11 Underrated Places to Visit in the Pacific Northwest

North Cascades National Park has more glaciers than anywhere else in the lower 48, over 300 of them, and draws fewer visitors in a year than Yellowstone gets in a fortnight. That is the Pacific Northwest in one statistic: the famous places are rammed, and the ones half an hour further on are empty.

Washington and Oregon hold a lot of both. These eleven are the ones worth the extra drive, running north to south and roughly inland to coast, from a glacier park on the Canadian border to a run of named sea stacks at the bottom of the Oregon shore.

North Cascades National Park, Washington

This is one of the least-visited national parks in the country and one of the most dramatic, which is a combination that should not exist. Fewer than 40,000 people enter the park proper in a typical year, against roughly three million at Olympic a few hours southwest.

Diablo Lake is the reason most people stop. The water is an improbable turquoise, caused by glacial flour, rock ground to powder by the ice above and suspended in the meltwater so finely that it scatters light. There is an overlook directly on Highway 20 and you do not have to walk a step.

For those who do, Cascade Pass is the classic day hike, switchbacking up to a saddle with peaks on every side. Ross Lake stretches north into Canada. The one thing to plan around: the North Cascades Highway closes with the snow, usually from late November until April, and there is no detour.

Winthrop, Washington

When the North Cascades Highway was about to open in the early 1970s and bring traffic through the Methow Valley for the first time, Winthrop remodelled its entire main street to look like an 1890s Western outpost. Boardwalks, false fronts, hitching posts. It has been maintained under a townwide design code ever since.

What keeps it from being a theme park is the valley behind it. The Methow holds one of the largest cross-country ski trail networks in North America, over 120 miles of groomed track, and in summer the same country is given over to hiking and fly fishing.

Trail's End Bookstore anchors the street with the river running past the windows, and Pearrygin Lake State Park is five minutes out for swimming and camping. Come in winter and the town is genuinely quiet, because the highway west is shut.

Fairhaven, Washington

Fairhaven was its own city until 1903, when it merged into Bellingham, and the brick commercial blocks from its 1890s boom are still standing as a National Historic District. The boom itself was a bust: speculators built for a railroad terminus that went to Seattle instead.

The Ski to Sea relay each May is the local event, a seven-leg race that starts with cross-country skiing on Mount Baker and finishes with a kayak paddle into Bellingham Bay, covering around 93 miles and ending with the winning team carrying a sea-soaked flag ashore.

Village Books holds down three floors on the square, the Bellingham Circus Guild runs live shows year-round, and the Alaska Marine Highway ferry leaves from the terminal here, which means you can board a boat in Fairhaven and get off in Juneau.

La Conner, Washington

La Conner is famous for exactly four weeks a year and overlooked for the other forty-eight. Nine hundred people live here. Every April roughly a million turn up for the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, the largest of its kind in the country, and then the town empties.

Those other eleven months are the point. This is a boardwalk village on the Swinomish Channel with an improbable number of galleries, left over from the Northwest School painters who worked here in the mid-century, and the Museum of Northwest Art covers them properly.

The orange Rainbow Bridge arcs over to the Swinomish Reservation, and the waterfront buildings lean out over the water at angles that only survive where nobody got around to redeveloping. Come any month but April.

Guemes Island, Washington

The ferry takes eight minutes. Guemes Island covers about 5,500 acres off Anacortes, has no town to speak of, and most visitors never get further than the general store, which is roughly the right instinct.

The Guemes Island General Store sells groceries, fresh food, and drink, and runs a full events calendar that serves as the island's social centre for residents and day-trippers alike. The Guemes Mountain Trail climbs to a summit with views across the San Juans, and Kelly's Point and the Peach Preserve handle the rest of the walking.

Guemes Island Resort has cabins, yurts, and houses on the shore, with a sauna, boat rentals, and a stone beach. There is no bridge, which is the entire reason the island is the way it is.

Silverton, Oregon

You can walk behind four waterfalls here. Silver Falls State Park, twenty minutes east of Silverton, runs the Trail of Ten Falls through a basalt canyon where the rock behind several of the drops has eroded out, leaving a path along the back wall. South Falls is the one most people photograph, a 177-foot curtain you pass under.

At over 9,000 acres it is the largest state park in Oregon, and it sits an hour from Portland and forty minutes from Salem, yet it never draws the crowds that Multnomah Falls does an hour north on the Gorge.

Silverton itself is a town of 10,000 on Silver Creek with a mural-covered downtown and the Oregon Garden, an 80-acre botanical garden with a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright moved onto the grounds. It is the only Wright building in Oregon open to the public.

Brownsville, Oregon

Brownsville is where Stand By Me was filmed in 1985, standing in for the fictional Castle Rock, and the town still runs a Stand By Me Day each July with the original filming locations marked around the streets.

Just under 2,000 people live here, in a downtown of buildings raised between the 1850s and the 1920s. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited towns in Oregon, settled in 1846 on the Calapooia River, and the 26-acre Pioneer Park runs along the water.

Living Rock Studios is the oddity worth the stop: a stone building a local family spent years constructing by hand, with translucent panels made from thin-sliced rock that light up from behind. The Linn County Historical Museum occupies the old railway depot. Brownsville is an easy drive from Portland, Eugene, or Corvallis.

Newberry National Volcanic Monument, Oregon

Newberry is an active volcano roughly the size of Rhode Island, and you can drive into the middle of it. The caldera covers 17 square miles and sits at the centre of a 1,200-square-mile shield volcano inside the Deschutes National Forest, with the whole monument running to 54,000 acres.

The Big Obsidian Flow is the part most people remember, a 1,300-year-old river of black volcanic glass you walk out onto by boardwalk and stairway. It is the youngest lava flow in Oregon.

Paulina Peak reaches nearly 8,000 feet, with a road most of the way up and a view over the caldera, its two lakes, and the High Desert beyond. Lava River Cave, further north, is a mile-long lava tube you walk through with a lantern. Six campgrounds and a horse camp serve the monument, and in winter the roads turn over to cross-country skiing and snowmobiling.

Yachats, Oregon

Seven hundred people live in Yachats, and the name comes from Siletz, meaning roughly where the trail leaves the beach. This is rock rather than sand, which changes the whole proposition: no sunbathing, but basalt shelves that throw spray twenty feet and tide pools worth an hour on your knees.

Three miles south, Cape Perpetua rises to the highest point you can drive to on the Oregon coast, with old-growth Sitka spruce on the hill and Thor's Well at the bottom, a collapsed sea cave that at the right stage of tide appears to drain the entire Pacific down a plughole.

Watch that one from well back. Sneaker waves on that shelf have killed people and the rock stays slick regardless of weather. Afterwards, the Drift Inn has been feeding this town for decades.

Oregon Dunes, Oregon

Some of these dunes rise 500 feet above sea level, and they run for roughly 40 miles along the coast, making this the largest expanse of coastal sand dunes in North America. Frank Herbert came here in the 1950s to write a magazine article about shifting sand and ended up writing Dune instead.

The Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area covers 31,500 acres inside the Siuslaw National Forest, with open sand, forested islands, beaches, and wetlands between the dunes. Five beachcombing zones and six sand-play areas divide it up, and fourteen campground areas serve different interests.

The Siltcoos Area has the Carter Lake boat ramp for motorised and paddle craft alike, and the South Jetty Area has surf when conditions allow. Be aware that large sections are open to off-road vehicles and others are not, so check the zone before you set off walking.

Bandon, Oregon

Golfers know Bandon and almost nobody else does, which is the opposite of how it should be. Bandon Dunes draws players from three continents to a resort four miles out of town, while the beach that makes this place extraordinary goes largely unvisited by anyone without a tee time.

The town burned to the ground in 1936. A fire driven by gorse, an invasive shrub an Irish settler had planted to remind him of home, took the entire town in a few hours and killed ten people. Old Town is the rebuilt version, which is why it is compact and nothing predates the Depression.

The beach south of town is the reason to come: a run of sea stacks substantial enough to have been given names, Face Rock being the one everybody photographs, and at low tide you can walk out among them.

Bandon also grows a serious share of the west coast's cranberries and throws a festival for it each September. Bandon Dunes brings golfers from three continents, and the Coquille River Lighthouse sits across the water on the north jetty.

Planning The Drive

These eleven split into three trips rather than one. The northern Washington cluster of North Cascades, Winthrop, Fairhaven, La Conner, and Guemes sits within a couple of hours of each other, though Winthrop is on the far side of a pass that shuts for the winter and Guemes needs a short ferry.

In Oregon, Silverton, Brownsville, and Newberry are all inland, with the first two under an hour apart and Newberry a further two hours southeast, while Yachats, the Dunes, and Bandon run consecutively down roughly 150 miles of Highway 101 and make the obvious coastal route. Two things to check before you commit: the North Cascades Highway closes from late November to April, and the Oregon coast in winter is spectacular and genuinely dangerous near the water.