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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.

Steamboat Rock State Park preserves spectacular features of the Columbia Plateau Ice Age Floods. The 800-foot-tall butte of Steamboat Rock, sheer cliffs, and scoured coulees are remnants of a series of flood events that completely dwarf the imagination.

Lewis and Clark Trail State Park lies nestled in a grove of ponderosa pine trees in the valley of the Touchet River. The park is situated along a pathway used for thousands of years to connect the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with the salmon highway of the Columbia River.

Alta Lake State Park is located on the shores of an unusual body of water. Its namesake lake, perched 1,166 feet above sea level inside a meandering trench between the Methow and Chelan valleys, has no visible inlet or outlet.

Nolte State Park preserves a forest sanctuary surrounding Deep Lake, favored for swimming and picnicking on hot summer days. The lake’s attractively cool waters are due to its 76-foot depth and cold water coming into the lake from Deep Creek, with its headwaters in the 3,000-foot-high foothills of the Cascade Mountains.

The lake has no outlet, as outflow percolates through gravels left as meltwater outwash from the great Ice Age glaciers that filled the Puget Sound lowlands.

The Bay of Despond

Today’s Jarrell Cove State Park was covered by glacial ice during the most recent ice age. The fingerlike waterways of South Puget Sound including the inverted Y shape of Jarrell Cove and Pickering Passage outside its entrance were excavated by highly pressurized meltwater streams that developed as the thousands-of-feet-thick ice began to melt. The park’s namesake cove features deep waters and a tall tidal range. Low tides yield extensive muddy banks.

Lake Wenatchee owes its existence to giant glaciers that widened and deepened the headwaters of the Wenatchee River. Gravel and rock carried in the glacier was deposited at the glacier’s end, forming a moraine, a natural dam to impound the lake. Lake Wenatchee State Park is situated on that moraine.