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The 130-mile Columbia Plateau State Park Trail weaves together a diverse parade of landscapes filled with stories of land and people along the route of the abandoned Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway. The trail stretches through a swath of today’s eastern Washington, from ponderosa pine forests near Spokane across the volcanic “scablands” and into the deep canyon of the Snake River.

Lincoln Rock State Park is a popular recreation area with access to Lake Entiat, the reservoir created by Rocky Reach Dam.

Indigenous Lands

The park lies within the traditional territories of Sahaptian and Interior Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. For thousands of years this area has provided habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures.

Ocean City State Park has been an oceanfront destination for generations. The park faces the Pacific Ocean at North America’s “active margin,” where the ocean-floor Juan de Fuca tectonic plate slowly sinks beneath the continent, sliding at a rate of about 13 feet per century in the plate’s subduction zone. Sudden movements of the Juan de Fuca Plate can cause earthquakes that may modify the land surface and generate tsunamis.

Lewis and Clark State Park preserves precious remnants of once-common southwest Washington landscapes along a historic Indigenous travel route.

Indigenous Lands

The park lies within the traditional territories of Coast Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation. For thousands of years this area has provided habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures.

Pacific Beach State Park has a long history as a place for travelers to rest as they journey along Washington’s Pacific Ocean coastline.

Indigenous Lands

The park lies within the traditional territories of Coast Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Quinault Indian Nation and the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation.

Ethnographers reported that the mouth of Joe Creek in today’s Pacific Beach State Park served as a “rest stop” for Indigenous people traveling along the coast between trading centers. 

Yakima Sportsman State Park owes its preservation and its distinctive name to the generosity of a group of waterfowl hunting enthusiasts who purchased lands in the Yakima River floodplain in the 1940s.

Folds, Floods, Meanders and Mines

The park is situated in a geographic area called the Yakima Fold Belt, an area of central Washington where tectonic compression of the layered Columbia River Basalt lava flows results in a series of parallel ridges that run perpendicular to the force of the stress—kind of like kicking a rug creates ridges in the fabric.

Cape Disappointment State Park spreads over the land north of the point where the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean meet. The park includes three headlands of basalt rock cliffs: Cape Disappointment overlooking the river, North Head above the strand of Long Beach, and McKenzie Head, midway between the other two headlands. The basalt bedrock of these wave-pounded cliffs are ancient lava flows that erupted on the ocean floor. Encountering the cold ocean water, the lava quickly hardened into bulbous masses geologists call pillow lava.

The 31-mile Klickitat State Park Trail hugs the meanders of the Klickitat River and its tributary, Swale Creek, revealing stories of massive volcanic flows, bubbling mineral springs, timeless Indigenous subsistence traditions, ephemeral attempts at wresting profits from the land, and a delightful environment of oak and pine woodlands and grasslands. The trail stretches from a windswept plateau 1,600 feet above sea level to the river’s confluence with the mighty Columbia River barely 100 feet above sea level.

Sequim Bay State Park hugs the western shore of Sequim Bay, which takes its name from an Indigenous village located near its mouth. The bay is protected at its entrance by two spits that have developed over centuries atop a flat section of underwater land. The spits, which nearly enclose the bay, are made up of glacial debris from the last Ice Age—mostly sand and gravel—that eroded into the water from nearby bluffs and was carried by ocean currents. An 800-foot gap between the spits leads into the seven-mile-long bay.