Podcasts about Pacific Northwest

Rain and what happens under it. True crime is the largest group of shows on this page, and its clips run from a judge urging jurors to seek counseling, to three bodies in a partly covered cave, to the cockpit radio of the 2018 Horizon Air hijacking as Richard Russell barrel-rolls over Puget Sound. A smaller group treats regional history as unfinished civic business: a 1913 Seattle riot, a landmarked house, a ski patrol at Hyak, orcas netted in view of a boat sailing out of Olympia harbor in 1976. The listening is Washington-heavy; Oregon enters mainly through a travel show and a Willamette Valley basketball team.

What the Pacific Northwest is

The Pacific Northwest is the corner of the United States between the Pacific and the Rockies: Washington and Oregon, often Idaho, and in the wider sense British Columbia. Most people live west of the Cascades, around Seattle, Tacoma and Portland; the east side is drier and agricultural. It is known for rain, evergreens, volcanoes, salmon, coffee, aerospace and software.

Cases filed under the rain

Murder In The Rain keeps its cases as regional record, and its clips sit at the sentencing end: Richard Russell Meyer released after 25 years in the Robin Johns case, with the hosts asking whether that could ever be enough, and a year-end proposal to call Warren Forrest the Emerald State Killer so his unresolved cases stay in view. What Happens in the Woods is more argumentative, its hosts picking over Aaron Ibarra's Virginia Tech statements and missing manifesto after John Meese pepper-sprayed him and held him for police at Seattle Pacific University. Olympia Oddities folds crime in with the strange; beside the Horizon Air clip sits a cryptid showdown that Trista hands to the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus because she once believed it was real. True Crime Cat Lawyer and True Crime Queen range wider than the region; the former's Vancouver clip has Constable Dave Dixon compiling 31 potential victims while colleagues ridiculed him, and the latter's titles keep returning to Keith Jesperson and Jerry Brudos.

History that is still being argued over

Mossback, from Cascade PBS, is a two-voice conversation that keeps asking what a moment looked like on the ground; its Potlatch Riot of 1913 clip follows Annie Miller's women's-rights speech as a sailor takes a swing at her and a man with a diamond ring punches the sailor, then Mayor George Cotterill closing saloons and banning street speakers. Cascade of History treats the past as a live fight; the host says on air he is biased toward historic preservation, and his Dr. Annie Russell House clip pairs biography (abortions at home, a lost license, a bullwhip pulled on workers) with procedure: an application to carve up the landmarked property, and more than 300 public comments forcing the city to schedule a meeting. A panel preview has Karen Munro Ellick sailing out of Olympia harbor in 1976 into a SeaWorld crew netting orcas. Patroller Chats, from the Pacific Northwest Division of the National Ski Patrol, is oral history: Shirley Cummings on a Hyak where her family has served since 1965 and where the patrol, not management, once decided when the mountain opened and which slopes were unsafe.

Sky, river, rock and trail

Weather with Cliff Mass is the region explaining its own sky, and the clips come from one July: a cool, cloudy spring blamed on persistent low pressure offshore, then the Northwest turning drier than Arizona, with July 4th showers and thunderstorms over the Cascades. Addicted Fishing Podcast's spring salmon clip debriefs a two-and-a-half-hour season-setting call: Spring Chinook below Bonneville set to April 7, a catch that might double with one more day on the Columbia; in Steelhead Stories the hosts are indoors watching rain instead of fishing with guide Jason Harmsen. Peak Northwest is the Oregon show; its Abiqua Falls clip explains how a 92-foot waterfall near Silverton ended up listed on Redfin, with the state emerging as a buyer, on a road so rough the host parks a mile short. Spotlight with Laura Dawn adds beavers, common in Western Washington.

Kraken, dugouts and a TBL season

The sports listening is narrow: hockey, high-school baseball coaching and a minor-league basketball team. Sound Of Hockey - Seattle Kraken Hockey Podcast is a panel that opens on a bit or a listener note before tightening onto the Kraken; its mailbag clip is a Shane Wright trade argument, Darren Drager reporting Seattle is listening but not rushing. Pacific Northwest Fungo Banter's Dave Wainhouse clip is a career told as accidents, one day of contact earning a Washington State tryout and an 0-6 senior season that still ended as a first-round Montreal Expos pick. Jags Beyond the Baseline stays with the Willamette Valley Jaguars through a season, with owner Marion Clark on the $100,000 contract on the table before a breakaway dunk injured his knee, and on having to close every sponsor himself.

Bills, bands and first-person stories

Behind the Line Podcast: Pacific Northwest Politics & Constitutional Commentary is a solo monologue that reads bills aloud and interrupts them with disbelief. Its SB 5892 clip lists the election records that would become exempt from disclosure and objects that records requests would be redirected from county offices to the Secretary of State, funnelling accountability up to Olympia. Tri-Cities Mixtape is where Tri-Cities musicians talk, loosely and profanely, about how they got here: Sean Da Don goes from opening for Rick Ross in Beverly Hills to a plan for an old school lounge with R&B all night and a house band, because the Tri-Cities needs "something sophisticated" for "the grown and sexy". Wilaker: A Journeyer's Podcast is a comedian's road memoir told alone and unpolished; its Seattle chapter has a Bremerton coffee stop making Will Ables cry over what the road has been carrying. Transmission, billed as life at the heart of an epidemic in the Pacific Northwest, plays here through The Walk Home: Monet Carter-Mixon hearing fear in a two-second radio clip of her brother Manny Ellis saying "I can't breathe".

Where to start

• Cases: Murder In The Rain, then Olympia Oddities for the Horizon Air hijacking.
• The past: Mossback on the Potlatch Riot, Cascade of History on the Annie Russell House, Patroller Chats for Shirley Cummings at Hyak.
• Sky and river: Weather with Cliff Mass, then Addicted Fishing Podcast for the spring Chinook season and Peak Northwest for Abiqua Falls.
• Sports: Sound Of Hockey - Seattle Kraken Hockey Podcast for the Shane Wright argument, or Jags Beyond the Baseline for the owner interview.

The Pacific Northwest feed on this page plays clips from these shows.