Sequim: The Rain Shadow Town
Near Port Angeles, Washington
You are passing through Sequim, pronounced SKWIM, and it sits inside one of the most improbable climates on the Pacific Coast. The Olympic Mountains loom to the south, and as Pacific storms slam into those peaks, they wring out their moisture on the windward slopes. By the time air spills down into the Sequim-Dungeness Valley, it is bone dry. The result is a rainshadow that gives Sequim only sixteen inches of rain per year, while Seattle, just sixty miles east, gets twice that. For western Washington, this is essentially a desert.
People have been drawn to this sheltered plain for a very long time. Glaciers covered the area as recently as fourteen thousand years ago, and when the ice retreated it left behind a rich, well-drained alluvial fan built by the Dungeness River tumbling down from the peaks. Native S'Klallam people established villages along the river and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, harvesting salmon, clams, and camas bulbs. When Euro-American settlers arrived under the Donation Land Claim Act of eighteen fifty, they found the same thing the S'Klallam had: reliable sun, fertile soil, and a natural harbor at Dungeness.
The Dungeness Spit, which curls out from the shoreline just north of town, is one of the longest natural sand spits in the world, stretching five and a half miles into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. A lighthouse was built at its tip in eighteen fifty-seven, the second lighthouse in what is now Washington State.
For most of the twentieth century Sequim was a modest farming and logging community. Then in the nineteen nineties, something unexpected happened. A handful of farmers discovered that the rainshadow climate and well-drained soils were nearly perfect for growing lavender. The idea spread, and by the early two thousands Sequim had reinvented itself as the Lavender Capital of North America, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors to its farms each July. It is a curious transformation: a tiny peninsula town that found its identity not in the sea or the timber, but in the dry air that set it apart from everything around it.
