Topic: Recreation
During the first decades of the twentieth century, Pine Lake in Sammamish was a featured attraction for early settlers of the Sammamish Plateau. Until suburban sprawl reached the area in the 1970s, th...
Hailed by its three owners as a place "to banish jaded nerves, nagging thoughts and worries, and to apply instead wholesome recreation and relaxation," Playland, a 12-acre "million dollar pleasure res...
Pritchard Island, a small island on the southwest shore of Lake Washington, was the site of a Duwamish Indian village known as tleelh-chus ("little island") for generations before the first United Sta...
Washington's public ports tend to be associated more with cranes and loading docks than with parks and promenades, but providing public access to the waterfront has been a part of the ports' mission f...
The Four Seasons Resort on the southwestern end of Beaver Lake, located on the Sammamish Plateau in east King County, was built about 1936 by Gus and LuLu Bartels. By the late 1930s it had become a po...
The Tanska Auto Camp was an early twentieth-century retreat located on the northwestern shore of Pine Lake on the Sammamish Plateau (King County), operating from about 1918 until 1940. The camp consi...
For several decades in the middle of the twentieth century, San Juan Island was virtually overrun with rabbits. A population of several thousand domestic rabbits released in 1934 from a failed breedin...
Bill Bonham managed hotels in the Northwest in the 1920s through the 1940s, including the Seattle Hotel at 1st Avenue and Yesler Way in Seattle and the Hotel Monticello in Longview. Bonham's daughter,...
This excerpted account of schooling at a Cedar Falls railroad camp was originally recorded on June 15, 1993 as a part of the Cedar River Watershed Oral History Project. Dorothy Graybael Scott moved to...
Seattle's waterfront is a natural location for an aquarium, and proposals to build one go back many years, though it wasn't until a Forward Thrust bond issue was approved in 1968 that funds were alloc...
Coast Salish Indians fished, hunted, and gathered shellfish along Elliott Bay for millennia before May 1792, when European sailors first gazed at the site of present-day Seattle. Sixty years later, U....
The waterfront between Battery and Broad streets, beginning with Pier 69, is graced by the Edgewater Hotel, the Port of Seattle terminal for high-speed Victoria Clipper catamaran ferries, and Myrtle E...
Piers 46 and 47 are located south of Pioneer Square and Pier 48 is located directly west of Pioneer Square. Piers 46 and 47 serve as the Port of Seattle's vast loading apron for containers. Pier 48 is...
The present site of the Seattle Aquarium was once a giant coal pier and the city's first commercial swimming beach (brrrr!). Both had disappeared by the late 1870s. A furniture mill and a succession o...
Piers 64, 65, and 66, including the Bell Street Pier and the Bell Harbor complex, are located south of Virginia Street and east of Belltown. The area was once a shantytown, home to mostly Native Ameri...
Bob Donegan, President of Ivar's, has been a tireless advocate for the interests of businesses along Seattle's waterfront and beyond. In conversation with Dominic Black he recounts his activism around...
In the winter of 1934, Seattle made national news when its Board of Park Commissioners opened one of the first municipal ski areas in the country at the old Milwaukee Railroad stop of Laconia at Snoqu...
During the 1930s, skiing in the northwest grew rapidly. Seattle and Tacoma area enthusiasts traveled to Snoqualmie Pass, Paradise on Mount Rainier, and Mount Baker on weekends to ski. Travel to ski ar...
Martin was a stop on the Northern Pacific (NP) rail line in Kittitas County, at the east portal of the NP tunnel through the Cascade Mountains under Stampede Pass. It was named for nearby Martin Creek...
Rick Steves (b. 1955) is a best-selling travel writer, businessman, philanthropist, and television personality whose work revolves around encouraging people to broaden their perspectives through trave...
The Mountaineers is a Western Washington-based organization that has had a major impact on outdoor recreation and wilderness preservation in the state. Started in Seattle in 1906 primarily as a mounta...
The mountain wilderness that rims the Puget Sound Basin has beckoned adventurous residents since the late 1800s. Hiking, backpacking, and mountain and rock climbing grew steadily there until Worl...
The San Juan Islands, an archipelago located in Salish Sea waters between Washington and Vancouver Island, B.C., have always held a strong attraction for visitors. From the first peoples who inhabited...
From the earliest settlement of the San Juan Islands, visitors traveled to the enchanting archipelago in the far Pacific Northwest Salish Sea to fish and hunt; explore rocky coasts and inland forests;...