Cape Alava

Cape Alava is a remote, forest-backed shore on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, generally recognized as the westernmost point of the contiguous United States. Part of Olympic National Park, it can be reached only on foot, by a boardwalk trail through dense coastal rainforest to a wild beach of sea stacks, tide pools, and drifting fog where the land finally gives out to the Pacific.

Just offshore lies Ozette Island, and the cape sits beside the site of Ozette, an ancient Makah village partly buried by a mudslide centuries ago and later excavated as one of the richest archaeological finds on the continent. With its old-growth forest meeting a rugged, undeveloped coast, Cape Alava feels like the far edge of the Lower 48 - which, by longitude, it is.

• Washington
  The Evergreen State, the wet and dry sides of the Cascades related