Port Angeles

The shore of the harbour was home to the Klallam people, whose village of Tse-whit-zen stood on the beach at the foot of Ediz Hook. Diseases brought by outsiders killed many of them in 1780 and 1835. In 1791 the Spanish explorer Francisco de Eliza sailed into the harbour and named it Puerto de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, Port of Our Lady of the Angels. A small whaling, fishing and shipping village grew up, trading across the strait with Victoria, and in the 1860s President Abraham Lincoln set aside 3,520 acres here as a federal reserve for a lighthouse and military and naval use — the reason the town was later promoted as the "Second National City".

Growth came late. A village of 300 in 1886 had 3,000 people by 1890, hundreds of them members of the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony, founded in 1887, which built a sawmill, church and opera house among the settlement's first permanent civic facilities. Port Angeles was incorporated in 1890 and became the seat of Clallam County. Large-scale logging began in 1914 with a big mill and a railway into the forests, and lumber and pulp mills carried the economy for most of the century.

The mills began to close in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Rayonier pulp mill shut in 1997, while tourism to Olympic National Park grew in importance. In 2003 work on a dry dock for the Hood Canal Bridge uncovered the remains of Tse-whit-zen, with about 300 graves and many ritual and ceremonial objects of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe.

Port Angeles is a working harbour town with an outdoor life on its doorstep. The national park's headquarters and main visitor centre are here, and people come to hike, fish, kayak and cycle; the Olympic Discovery Trail runs right through the town. The view north across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island and Victoria, and south to the Olympic Mountains, defines the place.

The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has a strong presence. Its museum occupies the old Carnegie Library, the excavation at Tse-whit-zen brought Klallam history to the centre of public life, and street signs in English and Klallam were put up in 2016 to help keep the language alive. The removal of the two dams on the Elwha River, which had blocked the river's salmon runs from 1911 to 2014, was the National Park Service's second-largest ecosystem restoration project, after the Everglades.

Peninsula College, the community college for the peninsula, is based in the town, and the Peninsula Daily News serves the whole north peninsula. The harbour with the mountains behind it appeared in the final scene of the 1994 film Wyatt Earp.

Port Angeles had 19,960 people at the 2020 census and an estimated 20,112 in 2024, making it the largest city on the Olympic Peninsula. It is the seat of Clallam County, spread over the bluffs above the harbour, and covers about 14.5 square miles, a quarter of it water. The median age was 41.3 in the 2022 American Community Survey.

With most of the mills gone, tourism and public bodies loom large — the county, the national park, the Coast Guard station on Ediz Hook and Peninsula College. About 11 per cent of residents lived at or below the poverty line in the 2022 survey.

Life follows the seasons. Summer brings visitors through on their way to Hurricane Ridge and Lake Crescent, and the ferry to Victoria runs more often; winter is quiet, mild and grey. The rain shadow of the mountains gives the town far less rain than the rest of western Washington.

The waters of the strait and the peninsula shape the menu. Dungeness crab is named after Dungeness Spit, east of town, and appears in crab cakes, sandwiches and whole on the plate; salmon, halibut, oysters and clams fill out the seafood. People still fish for crab and shrimp from City Pier, the main outdoor civic space downtown, which has a lookout tower over the inner harbour.

Downtown has cafés, bakeries, brewpubs and seafood restaurants within a few blocks of the ferry terminal, many busiest in summer when park visitors pass through. The wider state supplies apples and sweet cherries, of which Washington is the largest US producer, and Washington wine.

Salmon carries special meaning here. The Elwha dams blocked the river's salmon runs for most of the 20th century, and the river's recovery since the dams came down is followed closely. Smoked salmon and salmon grilled on a cedar plank, techniques often used in Pacific Northwest cooking, are the local classics.