Interstate 90 (I-90) is the longest interstate highway in the United States. The highway starts in Boston, MA and stretches west to its western terminus in Seattle, WA. The entire length of I-90 is 3021 miles. The interstate passes through 13 states and serves major cities such as Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago.
I-90 serves as Washington State's major east-west corridor connecting Seattle in the west to Spokane in the east. The highway serves as a major freight route connecting the Port of Seattle to all points east. In Washington, I-90 serves Seattle, Issaquah, North Bend, Cle Elum, Ellensburg, Moses Lake, Ritzville, Spokane, Spokane Valley and Liberty Lake before crossing into Idaho. Just about 298 miles of I-90 are in Washington, making I-90 the longest freeway in the state beating out I-5 at 277 miles.
I-90 crosses a few passes as it migrates east to the Idaho border. The biggest pass is Snoqualmie pass where I-90 climbs up to 3,022 feet. Over the years, there has been a number of construction projects to improve travelling across the pass to try to limit winter closures of the pass. Despite that, winter closures are common for I-90 at the pass. In fact, the winter of 2020 - 2021 the pass had a record of 464 inches of snowfall. During that same winter, the pass was closed for almost 70 hours during that winter with the primary reason being due to avalanche mitigation, accident and spinouts at the pass.
At GZ, there's a big dirt pull out just off of the off ramps to from I-90. Easy parking. It may be more of a challenge in the winter time, but even if the U Fish road is closed, you should be able to walk to the cache..
In September 2002, a group of 19 concerned geocachers scheduled a meeting after hearing that the Washington State Parks was considering banning geocaches in the state park system. Out of this meeting, the Washington State Geocaching Association (WSGA) was "born" with its core values of promoting geocaching as a fun, family-oriented outdoor activity that increases awareness and appreciation of the environment and our parks and trails, provide opportunities for participants to enjoy geocaching and to socialize with other geocaches, educate park systems and land managers about geocaching and its benefits, increase awareness and support of the geocaching through interaction with other outdoor groups and the public, encourage low-impact geocaching and promote stewardship of our natural resources, and support "Cache In Trash Out" activities to help maintain parks and trail systems.
In 2022, the WSGA turns 20 years young. To celebrate this milestone, the WSGA is hosting a 20th-anniversary GeoTour. This GeoTour will give you the opportunity to travel to all corners of the Evergreen State while you search for 140 GeoTour caches. To make it easier to tackle such a large GeoTour, each of our 7 regional chapters will host a bite-sized GeoTour consisting of 20 GeoTour caches with the entire GeoTour consisting of 140 caches. To learn more about our GeoTour, please visit the GeoTour page on our website which you can find HERE. We hope that you enjoy getting back out on the road while touring around Washington State. If you have any questions about our GeoTour, you can reach out to us via the contact tab on our website.
