My Corner of the World - The Pacific Northwest, Seattle, WA, USA

Today's is a special post for my friend Sarah who lives in New Zealand. Because my work makes me especially aware of geography, I sometimes forget that others don't take the same keen interest in looking at maps as I do! In fact, some people find geography just plain boring. Though I haven't traveled much in my life, I've done a lot of armchair traveling through National Geographic maps and in more recent years, Google Earth.

The Pacific Northwest, as we call it here, is located in the northwesternmost corner of the continental United States. Washington State has two distinct climates. Seattle, located on Puget Sound (a salt water inland arm of the Pacific Ocean), is between two high mountain ranges located to the east and west, the Olympics (an accreted range) and the Cascades (a volcanic range). Seattle benefits from the warm breezes and jet stream current from the Pacific Ocean, and this keeps the snow at bay here in the lowlands between the mountain ranges most of the time. Eastern Washington's climate is similar to the midwest and the Great Plains....very cold winters with substantial snow. Spokane is Washington's major eastern city. Though it seldom snows here, I've included a photo of my neighborhood taken last winter, when we got about four major snowfalls right here in Seattle!!