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Destinations around the school

The Pacific Northwest is a great area in which to live, study and play. While attending the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, you’ll find yourself right in the middle of a remarkable playground.

Surrounding us are hundreds of miles of protected cruising waters and at our backs tower the snow-clad Olympic Mountains. Hiking, climbing, skiing and sailing are just a few of the many experiences found on the Olympic Peninsula. Pacific Ocean beaches lie a couple of hours to the west and the sunny San Juan Archipelago is 20 miles across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The region is also close to the metropolitan centers of Victoria and Vancouver, B.C. and Seattle and Tacoma, Washington.

Port Townsend: Victorian Seaport

Port Townsend Chamber of Commerce

This small seaport of 8,000 people has become a center for the local boatbuilding industry. Boat builders, sailmakers, riggers, blacksmiths and other marine trades people carry on a long maritime tradition. Summer tourists come to shop in the diverse stores along Water Street and to enjoy historic downtown, once home to a boisterous population of sailors, lumbermen, land speculators and those who profited from them. Uptown, stately Victorian homes, many lovingly restored, overlook the harbor. Only five miles from the school, Port Townsend is a great place to visit and offers a wide variety of drinking, dining and shopping opportunities. It is also home to a vibrant community of locals who enrich the town with their art, music, drama and businesses. Port Townsend is recognized as the wooden boat capital of the West Coast and is host to the annual Wooden Boat Festival.

Port Hadlock

Port Hadlock Chamber of Commerce

Located at the southern end of Port Townsend Bay, Port Hadlock, founded by Samuel Hadlock in 1870, is one of the now forgotten corners of busy Puget Sound. Back then, lumber ships, schooners and square riggers lined up to load timbers manufactured by the Washington Mill Company’s new sawmill. Hotels, saloons, stores and barbershops sprang up. For thousands of years prior to the arrival of the immigrant Europeans and Asians, Northwest Indian tribes gathered here at what they called Tsetsibus to live, visit, gather shellfish, gamble and race their cedar dugout canoes. Today, traces of this long Native Peoples occupation survive as shellfish middens along the shores. Of the sawmill, which burned in 1910, only pilings remain. A small collection of turn-of-the-century wood framed buildings still stand on the waterfront.