strong contrasts. At one moment
you may be jostled along the streets of some metropolitan center among
people of many nationalities and within a mere hour or so be wafted to a
sequestered spot of transcendent beauty, where no voice but your own is
echoed by the hills and where the existence of any other human being to
share this planet can be completely forgotten.

It is a state of large accomplishments. Big projects are planned:
mammoth irrigation schemes are carried out; lands are reclaimed from the
deep; orchards fill its valleys; wheat plateaus extend for miles; salmon
traps line the shores; its lumber supplies the world; its ships sail all
the seas; monstrous bridges cross the waterways; buildings vie with the
highest anywhere constructed; its schools rank first in the Union; its
men contribute to the world's greatness; its women vote and rear capable
families; the people make their own laws. Loyalty, originality,
enterprise, independence and liberality, all attributes of the western
spirit, are evident throughout the state.

Its population has grown in twenty odd years from 343,000 to over
1,400,000. In the meantime, wildernesses have been converted into
gardens, villages have developed into towns, while towns have grown into
cities, taking their places among the leading marts of the world. From a
frontier state it has come to be one of the greatest and most important
in the Union, adding to the galaxy of stars one of the brightest that
has yet appeared on the horizon.

[Illustration: LAKE CHELAN, ONE OF THE MOST WONDERFUL LAKE RESORTS IN
THE WEST

_"Pride of the waters of the world"_

_Copyright by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore._]

[Illustration: OUR MOUNTAINS

"Touched with a light that hath no name,
A glory never sung,
Aloft on sky and mountain wall
Are God's great pictures hung."]

Perhaps the most prominent feature which attracts the eye of a visitor
upon his arrival in the Pacific Northwest consists of the mountain
ranges with their towering snowcapped peaks, forming, as it were,
ladders reaching from the green vales of earth to the blue vaults of
heaven. Silhouetted against the sky in the hazy distance, they are noted
by the westward bound traveler as soon as he reaches the highest point
in the divide of the Rockies, while to the mariner groping his way
eastward upon the Pacific Ocean they offer the first evidence of the
nearness of the welc