The Pacific Region

Pacific is one of the nine statistical divisions the US Census Bureau uses to subdivide the country, and one of the two that make up the West region. Its five members are Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska and Hawaii. The other half of the West is the eight-state Mountain division. Pacific is not the same thing as the West Coast, which covers only the three contiguous states, and it is not the Pacific Northwest, which in ordinary speech includes Idaho. The Census puts Idaho in Mountain.

States in the Pacific division

State	Capital	Statehood	2020 population
California	Sacramento	1850	39,538,223
Washington	Olympia	1889	7,705,281
Oregon	Salem	1859	4,237,256
Hawaii	Honolulu	1959	1,455,271
Alaska	Juneau	1959	733,391

Honolulu is the only Pacific capital that is also its state's largest city; Sacramento, Olympia, Salem and Juneau are outranked by Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland and Anchorage. Juneau is the only state capital with no road connection to the rest of its own state.

Population, area and economic weight

The five Pacific states held 53,669,422 residents on April 1, 2020, about 16 percent of the national total of 331,449,281. California accounted for 39,538,223 of that, roughly 74 percent of the division on its own. The land side is even more lopsided in the other direction: the division covers about 1,009,700 square miles of total area, more than a quarter of the United States, and Alaska's 665,384 square miles is larger than Texas, California and Montana combined. The division sends 71 members to the House of Representatives and casts 81 electoral votes, with California's 52-seat delegation the largest in Congress. California's annual output passed 4 trillion dollars in 2024, more than any other state. The neighboring ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the two busiest container ports in the country.

The geography that holds the region together

What the five share is the Pacific Ring of Fire. The Cascade Range carries active volcanoes from Mount Rainier, at 14,411 feet, down through Mount St. Helens, which erupted on May 18, 1980. Kilauea and Mauna Loa are still building the island of Hawaii, and Alaska's Aleutian arc holds more active volcanoes than any other state. Offshore, the Cascadia subduction zone runs from northern California into British Columbia, and the San Andreas Fault cuts through California itself. Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada reaches 14,505 feet, the highest point in the contiguous states, and sits about 85 miles from Badwater Basin in Death Valley at 282 feet below sea level, the lowest point in North America. Denali, at 20,310 feet, is the highest peak on the continent. The Columbia drains roughly 258,000 square miles, the Sacramento and San Joaquin drain the Central Valley into San Francisco Bay, and the Yukon crosses interior Alaska. Climate runs the full range: summer-dry Mediterranean in California, oceanic on the Oregon and Washington coasts, subarctic in interior Alaska, tropical in Hawaii. Death Valley's 134 degree reading on July 10, 1913 is still the official world record.

How the region was settled

Spain moved north from Mexico with a chain of missions starting at San Diego in 1769, while Russia worked the fur coast from the north. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 fixed the boundary with British territory at the 49th parallel, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred California in 1848. Gold was found at Sutter's Mill that January, and the rush was large enough that California entered the Union in 1850 under the Compromise of 1850 without ever passing through organized territorial status. Oregon followed in 1859 and Washington in 1889, both pulled together by the transcontinental railroad joined at Promontory Summit in 1869. Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867 for 7.2 million dollars. The Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in 1893 and annexed in 1898. Both became states in 1959, Alaska on January 3 and Hawaii on August 21, which makes this the only division containing the two youngest states.

What the Pacific division is known for

Hewlett-Packard started in a Palo Alto garage in 1939, Shockley Semiconductor arrived in 1956 and Fairchild Semiconductor followed in 1957, which is how the valley got its silicon. Boeing was founded in Seattle in 1916, Microsoft sits in Redmond and Amazon in Seattle. California leads every other state in farm output by value, most of it from the Central Valley, and Washington grows most of the country's apple crop. Alaska's Prudhoe Bay field was discovered in 1968 and the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline was completed in 1977. Hawaii runs on tourism and the military presence around Pearl Harbor. Two presidents were born in the division, Richard Nixon in California and Barack Obama in Hawaii.

Where the boundary is argued

The loudest complaint is that Alaska and Hawaii are grouped with the coast at all. They qualify by ocean, not by adjacency: Honolulu lies farther from Sacramento than Sacramento lies from Chicago. The second argument is Idaho. Almost everyone who says Pacific Northwest means Washington, Oregon and Idaho, sometimes with British Columbia attached, but the Census assigns Idaho to Mountain, so a Pacific Northwest data table and a Pacific division data table never match. The third is internal. California is routinely treated as two or three places rather than one, and the 1941 State of Jefferson movement in far northern California and southern Oregon tried to make that formal. Nothing came of it, and the Census still counts California as a single undivided unit, as it does with every state.

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