Rocks

Oregon Road Trip

The Solitary Coast

Alaska Road Trip

North on the Alcan

Lummi Island Road Trip

Destination Dinner at the Willows Inn

Golf Getaways

Central Washington Road Trip

Oregon Road Trip

Lummi Island Road Trip

Golf Getaways

A Week at Pronghorn

A Weekend at Salish Cliffs

A Day at Chambers Bay

Escape from Mount Rainier

Storm Watching on the Oregon Coast

When You Go

Sleep

Eat

Do

A Weekend  at Salish Cliffs