Soft layers of moss and pine needles carpet the ground as dappled sunlight or misty rain filters through the forest canopy's branches. Western Washington woodlands can be enchanting. Fortunately these magical places are abundant, covering half the state's soil. Affording beauty and recreation as well as economic value, they endure as one of the area's most important natural assets.

In Native Trees of Western Washington, Washington State University's Kevin Zobrist examines regional indigenous trees from a forestry specialist's unique perspective. He explains basic tree physiology and a key part of their ecology--forest stand dynamics. He groups distinctive varieties into sections, describing common lowland conifers and broadleaved trees, high-elevation species found in the Olympic Mountains and western side of the Cascades, and finally, those with a very limited natural range and small, isolated populations. Numerous full-color photographs illustrate key traits.

In addition, Zobrist discusses notable features, offering information about where to find particular species. He includes brief lists of some common human uses, citing Native American medicines, food, and materials, as well as commercial utilization from the time of European settlement to the present day. The result is a delightful and enlightening exploration of western Washington timberlands.

A magnificent active volcano, Mount Rainier ascends to 14,410 feet above sea level--the highest in Washington State. The source of five major rivers, it has more glaciers than any other peak in the contiguous U.S. Its slopes are home to ancient forests, spectacular subalpine meadows, and unique, captivating creatures.

In Tahoma and Its People, a passionate, informed, hands-on science educator presents a natural and environmental history of Mount Rainier National Park and the surrounding region. Jeff Antonelis-Lapp explores geologic processes that create and alter landscapes, interrelationships within and between plant and animal communities, weather and climate influences on ecosystems, and what linked the iconic mountain with the people who traveled to it for millennia. He intersperses his own direct observation and study of organisms, as well as personal interactions with rangers, archaeologists, a master Native American weaver, and others. He covers a plethora of topics: geology, archaeology, indigenous villages and use of resources, climate and glacier studies, alpine and forest ecology, rivers, watershed dynamics, keystone species, threatened wildlife, geological hazards, and current resource management. Numerous color illustrations, maps, and figures supplement the text.

2020 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist, Mountain Environment and Natural History category

Remote and rugged, Idaho's Priest Lake remains a wild place, with brutal winters and an upper lake accessible only by foot, mountain bike, or boat. Even so, beginning in the 1890s a wide cast of homesteaders, prospectors, speculators, and loggers tried their best to tame it.

Despite impressive forests, turn-of-the-century Western expansion bypassed the area, sparing its idyllic beauty. In 1897 President Grover Cleveland created the Priest River Forest Reserve, initiating an enduring tension between public and private lands. Soon both timber and summer cottages were in high demand. Rangers doled out permits, scrappy residents eked out a living, and families created a cherished seasonal community.

Devastating wildfires initiated profound change, leading the Civilian Conservation Corps to concentrate on fire suppression. After World War II, population growth accelerated, electricity became commonplace, and a local newspaper crowed, Priest Lake has become a cult with many vacationists. Wild Place traces the region's history, focusing on little-known yet captivating stories of its colorful characters.

The Restless Northwest provides a brief, easy-to-follow overview of the geologic processes that shaped the Northwest.

One of the attractions of the Northwest is its varied terrain, from the volcanic Cascade Range to the flood-scoured scablands of eastern Washington and the eroded peaks of the northern Rockies. These vast differences are the result of a collision of the old and the new. The western edge of Idaho was once the edge of ancient North America; as eons passed, a jumble of islands, minicontinents, and sediment piled up against the old continental edge, gradually extending it west to the present coastline.

Figuring out how and when these various land forms came together to create the Northwest took much geological detective work. Unlike many geology books that focus on rocks, The Restless Northwest emphasizes the human drama of geology. The narrative is sprinkled with firsthand accounts of people involved in the exciting geological discoveries made in recent years.

Hill Williams uses an informal conversational style to explain complex processes to a general readership. He enlivens the story of long-ago geologic events with fascinating asides on everything from enormous undersea tube worms to the Willamette meteorite, the largest ever found in the United States. Interested readers will discover much about Pacific Northwest geology without getting bogged down in an overabundance of details and scientific terms. Winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award.

There wasn't that many people, but they were good people.--Madeline Gilles

First time I ever tasted cherries or even seen a cherry tree was [in White Bluffs]. Or ever ate an apricot or seen an apricot...It was covered with orchards and alfalfa fields.--Leatris Boehmer Reid

Euro-American Priest River Valley settlers turned acres of sagebrush into fruit orchards. Although farm life required hard work and modern conveniences were often spare, many former residents remember idyllic, close-knit communities where neighbors helped neighbors. Then, in 1943, families received forced evacuation notices. Fruit farmers had to leave their crops on their trees. And that was very hard on them, no future, no money...they moved wherever they could get a place to live, Catherine Finley recalled. Some were given just thirty days, and Manhattan Project restrictions meant they could not return.

Drawn from Hanford History Project personal narratives, Nowhere to Remember highlights life in Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland--three small agricultural communities in eastern Washington's mid-Columbia region. It covers their late 1800s to early 1900s origins, settlement and development, the arrival of irrigation, dependence on railroads, Great Depression struggles, and finally, their unique experiences in the early years of World War II.

David W. Harvey examines the impact of wagon trade, steamships, and railroads, grounding local history within the context of American West history. Robert Franklin details the tight bonds between early residents as they labored to transform scrubland into an agricultural Eden. Laura Arata considers the early twentieth century experiences of women who lived and worked in the region. Robert Bauman utilizes oral histories to tell forced removal stories. Finally, Bauman and Franklin convey displaced occupants' reactions to their lost spaces and places of meaning--and explore ways they sought to honor their heritage.

On the eve of World War II, news of an astonishing breakthrough filtered out of Germany. Scientists there had split uranium atoms. Researchers in the United States scrambled to verify results and further investigate this new science. Ominously, they soon recognized its potential to fuel the ultimate weapon--one able to release the energy of an uncontrolled chain reaction. By 1941, experiments led to the identification of plutonium, but laboratory work generated the new element in amounts far too small to be useful. Fearing the Nazis were on the verge of harnessing nuclear power, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gambled on an ambitious project to research and manufacture uranium and plutonium for military use.

As research continued, engineers began to construct massive buildings in an isolated eastern Washington farming community. Within two years, Hanford became the world's first plutonium factory. The incredibly complex operation was accomplished with a speed and secrecy unheard of today; few involved knew what they were building. But on August 9, 1945, when the Fat Man fell on Nagasaki, the workers understood their part in changing the world.

Hanford's role did not end there. The facility produced plutonium throughout the Cold War. Some was used in tests conducted halfway around the world. Nuclear bombs were dropped on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, profoundly impacting the Marshall Islands people and forever altering their way of life.

Through clear scientific explanations and personal reminiscences, Hill Williams traces Hanford's role in the amazing and tragic story of the plutonium bomb.

As Idaho's State Historian, the question Keith Petersen heard most was, How did Idaho get such a strange shape? That curiosity is fitting, because those peculiar borders have held enormous influence on much of Idaho's political, economic, and cultural history, and prompted repeated efforts to connect the north and south.

In Inventing Idaho, Petersen answers that popular inquiry, breaking the state's intriguing border story into six sections covering the fascinating events and people--often U.S. presidents and other politicians and diplomats who never set foot in the region--involved in creating the boundaries between Idaho and Canada, Oregon, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. He explains their roots in the French and Indian War, how Idaho's northern and southern portions were once split between Oregon Territory and Washington Territory, how the state's panhandle and name can be traced back to a late-night 1863 Senate proposal, how Moscow became home to the University of Idaho, what might happen to a criminal in the Zone of Death, and how a gold rush, geographic barriers, differing business and political interests, and more factored into border decisions. In addition, he discusses some of the ramifications Idahoans have faced ever since, and the various attempts to deal with them.

Seattle's population was growing rapidly during the 1880s, but steep hills and shorelines impeded residential development, pushing expansion northward and creating a long, narrow corridor ideal for a public transportation route. Frank Osgood arrived from Boston in 1883, recognized the potential, and opened Seattle's first street railway the following year, operating from Pioneer Square north on Second Avenue to Pike Street. The tiny streetcars were pulled by horses.

Motivated by potential increases in real estate values, by 1896 thirteen private companies ran streetcar lines in the Emerald City. Horse-drawn streetcars were gone, replaced by electric trolleys and cable cars. But many of the lines were cheaply built or spaced too close together, and small, independent companies lacked economies of scale. Consolidation began, and the Seattle Electric Company acquired almost all of the independent street railways. The firm started a massive improvement and expansion program, and by 1910, ridership totaled 103 million annual passengers--a number equivalent to every Seattleite boarding a streetcar 435 times that year.

Following voter approval, Seattle became one of the country's first large cities with a publicly owned transit system. The new Seattle Municipal Street Railway took over operations in April 1919, initially adding new bus routes and extending some existing streetcar lines. But a huge debt load, declining ridership, and the Great Depression caused severe financial troubles and maintenance issues. By 1938, Seattle and San Francisco were the nation's only cities still operating cable cars. Over the next three years, Seattle converted its entire transit system to trolley coaches and motor buses.

Utilizing narrative, maps, and many previously unpublished photographs, author Mike Bergman offers a detailed jaunt through Seattle's fascinating streetcar era.

Meriwether Lewis commanded the most important exploration mission in the early history of the United States. Clay S. Jenkinson takes a fresh look at Lewis, not to offer a paper cutout hero but to describe and explain a hyperserious young man of great complexity who found the wilderness of Upper Louisiana as exacting as it was exhilarating.

Jenkinson sees Lewis as a troubled soul before he left St. Charles, Missouri, in May 1804. His experiences in lands upon which the foot of civilized man had never trodden further fractured his sense of himself. His hiring William Clark as his partner in discovery was, Jenkinson shows, the most intelligent decision he ever made. When Clark was nearby, Lewis's leadership was stable and productive. When Clark was absent and thus unable to provide a calming influence on his mercurial friend, Lewis tended to get into trouble. Jenkinson argues that if Clark had been with Lewis on the Natchez Trace, the governor of Upper Louisiana would not have killed himself. Jenkinson sees Lewis's 1809 suicide not as an inexplicable mystery, but the culmination of a series of pressures that extend back to the expedition and perhaps even earlier.

The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness is a revision of an earlier book, greatly expanded with new scholarship and insights gained through Jenkinson's extensive participation in the Lewis and Clark Expedition Bicentennial. Jenkinson discusses Lewis's sense of humor, his oft-stated fear that the expedition he was leading might collapse, his self-conscious learnedness, and his inability to re-enter polite society after his return. The book attempts to reconstruct from Lewis's journal entries and letters his rich, troubled personality and his aspirations to heroism. When the American mythology surrounding him is removed and Lewis is allowed to reveal himself, he emerges as a fuller, more human, and endlessly fascinating explorer.

Before Hudson's Bay Company domination, two companies attempted large-scale corporate trapping and vied to command Northwest fur trade. On one side were the North West Company's Montreal entrepreneurs, and on the other, American John Jacob Astor and his Pacific Fur Company.

They were businessmen first and explorers second, and their era is a story of grand risk in both lives and capital--a global mercantile initiative in which controlling the mouth of the Columbia River and developing the China market were major prizes. Traversing the world in search of profit, these fur moguls gambled on the price of beaver pelts, purchases of ships and trade goods, international commerce laws, and the effects of war.

In the process, partners and clerks quarreled, surveyed transportation routes, built trading posts, and worked to forge relationships with both French Canadian and Native American trappers. The loss of valuable natural resources as well as the intermixing of cultures significantly impacted relationships with the region's native peoples. Ultimately, their expansion attempts were economically unsuccessful. The Astorians sold their holdings to the North West Company, who later accepted a humiliating 1821 merger.

Drawing from a reservoir of previously unexploited business and personal correspondence, including the letters of clerk Finnan McDonald and a revealing personal memorandum by Fort George partner James Keith, the authors examine Columbia drainage operations and offer a unique business perspective.

Remote, rugged, and spectacularly majestic, with stunning alpine meadows and jagged peaks that soar beyond ten thousand feet, North Cascades National Park is one of the Pacific Northwest's crown jewels. Now, in the first full-length account, Lauren Danner chronicles its creation--just in time for the park's fiftieth anniversary in 2018.

The North Cascades range benefited from geographic isolation that shielded its mountains from extensive resource extraction and development. Efforts to establish a park began as early as 1892, but gained traction after World War II as economic affluence sparked national interest in wilderness preservation and growing concerns about the impact of harvesting timber to meet escalating postwar housing demands.

As the environmental movement matured, a 1950s Glacier Peak study mobilized conservationists to seek establishment of a national park that prioritized wilderness. Concerned about the National Park Service's policy favoring development for tourism and the United States Forest Service's policy promoting logging in the national forests, conservationists leveraged a changing political environment and the evolving environmental values of the natural resource agencies to achieve the goal of permanent wilderness protection. Their grassroots activism became increasingly sophisticated, eventually leading to the compromise that resulted in the 1968 creation of Washington's magnificent third national park.

After the death of his beloved wife, a devastated Levi Scott and his youngest surviving son left Iowa for Oregon. Their overland journey--rife with quarrels, stolen horses, arduous river fords, con artists, and death--ended when he and John finally arrived in Oregon City in November 1844.

In the early 1840s, emigrants who reached The Dalles and chose to continue to the Willamette Valley had to embark on a perilous raft trip and portage down the Columbia River. Answering the plea of settlers and the provisional government, Scott participated in two expeditions seeking a better, safer way through the Cascades. The second, organized by Jesse Applegate in June 1846, yielded the southern route through the Umpqua Valley, three mountain ranges, and the Black Rock Desert. Early on a July 1846 morning, the party found the Humboldt River along the established California Trail.

At Fort Hall, Applegate recruited parties to travel the new route. Scott led the initial wagon train west while others went ahead to prepare the road. He details a harrowing trip that included unwatered desert, soda plains, mirages, a heroic mother, dense timber, and steep canyons.

In 1847 Scott led a second group to the Willamette Valley over the alternate trail and retraced it again in 1849. He faced narrow escapes and witnessed several deadly encounters with Native Americans. Later he ran cattle, founded Scottsburg, and participated in Oregon's territorial legislature.

As he neared his ninetieth birthday Scott employed his friend James Layton Collins to help him record his life story, but the memoir was never published. Now edited and extensively annotated, Scott's autobiography has become Wagons to the Willamette. An exceptional contribution to Oregon Trail history, his reminiscence is the only first-hand account written by someone who not only searched for the southern route but also accompanied its first wagon train.

Originally published in 1944, Buffalo Coat spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The first adult novel written by acclaimed Idaho writer Carol Ryrie Brink, winner of the Newbery Award for the outstanding book of children's literature in 1936, Buffalo Coat has become a classic of Northwest literature. It tells the tale of three doctors who came to Opportunity (Moscow), Idaho, in the 1890s seeking success and fortune in the town with the promising name. At first all attained their private objectives and financial success, symbolized by owning a great buffalo coat to wear through the bitter winters. Then one by one, each of their lives ended in tragedy.

Noted for her human insight and succinct storytelling, Brink's Buffalo Coat was perhaps her finest novel, the first in a trilogy about northern Idaho and eastern Washington that also includes Strangers in the Forest and Snow in the River.

Observing its busy stations today, it is difficult to picture Seattle and Puget Sound without Sound Transit. Or to imagine how close the transportation agency came to folding. Back on Track reveals its astonishing survival story. After the city took the last streetcar out of service in 1941, Seattle subsisted for decades without a rail system, and it was choking on congestion. So for many, it was a joyous day in November 1996 when voters in urban areas of King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties approved a ten-year, $3.9 billion plan to bring mass transit to Puget Sound. But for the 23 employees of the fledgling Sound Transit, the celebration was short-lived. When light rail plan estimates came in a billion dollars over budget and extended the project three years, the agency faced a torrent of angry taxpayers and public ridicule. News headlines bristled about Unsound Transit, and whether the organization was on the midnight train to nowhere. Prominent politicians and citizens joined the battle. One by one, Sound Transit's administrators resigned.

Then Joni Earl stepped in. The new executive director rallied the remaining team members, secured a crucial $500 million federal grant, publicly confronted critics, and presented a realistic revised budget. As construction began, she and her team navigated lawsuits, the complex and at times excessive demands of impacted locations, and the expanding expectations of outlying communities. Earl's vision, tenacity, and diplomacy transformed Sound Transit. Under her leadership, with strong support from Link Executive Director Ahmad Fazel and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, the agency delivered its promised light rail system in July 2009. A resounding success, Sound Transit exceeded usage forecasts, and now its trains and buses serve nearly 50 million passengers a year traveling a combined 73,000 miles every day, and few ever question whether the region's light rail system should exist.

Strangers in the Forest, originally published in 1959, was included in the Reader's Digest Condensed Books series. Set in the white-pine timberland of the Idaho panhandle in 1908, the story explores the efforts of the early U.S. Forest Service to instill a sense of conservation in the land--a new concept affecting Idaho's seemingly inexhaustible forests.

Bundy Jones heads west to investigate the people taking timber homesteads in the north Idaho woods, suspecting that their real intention is to sell out for profit to lumber companies. Jones befriends the homesteaders, wins their confidence, and even admires them. When his connection with the Forest Service is revealed, most of the homesteaders turn against him. But the inferno of a north Idaho forest fire once again unites Jones and the timber settlers.

Spanish, British, and French explorers reached the Pacific Northwest before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The American captains benefited from those predecessors, even carrying with them copies of their published accounts. James Cook, George Vancouver, and Alexander Mackenzie--and to a lesser extent fur traders John Meares and Robert Gray--directly and indirectly influenced the expedition. Based on new material as well as revised essays from popular history journals, Lewis and Clark Reframed examines several curious and seemingly inexplicable aspects of the journey after the Corps of Discovery crossed the Rocky Mountains.

The captains' journals demonstrate that they relied on Mackenzie's 1801 Voyages from Montreal as a trail guide. They borrowed field techniques and favorite literary expressions--at times plagiarizing entire paragraphs. Cook's literature also informed the pair, and his naming conventions evoke fresh ideas about an enduring expedition mystery--the identity of the two or three journalists whose records are now missing. Additional journal text analysis dispels the notion that the captains were equals, despite expedition lore. Lewis claimed all the epochal discoveries for himself, and in one of his more memorable passages, drew on Mackenzie for inspiration. Parallels between Cook's and other exploratory accounts offer evidence that like many long-distance voyagers, Lewis grappled with homesickness. His friendship with Mahlon Dickerson lends insights into Lewis's shortcomings and eventual undoing. As secretary of the navy, Dickerson drew from Lewis's troubled past to impede the 1840s ocean expedition set to emulate Cook and solidify America's claim, through Lewis and Clark, to the region.

Two of Ezra Meeker's defining traits were his ability to recognize business opportunities and his willingness to take risks. In 1852, the Washington Territory pioneer traveled west over the Oregon Trail, finally settling near Tacoma in the Puyallup Valley.

In the mid-1860s, he planted his first hops, and despite wild price fluctuations, attained modest success. Then he met beer brewer Henry Weinhard and began selling to him directly. Approximately twenty-five acres of hop roots led to $9,000 in sales--$154,000 today. Inspired, other farmers slowly joined in, shipping produce to San Francisco.

Ezra served as a broker and traveled to New York and London to open new markets. Convinced Northwest hops were superior, he hired a respected chemist to analyze the quantity of extract produced from Bavarian and New York hops as well as his own. The results confirmed his claims.

Then in 1882, Meeker quietly bypassed California middlemen, sending Washington hops directly to New York. That same year, Pacific coast growers benefited from widespread crop failure elsewhere. Desperate brewers offered astronomical prices and Puyallup farmers were rich. E. Meeker and Co. became the largest hops exporter in the country, and Ezra the official hop king.

Rarely idle, Meeker also managed a large family, became involved in philanthropy and development schemes, promoted Washington and Puget Sound, was active in politics and women's suffrage, and tried to manufacture sugar from beets. Impulsive and pugnacious, he was an intimidating business opponent who became entangled in numerous lawsuits. Sadly, a combination of bad investments, lack of diversification, the 1893 depression, a financial betrayal, and an aphid plague brought Meeker's boom years to a close.

In his newest book, Dennis M. Larsen recounts Ezra Meeker's profitable years as well as the intertwined histories of hops, Puyallup, and Washington Territory.

Crooked River Country is a sweeping account of north central Oregon's thrilling history, beginning in ancient times but focusing primarily on the period between 1800 and 1950. Bordered by intimidating natural barriers, the rough country and brutal winters produced equally hardy inhabitants. Legends include Billy Chinook, Chief Paulina, Elisha Barnes, James M. Blakely, Newt Williamson, James J. Hill, Johnnie Hudspeth, and Les Schwab.

The homestead boom sparked deadly Paiute raids and range wars. Native Americans were forced onto reservations. As land became more precious, the Vigilantes terrorized settlers with showdowns and lynchings, and gained a foothold in both local and state politics. Moonshiners fought back. Cattle ranchers slaughtered sheep (and sometimes shepherds) in conflicts over grazing rights. Dishonest politicians and capitalists misused road-building laws to profit from vast amounts of stolen timberland.

Steamship and railroad lines opened the region even further. Citizens erected schools and libraries, and the territory gradually became less wild. Big eastern lumber companies arrived, harvesting trees and constructing the largest pine mills in the world. The stock market collapsed, and central Oregonians faced severe economic depression intensified by long years of drought.

Yet the shift away from agriculture continued to spur industrial and population growth. Today, although desolate, empty corners and mysteries of the past still haunt Crook, Deschutes, Jefferson, Wasco, and Wheeler counties, Crooked River Country presents a captivating and thoroughly-researched look at the region's incredible transformation.

Rather than simply demonizing or directing outrage at Patriot and militia organizations, as some recent high-visibility publications have done, David Neiwert takes the approach of allowing Patriot extremists to speak for themselves and largely on their own terms. His critical journalistic dialogue allows us to better understand the social, economic, philosophical, and religious complexities of how and why these people have come to think the way they do.

There is no question that strains of racism, paranoia, ill-will, and even evilness can characterize many of these people, but it is equally true that they--often minimally educated, and economically and socially challenged by the changing times--are desperately responding to feelings of having been marginalized, and even disenfranchised, from the American dream.

Neiwert's comprehensive manuscript presents an overview of the multitude of Patriot organizations and beliefs found in the Northwest today. Neiwert feels it is essential to maintain some kind of dialogue with Patriots because, after all, these people are our neighbors and relatives, and they are here to stay.

John Mullan's celebrated construction project--a 625-mile link that connected the Missouri and Columbia rivers--established the West Point graduate as an accomplished road builder. After completing the West's first engineered highway at age thirty-two, he lived for nearly another half century, a period of dynamic change. When he died in 1909, automobiles were making their initial crossings along the route he engineered, and his arterial eventually became a critical link in America's longest interstate freeway, I-90. Yet despite frequent mentions in books about the nineteenth century Northwest, the soldier/explorer has remained little more than a caricature: a dashing young Army officer who comes West, builds one of its most important thoroughfares, and then disappears from the region's literature.

Now, in lively prose, Idaho State Historian Keith Petersen takes a fresh look at Mullan's road, which has significantly impacted the development of the Northwest for more than 150 years. The deeply researched biography also probes Mullan's complex personality and continues the story, including business partnerships and personal relationships with some of the West's most intriguing characters: Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet, General William T. Sherman, Chico founder John Bidwell, Idaho gold discoverer Elias Pierce, Yakama Indian chief Owhi, and others. Long overdue, Petersen's comprehensive portrayal bestows a full appreciation of Mullan's life--his rise to fame as well as his fall from grace.