I love it here. The weather, while depressing to you, is mild and temperate and the summers are perfection. There’s tons to do all year round outside. There’s tons of high paying tech jobs, many that don’t require a degree if you educate yourself. Seattle costs a lot because lots of people like it. You’re just not one of them.

Yes! I mean non poisonous spiders.

I noticed that the star for Glacier Peak is placed in the wrong spot, but this info is all pretty great.

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Buying used equipment can be cheaper than a single rental. but yeah lift tickets are insanely expensive

No spiders? Tell that to the hundreds of spiders in and around my house every summer and fall. At least they aren't poisonous.

Have you seen the rest of America? This place is pretty nice. You couldn’t pay me to live n most of the US but here is pretty good. Good food, good jobs, good airport, mild weather, good connectivity, good schools and universities, uniquely beautiful scenery, I could go on. Seriously go take a trip to Tennessee or somewhere cheaper. You’ll understand why it’s cheaper.

Glacier Peak can be seen from the Edmonds-Kingston ferry on a clear day. It's not super obvious but is noticeably taller than other peaks in the area and stays white through the summer (at least the part you can see from the ferry).

I've traveled quite a bit and lived in multiple different parts of the world. Yet, I enjoy the weather in Western Washington more than anywhere else I've been. It's fairly mild, rarely gets too hot, or too cold. We have plenty of rain to keep things green, but our summers are absolutely beautiful. We get enough snow to make things interesting every once in a while, but not so much that we have to deal with it all winter. The black months can be a challenge, but I find that I am much less likely to take nice weather for granted living in a place like Seattle, as opposed to Hawaii or LA. I just appreciate the sun so much more here, and I really enjoy the balance of the seasons we have.

Oh, and to answer your question, supply and demand. Our region has grown rapidly over the past 20 years, with rapid job growth in a lot of high paying sectors. New home construction has not been able to keep pace.

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Rich CA ppl looking for new states to ruin

Mix of things: supply and demand play a part, but so do the ways in which corporations deliberately interfere with that.

Companies have been buying up every bit of spare housing they can, with the explicit (in their own words) intent of renting them out at exhorbitant rates. Most of those rentals aren’t even residential; they’re being marketed as AirBnBs and Vrbos.

There’s also been issues with the recent admission that rental companies have been relying on an algorithm to determine what rents to charge, regardless of other factors. End result is that placed that are clearly not worth that sort of money are still charging twice as much as they’re worth and because everyone is charging the same rates, people have no choice but to find a way to pay them. Which, in turn, skews the supply and demand numbers even further.

It’s a complex issue.

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Snowboarding makes the winters better. Take advantage of the season!

Millions of people want to live there.

Thousands of homes are available.

Basically it.

Great, thank you!

Thank you for the description - I like the water option. A colleague recommended Winthrop some time ago. I didn't realize they were so close. Thank you!

Semantics, I guess. I wouldn’t disagree that an airport or train station stop wouldn’t qualify as a visit to a specific place, but traveling by train through the countryside on my way to Tokyo would count as being in the region to me.

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I didn't know the Indian Heaven area had so many. All I knew was that just south of Indian Heaven Wilderness there's a large lava field called, creatively, Big Lava Bed. I guess it is part of the Indian Heaven volcanic field but not the designated wilderness.

There's a forest road that runs along the east edge of the lava bed. One time I stopped and walked into it a little. It has vegetation and trees but the ground is very obviously a lava bed—very chaotic and rough, can tear up shoes, has sudden deep holes and trenches everywhere. It is very easy to get lost and definitely a bad idea to go in without a navigation plan. I went in only 50 yards or so, and that took a while. Here's a few photos I took: 1, 2, 3.

And here is a topo map of the area. Stands out on a satellite view. Interesting area, if rather dangerous to hike into. The forest isn't too thick, but it's enough to make it very easy to get disoriented.

I’ve had similar issues with my own ADHD meds. It’s frustrating, as I just had an issue caused by the holiday mess, meaning I was likely to run out before I could see my doctor again. He tried to prescribe two months worth at once, but the pharmacy wasn’t allowed to process it as such. Thankfully I was able to email him and he mentioned having some computer trouble at his end when he tried to update it to two separate monthly prescriptions…

I’ve also had issues with pharmacies running out of my medication and invalidating the entire prescription if they can only give me a partial amount, forcing me to go through the extra expense of going back to the doctor for an entirely new prescription after only a week or so. Which the insurance company might also reject for “attempting to refill too early.”

I’ve had slightly better luck with Hagen Pharmacy in Woodinville. They’re much more open and honest, and willing to help me work through any hurdles. They know I’ve been on the exact same medication for almost ten years and aren’t too worried that I might be “abusing it.” They also usually have it in stock, much more reliably than other pharmacies, and if they do run out they’re willing to fill what they can and add a note to my file to only fill the remaining amount instead of just invalidating the entire prescription.

Unfortunately, unless these medications are removed from the controlled substance lists, we’re unlikely to see any changes. We’re just stuck, even though it means being treated like a criminal because our brains don’t produce certain chemicals the same way others do.