Quirky Northwest Vacations
Ask any of my friends and they will probably tell you that I am not “average” or maybe even “normal” whatever that means. As such I have always been intrigued by interesting, out of the ordinary, “Fortean” phenomena. Thus I was pleasantly surprised, when roughly 10 years ago, I first moved to the Pacific Northwest (Puget Sound) area. Having left the Puget Sound area slightly over a year ago because of a divorce, I am still in awe of the unusual and unappreciated enigmas that native Northwesterners take for granted.
Movies and television have celebrated this quirkiness. Two shows in particular noted for their quirkiness, though neither is still on the air, continue to host local festivals for fans. Unfortunately this year both are being held on the same weekend in July, July 28-30. The first is the Twin Peaks Fan Festival, for fans of both the movie and the television show, Twin Peaks, as well as of Director David Lynch. It is being held in North Bend, Washington, between 20 and 30 miles due east of Seattle on Interstate 90. On the main street of North Bend is a cafe called the “Twin Peaks Cafe” in honor of the show, which proudly served as a location for the show and still serves “Twin Peaks Cherry Pie.” The mountain which was called “Twin Peaks” on the Show is actually Mt. Si and just to the west of north bend is a spectacular waterfall called Snoqualmie Falls which is a 100 feet taller than Niagara.
Fans of “Twin Peaks” know that the plot of the movie and the show revolved around a quirky and almost supernatural hunt for a serial killer. One of the less savory but certainly more intriguing things about the Pacific Northwest is that it has been host to much more than its share of serial killers including Ted Bundy and the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history, Gary Ridgeway, who was known as the Green River Killer. With over 40 victims, whose bodies were found all over western Washington and perhaps elsewhere, almost anywhere is likely at least near the site of the last resting place of one of his victims.
While explanations for this phenomena are certainly debatable and in the end, unknowable, there is at least one place, almost directly across Puget Sound from Seattle that might provide one possible explanation. The place is known as “Dewatto,” a word that in the language of one of the local Native American tribes means, “the home of evil spirits who drive men mad.” The Native Americans believed that evil spirits rose out of Dewatto Bay and tried to inhabit men in the area. A local newspaper, “The Bremerton Sun,” once reported that the area, very sparsely inhabited for an area so close to Seattle, was also rumored to be the home of satanic cults and neo-Nazis.
Across Snoqualmie pass from North Bend is Roslyn, Washington, which is known to fans of the show which was called “Northern Exposure,” as the quirky “Alaskan Riviera” hamlet of Cicely, Alaska. It also has held an annual festival for its fans, called “Moosefest” which is also scheduled for July 28-30th of this year. Among the more interesting activities in years past has been the launching of various large projectiles via a catapault, based on one of the show’s episodes. The tactiturn storeowner, Ruth Ann, never left the area after the show was cancelled and opened an acting school in the Seattle suburbs until her death a few years ago.
If your quirky thing is crytozoology, then the Northwest is also the place for you. The Northwest is the reported home of Bigfoot or Sasquatch (in fact in nearby British Columbia, the Canadians have even named a Provincial Park for the creature). Also in British Columbia are not one but two reported seamonsters. The first and most famous, is called Ogo Pogo and is found in a 50 mile long very deep lake near the town of Kelowna. Nearly every local claims to have seen the monster at one time or another during their lifetimes. The other is found off of Vancouver Island and a photograph was once taken of a small fairly well decomposed one that had been taken out of the stomach of a whale in the 1920s or 1930s.
If UFOs are your thing remember that it was a pilot flying over Mt. Rainier who first coined the term “flying saucers.”
The best thing about a summer trip to the Northwest is that it’s summertime climate is almost ideal. The average water temperature of Puget Sound is around 50 degrees and anywhere near the sound rarely gets a great deal hotter or colder than that. Thus entire Puget Sound summers will go by without the temperature ever reaching 90 degrees. As far as constant rain ruining your vacaction, Seattle’s rainy reputation is partially earned and partially a myth. The truth is a bit complicated. In fact, there are areas along the coast of Washington (as well as Oregon, British Columbia and Alaska) that comprise the largest temperate rainforest on earth. Parts of the Washington coast get well over 200 inches of rainfall a year. However, because of the Olympic mountains there are areas that get considerably less rain and are said to be in the ‘rainshadow’ of the Olympics. In fact, Seattle is actually in one of the drier areas of Puget Sound and gets only about 40 inches of rain a year, which is about as much as Baltimore or some other eastern cities. But every rainforest has a dry as well as a wet season and fortunately for the Puget Sound area, the dry season usually runs for mid-July through mid-September which coincides perfectly with most planned summer vacations.
