Kelso, WA
Eight miles north of Longview and three miles north of Kelso, in the I-5 corridor between Portland and Seattle. Single 4,200ft runway 12/30, uncontrolled. Owned by the City of Kelso. The closest civilian airport to Mount St. Helens (35 miles east) and the most common base for sightseeing flights to the crater. The field was buried under three inches of volcanic ash on May 18, 1980 — pilots returning that afternoon described the apron as a gray moonscape, and operations were suspended for ten days while crews swept the runway and pumped abrasive ash from aircraft systems. The Cowlitz River confluence with the Columbia is two miles south; on a clear day Mount Hood is visible 60 miles southeast and Mount Rainier 70 miles northeast.
On May 18, 1980, St. Helens blew its north face off in the most destructive eruption in U.S. history, dropping the summit about 1,300 feet and leaving a horseshoe crater open to the north. Inside it a lava dome built through the 1980s and again from 2004 to 2008, wrapped by Crater Glacier, which formed after the eruption and is one of the youngest glaciers in North America. The Cowlitz people call it Lawetlat'la. It has been quiet since 2008.
The volcano that blew. May 18, 1980 at 8:32 AM Pacific time, after months of seismic warning, the north flank of Mount St. Helens collapsed in the largest landslide in recorded history, releasing a lateral blast that flattened 230 square miles of forest and killed 57 people. The eruption removed 1,300 feet of summit elevation. From the air today the crater is dramatic — a horseshoe gap open to the north, with a growing lava dome inside and Spirit Lake (now elevated 200 ft above its former level by debris) just north. Routinely visible from departures out of KPDX. The Johnston Ridge Observatory (named for volcanologist David Johnston, killed in the blast) is the eye-level ground perspective.
The southwestern tip of Washington State, at the mouth of the Columbia River — the final westernmost point Lewis and Clark reached on the Corps of Discovery expedition. They arrived in November 1805 and spent nine days here before retreating across the river to the more sheltered Fort Clatsop site for the winter. William Clark carved "William Clark, November 19, 1805" into a tree at the cape; Sergeant Patrick Gass later wrote that the men "in general were much pleased with the prospect." Cape Disappointment Lighthouse, completed in 1856, is the oldest functioning lighthouse on the West Coast. The bar at the mouth of the Columbia, just offshore, is among the most dangerous in the world — over 2,000 large vessels and 700 lives have been lost on it. Coast Guard Station Cape Disappointment trains the bar pilots who guide every commercial ship across.
A 150-mile-long agricultural valley between the Coast Range and the Cascade Range — Oregon's heart, the destination of the Oregon Trail, and one of the world's most acclaimed cool-climate wine regions. The valley sits at the same latitude as Burgundy in France and produces Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Gris that regularly outscore French equivalents in blind tastings. The first commercial Pinot vines were planted at Eyrie Vineyards in 1965 by David Lett, who took home a top-tier place in the 1979 Gault-Millau Olympiad of Wine in Paris and put Oregon Pinot on the world map. Today the Willamette Valley AVA has 700+ wineries and 27,000 acres of vineyards, most clustered in the Dundee Hills and Eola-Amity Hills west of Salem.