Washington Our Home

I've spent a lot of time in Ocean Shores, Washington, over the years...hiking around Damon Point, rock-hopping at the north jetty and exploring the Coastal Interpretive Center (which is absolutely worth seeing, if you ever get the chance). But one of the more memorable moments in my Ocean Shores experience was getting to "discover" a shipwreck as the tempestuous weather began shifting the dunes and slowly exposing its hull at the beginning of the century. That ship, it turns out, was the S.S. Catala - a Canadian coastal passenger and cargo steamship built in 1925.

There are 281 official cities and towns in the State of Washington, according to the Washington State Association of Cities, and every one of them has a unique story to tell. Some of them have hundreds of stories…others, perhaps just one major story. All of them have their own character, vibe, ambiance, and backstory, and many of them have weird, interesting or unusual ways they got their names. Why is there no University in University Place? What happened that earned one town the name Slaughter? And what exactly do people do in Humptulips? Fear not, my loyal listeners…all will be revealed in this Washington City Names episode of Washington Our Home.

At the very end of Washington State Route 506 lies a tiny, well-kept community that bills itself as the town with two histories. And both of those histories are pretty darned amazing. Heard of Ryderwood, Washington? Neither had I until I was approached by a representative of their historical society. And the story she told me had me fascinated…I decided I had to visit to learn more. Ryderwood is located about halfway between Centralia and Longview in western Washington, just a bit west of the I-5 corridor. A Google satellite map of the area shows a small brownish patch at the top of Cowlitz County just below the Lewis County line, surrounded on three of four sides by inches and inches of deep green forests. In fact, that’s exactly why Ryderwood was created there in the first place…for the timber.

Today, we're beginning the creation of THE definitive pronunciation guide for Washington State. This will be part one of a three-part series looking at Washington's notoriously difficult county, city and geographic names, so you'd better favorite these episodes if you want to sound like you're from here. For this episode, we'll stick to the tricky county names. Of course, we'll also have our monthly trivia quiz, and we'll pepper in some Fast Facts to learn about how many of these places got their names. I'll also have a few stories of my own to share about these places. And I'm going to plug these names into a text-to-speech app and see how the robots would pronounce them.

On this episode of the Washington Our Home podcast, we'll be trekking deep into the forests of western Washington looking for a killer and a victim - who many say are one and the same. And he's certainly one of the finest woodsmen Washington State has ever produced. We're hunting a man named John Tornow - otherwise known as the Wild Man of the Wynoochee. In 1911, the misunderstood misanthrope - thought to have gunned down his own nephews - decided to turn his back on civilization for the final time and disappear into the wilderness surrounding the Wynoochee River. The manhunt that ensued for the next 19 months, resulting in six more deaths including Tornow's, was nothing short of legendary.

On June 24, 1994, Bud Holland crashed one of the biggest, most powerful aircraft ever built in the history of mankind, sending up a fireball that darkened the sky, leaving his kids fatherless and his wife a widow…and taking three members of his flight crew with him. Some people call it a tragic culmination of circumstances that took the life of one of our country's bravest. Many others call it an inevitable disaster caused by a murderer bent on self destruction. Was Bud Holland an American hero? Or an arrogant hot-stick? Strong words, and strong feelings - even decades later, as you'll see from some of the comments - and we look at all of them in this episode of Washington Our Home.

There are dozens of things to see and do on the Lewis and Clark Trail Highway in southwest Washington (see here and here for just a few examples), but surely one of the most unique lies just outside a tiny berg called Knappton on the bank of the Columbia River. The rusty barge is interesting enough, tied up to the shoreline and in all likelihood unusable. But look around closely and you’ll see the hull of another wrecked ship half buried in the muck just a few hundred yards away. You can’t really get to it without violating the “KEEP OUT” and “NO TRESSPASSING” signs spray painted on particleboard, so getting a quality photo is difficult. But what you’re looking at is actually what remains of what was, in its time, the world’s largest hydrofoil: the USS Plainview…also known as the ship that flew.