The Road That Predates the Cars — a stop on Chuckanut Drive.
The first thing worth knowing about this road is how old it is. Chuckanut Drive was initially completed in eighteen ninety-six — which is to say it was built for horses and wagons, not for cars, and it shows.
That is why it is the shape it is. A modern engineer given this hillside would blast a wider bench, straighten the curves and put a barrier up. What you have instead is a route that follows the contour of the mountain because that was the cheapest way to get a wagon along it, hugging the rock, bending around every fold in the slope.
Later it became part of the original Pacific Highway — the main north-south route up this coast before the freeway existed — so for a while every car driving from Seattle to Canada came along here. Then Interstate Five was built inland through the valley, took all the traffic, and left this as what it is now: a road you drive on purpose.
Today it is designated a scenic byway, and the whole point of it is that nobody ever modernised it.
Which means: narrow lanes, no shoulder in places, rock on your left and air on your right. Twenty-five to thirty-five miles an hour is not a suggestion up here.