Things to Hear in Washington Before You Die (or Leave)

For over a decade until a 2024 renovation, the Bavarian town’s signature attraction sounded like pigeons. Birds had taken up residence in the little cubby atop Leavenworth’s Tannenbaum building, but locals cleaned them out and repaired the 1960s mechanism, whose little doors opened every hour to reveal dancing wooden figurines. Catch it on Front Street just uphill from München Haus. 

Two decades ago, an acoustic ecologist designated a tiny bit of Olympic National Park the One Square Inch of Silence, promoting how little noise pollution reached the rainforest more than three miles up a hiking trail. Of course, the critters and cracking branches of the thick wilderness make their own ruckus, so here the sound of silence is more accurately nature’s symphony.  

Like a PE teacher who has a whistle and isn’t afraid to use it, mountain marmots earn their whistle-pig nickname by splitting eardrums in the alpine. Easily heard in the meadows of Mount Rainier, the insistent screech is at charming odds with the animal’s plump bodies and penchant for sunbathing.

You feel it as much as hear it when experts use explosive charges to intentionally send mountain snow rushing downhill. Avalanche control work is done on the cross-state highway at Stevens Pass, and on ski slopes at Crystal Mountain. It’s a reminder of how powerful Washington’s nature can be—and what we can do to control it, if just for a moment.

A lot of good music has soaked into the rocky landscape of the Gorge at George, the humble hillside auditorium that has grown into a massive outdoor concert venue. Joni Mitchell made her triumphant return at nearly 80 years old there, and Dave Matthews Band almost always sets up shop onstage for Labor Day. Tunes just hit different when they echo off the banks of the Columbia River.