Washington
My new home state...
Washington is a whole USA in miniature, from what used to be an eastern shoreline, since overrun by magma...not just a little eruption, but flows thosands of feet thick, basalt columns that sometimes overlie one another. This scale of eruption is unmatched by anything but the Deccan Traps in India.
And in Eastern Washington, you have incredibly aged mountains buried up to their tops in silt, sand, and lava. One such is Steptoe Butte, which is not really a butte, down on the road between Spokane and Pullman. It's to your left. You can drive up to the mountain top for a beautiful view of the surrounding Palouse, rolling massive hills that now are one of the richest grain regions in the US. While you're up there, look at the rocks. They're very, very, very old, predating Washington's arrival as part of the continent. Washington used to be a set of islands that sort of collided with the rest of the continent.
The Palouse River runs through this soft, silty land, and tumbles off the edge of some of those basalt flows quite spectacularly:
See how many tiers of basalt flow there are? This is Palouse Falls---intermittently like this. During drier seasons it's much tamer. At the best times, it has rainbows.
Here's one of my favorite shots of it.
If you drive through the area, you can see the various lava flows quite clearly...
This region suffered what is called, variously, the Spokane Floods or the Lake Missoula Floods. In short, as the last ice age ended, water piled up in glacial Lake Missoula, near Missoula, Montana. It was blocked by an immense dam of glacial ice---which eventually, as the lake deepened, floated. The water poured out, ripping up the landscape, creating instant Niagara's at places like Dry Falls, and generally ripping soil off the landscape and moving boulders the size of modern office buildings an amazing distance, while cutting "coulees" or "flow-zones" deep into the basalt. Eventually it poured into the Columbia, and sent silt and unfortunate critters down to the continental shelf clear to California. Opinions differ as to how many times this happened, as the dam alternately floated and settled, but if you look at the hills around Colfax, north of Pullman, you can see ample evidence: those aren't cattle tracks on the hills, they're 10,000 year old flood marks, about a hundred of them. You're standing in, between the lava flows and the floods, one of the most violent places on the planet---historically speaking. Fortunately we're between ice ages now. A similar thing is reputed to have happened on the east coast, possibly disrupting the conveyor-current offshore and causing an ice age..
When you go west, as far west as the Pacific, you run into a different kind of
landscape, notably the Olympic Peninsula, which is a big lump of real estate that became
fixed to Washington a long, long time ago, with a whole mountain range rising in the
middle of it. Snowcovered mountains and green rainforest. A highway runs around it, and I
recommend the drive. This particular image is from the front lawn of a little resort that
just happened to be opening for the season as we drove up. We sat and wrote for several
days while being practically the only people there but staff, in nice little cabins that
had electricity, and a gorgeous view. 
Right next to these beautiful mountains, beautiful forest...the
Hoh Rainforest. Bring a hat. The limbs drip. It's cool and it's green, and it's gorgeous.
We also ran into herds and herds of Roosevelt Elk, which had absolutely no fear of us as
we were driving. People got out of their cars to take photos a little closer. I wouldn't
recommend this. This is not Bambi, and you can come closer to nature than you like. 
When you drive
off the peninsula proper and start onto the main part of the state, you can run into
places like this. They grow tulips for sale. And roses, and irises, and other flowers. 
Do you wonder I
so enjoy this state?