Washington’s Six Regions

Washington is a big state doing an impression of two. Every state park, coffee shop and business in our directories is filed into one of six regions. This page says what those six are, which counties sit in each, and why we chose them.

One rule runs the whole system: a place gets its region from its county.

Not the city name, not how a place feels, not which side of the mountains you reckon it is on. We look up the county, and the county decides. It means the answer is the same every time, and it means we are never arguing about it.

NorthwestOlympicSouthwestNorth CentralSouth CentralEastern
The six regions of Washington State, by county. Boundaries from the Washington State Department of Transportation.

The six regions

Northwest

Island · King · San Juan · Skagit · Snohomish · Whatcom

The San Juans and Whidbey, Bellingham and Everett and Seattle, and the North Cascades standing behind all of it.

Olympic

Clallam · Grays Harbor · Jefferson · Kitsap · Mason · Pierce · Thurston

The Olympic Peninsula and its rainforest, the Pacific beaches at Westport and Ocean Shores, Hood Canal, and the south sound at Tacoma and Olympia.

Southwest

Clark · Cowlitz · Klickitat · Lewis · Pacific · Skamania · Wahkiakum

The lower Columbia and Vancouver, the Gorge as far east as Goldendale, Mount St. Helens, and the Long Beach Peninsula.

North Central

Chelan · Douglas · Grant · Okanogan

Lake Chelan, Leavenworth and Wenatchee, the Methow Valley, and the coulee country out around Dry Falls.

South Central

Asotin · Benton · Columbia · Franklin · Garfield · Kittitas · Walla Walla · Yakima

The Yakima Valley, Ellensburg and the Kittitas Valley, the Tri-Cities, Walla Walla wine country, and the Snake River down to Clarkston.

Eastern

Adams · Ferry · Lincoln · Pend Oreille · Spokane · Stevens · Whitman

Spokane, the Palouse wheat country, and the lakes and mountains of the far northeast corner.

Why we use the state road map

We used to run eight regions of our own, drawn for travel rather than for accuracy. They were a nuisance. Every county anywhere near a boundary became an argument we had to have again with each new listing. Is Kittitas central or east? Do the San Juans get their own bucket? Six regions defined by county, taken from an official source, retire the argument completely.

There is a second reason, and it matters more than tidiness. Explore Washington State already pulls live road and park alerts from WSDOT. Using their regions means our alerts and our directories speak one language, so when an alert names the Olympic region it means exactly the counties this page says it does.

Two things that surprise people

Tacoma is in the Olympic region

Pierce County is Olympic on the state map, so Tacoma is an Olympic region city and so is Olympia. You will also notice that Puget Sound is not one of the six names, which catches people who have lived here their whole lives.

We kept the official boundaries rather than redraw the state to match how it feels from the freeway. That is the cost of using a real map instead of a pretty one, and we decided it was worth paying.

The coast is split down the middle of a beach

Twin Harbors State Park sits in Grays Harbor County, so it is Olympic. Grayland Beach, a few miles south along the same stretch of sand, sits in Pacific County, so it is Southwest. The county line runs through the beach.

We could quietly fudge that one. We would rather tell you the rule is the rule.

Where you will see them

Every entry in these directories carries a region, and several of them let you filter by it.

The six regions and the counties in each come from the Washington State Department of Transportation offices and regions map, in effect since 1 November 1995. Thirty nine counties, every one assigned, none of them in two places at once.