Port Angeles, WA
On the Olympic Peninsula, three miles west of Port Angeles, with the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the north and the Olympic Mountains on the south. Named for William R. Fairchild, a Port Angeles native and World War II pilot. Class D, single 6,347ft runway 8/26. The closest civilian airport to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park, 17 miles south, where a paved road climbs 5,000 feet in 17 miles to an alpine viewpoint over the Olympic interior. The Coast Guard maintains a station on the field. Kenmore Air runs scheduled seaplane service from Seattle to Port Angeles's downtown waterfront, but the floats land in the harbor, not at KCLM.
Almost a million acres of the Olympic Peninsula preserved as one of the most ecologically diverse parks in the National Park system. Three distinct ecosystems within a 50-mile radius: glaciated mountains with Mount Olympus at 7,980 feet at the center, temperate rainforest along the Pacific-facing valleys (Hoh, Quinault, Queets) with annual rainfall over 140 inches, and 73 miles of wild Pacific coast — the longest undeveloped coastline in the lower 48. Hurricane Ridge, accessible by paved road from Port Angeles, offers the most dramatic alpine viewing in the park. The Roosevelt elk subspecies, named for Theodore Roosevelt who saw the original herd here in 1907, is the largest remaining unmanaged elk population in the United States. From the air the peninsula reads as a green mass dominated by Mount Olympus's ice cap.
Port Townsend is a Victorian seaport frozen in the 1890s, a boomtown that expected to be the region's great harbor and kept its brick downtown and hilltop mansions when the railroad went elsewhere. On the bluff above sits Fort Worden, an early-1900s coastal artillery post that anchored the "Triangle of Fire" guarding the entrance to Puget Sound alongside Fort Casey and Fort Flagler. The fort is now a state park; An Officer and a Gentleman was filmed there.
A historic harbor on the northwest tip of San Juan Island, built around the 1886 Hotel de Haro and the lime kilns that once made this the largest lime producer west of the Mississippi. The white-painted hotel, the long wooden colonnade, and the harbor full of sailboats and yachts make this one of the most photogenic waypoints in the entire San Juans. A short flight from KORS — visible across San Juan Channel. Sunset Color Guard ceremony every evening in summer is a local ritual worth landing for if you can swing it (Roche has its own private strip, but Friday Harbor is the public landing).
172+ named islands in the Salish Sea between Washington and Vancouver Island. Emerald evergreens, rocky coves, blue water, and from May to September, J, K, and L pod orcas. From pattern altitude at KFHR or KORS the geography is extraordinary — peninsulas, kelp beds, lighthouses, and ferries threading between the islands. The major destinations: Friday Harbor (San Juan Island, biggest town), Eastsound (Orcas Island, biggest island), Lopez Village (Lopez Island, the bicyclist's favorite). The Rosario Resort on Orcas was Robert Moran's 1909 shipbuilder mansion. Lime Kiln Point on San Juan is the best whale-watching spot in North America from shore. Summer fly-in weekends are heavy — book tie-downs and rooms ahead. The islands sit in the Olympic rain shadow and get less than half of Seattle's rainfall; drier and sunnier than the rest of western Washington. The Pig War of 1859, a bloodless US-British border dispute, started on San Juan Island when an American settler shot a Hudson's Bay Company pig.