WAWashington Fun Facts

Seattle's reputation for rain is an accounting trick. The city logs measurable precipitation on roughly 150 days a year but collects only about 37 inches of it, less than New York, Boston, Atlanta or Houston. It drizzles constantly and almost never pours, which is why locals treat umbrellas as a tourist accessory.

Facts most people get wrong

• Seattle is not the rainiest US city. It is not close. Mobile, Alabama collects roughly double Seattle's annual total, and several southeastern cities beat it easily. Seattle wins on gray days, not on inches.
• Seattle is not the capital. Olympia is, with a population near 56,000, roughly one thirteenth the size of Seattle.
• The state was nearly named Columbia. Settlers north of the Columbia River petitioned Congress in 1852 for a Columbia Territory. Congress substituted Washington in 1853 to avoid confusion with the District of Columbia, and produced a century and a half of a different confusion instead.
• Half of Washington is dry country. The Cascades wring the moisture out of Pacific air. The Hoh Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula takes 12 to 14 feet of rain a year while the Columbia Basin near the Tri Cities gets under 8 inches, closer to Tucson than to Seattle.
• Mount Rainier is an active volcano. Geologists rank it among the most dangerous in the world, not because of an expected explosion but because of lahars, volcanic mudflows that would follow river valleys straight into populated suburbs.
• Mount St. Helens blew sideways. On May 18, 1980 the north flank collapsed in the largest landslide in recorded history and the blast went laterally across the forest. The mountain dropped from 9,677 feet to 8,363 feet and 57 people died, the deadliest volcanic event in United States history.

Records and firsts

• Washington grows around two thirds of the apples eaten in the United States and leads the country in sweet cherries, pears and hops, with the Yakima Valley supplying the bulk of the American hop crop.
• Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1942 on the Columbia River, is the largest power station in the United States at roughly 6,800 megawatts.
• The Boeing assembly plant in Everett is the largest building in the world by volume, about 472 million cubic feet under one roof.
• Mount Baker holds the world record for snowfall in a single season, 1,140 inches during the winter of 1998 to 1999.
• Mount Rainier carries more glacial ice than any other mountain in the lower 48, spread across more than two dozen named glaciers.
• Washington State Ferries is the largest ferry system in the United States by vessels and by riders.
• The first Starbucks opened beside Pike Place Market in 1971. Amazon started in a Bellevue garage in 1994, and Microsoft relocated to the Seattle area in 1979.
• The State Route 520 bridge across Lake Washington, opened in 2016 at 7,710 feet, is the longest floating bridge in the world, and Washington holds several of the other top spots.

Geography that surprises

• Point Roberts is a five square mile piece of Washington hanging off the tip of a Canadian peninsula below the 49th parallel. About a thousand people live there, and teenagers cross the international border four times a day to attend high school in Blaine.
• Cape Alava on the Olympic Peninsula is the westernmost point of the contiguous 48 states.
• Washington has more glaciers than the other 47 contiguous states combined.
• The Columbia River cuts clean through the Cascade Range at the Columbia River Gorge, the only near sea level passage through the mountains anywhere in the Pacific Northwest.
• Washington is the only state in the lower 48 with both a Pacific coastline and a land border with Canada, a straight 49th parallel line about 400 miles long.

Where the name comes from

Washington is the only state named for a United States president. When settlers asked for a territory in 1852 they wanted Columbia, after the river. Congress worried that Columbia Territory would be mistaken for the District of Columbia, and Representative Richard H. Stanton of Kentucky proposed honoring George Washington instead. The bill passed in March 1853.

The Evergreen State is a nickname with no official standing. A Seattle real estate man, Charles T. Conover, coined it around 1890 for the Douglas fir and western hemlock that stay green through winter, and it was never adopted by statute. The state motto, Alki, is Chinook Jargon for by and by, taken from the 1851 settlers at Alki Point who joked they were founding a new New York.

State basics

Bordering states

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