Seattle Chinatown >> Seattle Community News >> Washington State Business
7/27/2007-- 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.