Washington State Business- From the Rainy City

Washington State is a center of economic activity from Boeing Aircraft to hi-tech and computers. The capital is Olympia, and the largest city is Seattle, with a state population of 6.4 million. Seattle alone has a metropolitan area population of 4 million. Seattle is often known as the Emerald City, for being surrounded by large evergreen trees. It is also sometimes known as the Gateway to Alaska and as Jet City. Boeing Aircraft moved its headquarters to Chicago in 2001, but still has large manufacturing operations in Seattle and Everett, Washington. These are good things to know when planning your Washington Incorporation. Seattle is also the center of the hi-tech boom around Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corporation. Other industries being built up in the area include biomedical corporations such as Phillip, Boston Scientific, and ZymoGenetics.

The Seattle landscape has been much altered over the years, with the construction of a ship canal and a man-made Lake Washington, among other features. The dams on the Columbia River, including the largest, Grand Coulee Dam were key to getting Seattle its start as an industrial center, since they produced huge amounts of hydroelectric power. Note that Seattle is known as the rainy city, but it actually does not get a huge amount of rain, only 34 inches. However, it is often cloudy and drizzling. Rainfall in the area is distributed according to which area is in the shade of the mountains. For example, Olympia, the capital, gets 52 inches of rain, and nearby Olympia National Park has spots receiving 140 inches of rain per year. One of the parks features is the Hon Rainforest, a temperate zone rainforest. There are many Fortune-500 companies that make Seattle their home or a place of large operations. These include Washington Mutual Bank, Amazon.com, Starbucks Coffee, Costco (the retailer), Microsoft, Nintendo (games) and AT&T Wireless (originally McCaw Cellular) and Weyerhauser, the lumber company. Nintendo is actually a Japanese company but has a large operation in Redmond,
Washington. Nintendo also has a manufacturing plant east of Redmond, in North Bend.
The video-game giant has about 1,000 employees in the area. Other notable cities are Tacoma, which is a port at the bottom of Puget Sound.

There is also extensive agricultural production in Washington, including many fruits such as raspberries, apples, cherries, grapes. Other crops are peas, hops, lentils, potatoes and sweet corn.

Washington also has three National Parks- Mt. Rainier, North Cascades National Park and Olympic National Park. Olympic National Park is in the northern section of the Olympic Peninsula, and is centered around the 7,965 foot peak of Mt. Olympus. This is a truly impressive park with many lakes and much rain forest. Lake Crescent and Lake Quinault have cabins and lodges around them, other lakes only have campgrounds. This park can be reached from Seattle using the Edmonds Kingston Ferry. Mt. Rainer National Park is around the magnificent 14,411-feet peak Mt. Rainer. The park holds 400 square miles of wilderness and trails. Not too far is the Mt. St. Helens monument, the volcano that blew its top, literally, in 1980.

Howard Giske writes about how to get your
Washington Incorporation
and other business info at Inc Paradise