Texans have their star, Californians have their bear. Since Washington’s state flag is a bit of a snooze, the banner known as the Cascadia Doug Flag is our best regional logo. Developed in Portland in the 1990s, it rocks the signature colors and fir tree of the woodsy half of the state, though it’s not largely embraced by Washington’s eastern half.

This Columbia Gorge mansion was turned into an art repository thanks to local highway proponent Samuel Hill—who got assists from, of all people, a pioneering modern dancer and the then–Queen of Romania. Eclectic and a bit eccentric, the Maryhill Museum of Art our most highbrow of oddities.

Hundreds of years ago, a mudslide buried an Indigenous settlement on the Pacific Coast; archaeologists dug up artifacts that made their way to the tribal museum, illuminating what life was like in the Northwest before European contact. Even the statues outside, towering welcome figures in cedar hats, make an impact.

As a tour bus cruises through one of Central Washington’s emptiest, most placid landscapes, it passes yellow Columbia Basin grasslands dotted by only a few buildings here and there. But when the vehicle pulls up to the B Reactor, its smokestack rising high above the blocky concrete buildings, history hangs heavy in the dry air. This is a tour about more than sights.

In the middle of World War II, the US Army Corps of Engineers selected this almost-empty desert for the classified Manhattan Project. Thousands of workers arrived on the Hanford site to complete a mysterious project, fully understood by only a few individuals. They constructed a reactor—on a scale that had never been built before—to create an element that had never existed before. Locals learned the truth August 1945 when the United States dropped Little Boy and Fat Man, the world’s first nuclear bombs used in war, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The plutonium for Fat Man, which killed as many as 75,000 people, was made in the B Reactor. 

More than 80 years later the land remains a gated government facility, and the only way for most people to see it is through tours operated by the US Department of Energy and National Park Service. Outings departing from the Tri-Cities pass the various elements that were added to the Hanford Site after the B Reactor: now-shuttered power-generating nuclear reactors, nuclear waste storage, complex cleanup projects, and a scientific observatory that uses gravitational wave vibrations to decipher outer space. A special pre–World War II tour also covers Indigenous settlements and the prewar towns uprooted by the work.

Though the guided tours are the best way to see this strange historic sector of the state, one side of the reservation is bordered by a long free-flowing section of the Columbia River known as the Hanford Reach. Kayak trips take in the White Bluffs and distant reactor buildings, plus all the birds and mule deer who don’t know they’re crossing into off-limits government land.

While financial mismanagement led to the closure of many of the historic facilities at the Olympic Peninsula state park, the big concrete batteries still stand. Built to house massive military guns and ammunition, they’re an adult-size combo of a haunted house and jungle gym. Climb, explore, and holler down a dark tunnel to see if ghosts answer back.

Not just anyone can wander into the crater of America’s most infamous volcano, but hiking tours led by the Mount St. Helens Institute have special permission to enter the delicate landscape of lava beds and pumice fields. Guides explain how the crater has evolved since the iconic 1980 eruption, growing and crumbling into St. Helens’s next shape.

The perplexing sight of bump after bump in the prairie south of Olympia has long inspired theories of what made the tiny hills—gophers, glaciers, or even UFOs. Short trails, some paved, through the Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve put nature’s enigma up for inspection.