About
How this guide works
Find a place worth stopping for, hear its story, and go.
What this is
A field guide to 95 places across the Pacific Northwest that are worth pulling off the road for: mill towns that vanished, airfields that made a first, forts that never fired a shot in anger, and landscapes that carry more history than a marker can hold. 36 of them have a narrated version you can save and listen to where there is no signal.
How the history is sourced
Every factual claim is meant to trace to a graded source. Sources are ranked in four tiers: primary and official records first (agency documents, National Register nominations, Library of Congress, the Coast Guard, state archives), then peer-reviewed scholarship, then editorially reviewed secondary sources such as HistoryLink and The Oregon Encyclopedia, and tribal institutions for their own history.
Wikipedia is never treated as an authority here. It is a finding aid — useful for locating a document, never cited as the document.
Where the record contradicts itself, the guide says so and names both sources. Where the record is thin, it says that too. Uncertainty stated plainly is more useful than confidence that turns out to be borrowed.
What the verification badge means
2 of 95 guides currently carry the “researched and sourced” badge. It means a specific thing: someone worked through the entry claim by claim against graded sources, recorded how many claims were cited, and found no open questions and no neutrality problems. It does not mean every sentence is guaranteed true.
The badge also expires by itself. Each verified entry stores a fingerprint of the text it was checked against; editing the text changes the fingerprint and the badge drops off automatically until someone reviews it again. A verification claim that outlives the words it verified is worse than no claim at all.
Working offline
Pages, images, and map tiles are stored on your device as you browse, so a guide you looked at with signal is still there when you arrive without any. Audio narrations are larger, so they are saved only when you play one or press “Save for offline” — worth doing before you leave the last bar of coverage.
Privacy
There is no login, no account, and no advertising network. If you use “find places near me”, the coordinates stay on your device and are used to sort a list; they are never transmitted. Visitor numbers are counted with GoatCounter, which sets no cookies and collects no personal data — which is why there is no cookie banner to dismiss.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it should be fixed. Local knowledge and family records catch things that published sources miss, and a correction with a source behind it is always welcome.