2187, 2188 UNITED STATES (Washington / Oregon / California) - Pacific coast lighthouses

The Pacific Coast, stretching some 1,300 miles from Mexico’s border with California up to the Canadian border, was a dark and daunting line to mariners in the 1800s. The earth’s geology had given the West Coast a dramatically different contour from the Atlantic Coast: jagged, irregular, high cliffs, and, worse, a sudden, steep drop off the continental shelf that allowed prevailing winds from the west to drive waves onto the shore with incredible speed and power.

In 1848, the U.S. Congress created the Oregon Territory, and with the same act, appropriated funds for the U.S. Light House Establishment to construct the first two lights on the far northwest coast: the first at Cape Disappointment, and the second on New Dungeness spit, south of the new busy port of Nootka, on Vancouver Island. Thus began the history of lighthouses on the West Coast of the United States. I will present below, in short, fourteen of them. 

1407 UNITED STATES (Washington) - Washington map

Washington is that State located in the upper left corner on the map of the United States, bordered by Oregon on the south, Idaho on the east, the Canadian province of British Columbia on the north, and the Pacific Ocean on the west, not too large nor too small, not too populated nor too uninhabited. That if we talk about average, because if we consider that half of the population is concentrated in Seattle metropolitan area (over 3.6 million inhabitants), the things are changing. Admitted to the Union in 1889 as the 42nd state, Washington remained for long time a forest county, the demand for timber being the one which dictated its economic increase or decrease until WWII, when the place of the forest industry was taken by Boeing Company. It's famous the Skid Road (the road for the timber transport with Seattle as a starting point), became within one generation Skid Row, an proverbial area in America in '90s through his poverty and promiscuity.

0082 UNITED STATES (Washington) – The gateway to Alaska

 

I don't think that I'm the only one for whom Seattle remained forever linked with the grunge. So much touched me the movement in the early '90s, that in 1996 (two years after Cobain's death, because I didn't want to take advantage of it) I wrote a biography of the phenomenon, Nirvana Spirit, which I have edited by myself. Nothing surprising, because the movement was the most important since the punk era and furthermore it came to me, as Romanian, amid a newly gained freedom after 1989.