As we were walking today, Brian and I wondered aloud whether or not the Olympic Mountain range, being adjunct to a temperate rain forest, could sustain a profitable season of wintertime sports. I noticed that after the heavy rains last week, much of the snow on the peaks had vanished, though the uppermost levels were still flecked in white. However those areas also looked steep, rocky, and impassable. The Olympics are also far from Seattle, while the Cascades, which are larger and get more snow, are a short drive from King County.

The topic then moved on to why Puget Sound isn’t called Puget Bay instead. I speculated it had something to do with its size, and promised to look it up when we got home. I think sounds and fjords are my favorite bodies of water, followed very closely by archipelagos.

[wiki]: “A Sound is often formed by the sea flooding a river valley. This produces a long inlet where the sloping valley hillsides descend to sea-level and continue beneath the water to form a sloping sea floor. The Marlborough Sounds in New Zealand are a good example of this type of formation.

“Sometimes a Sound is produced by a glacier carving out a valley on the coast then receding, or the sea invading a glacier valley. The glacier produces a sound that often has steep, near vertical, sides that extend deep under water. The sea floor is often flat and deeper at the landward end than the seaward end, due to glacial moraine deposits. This type of sound is more properly termed a fjord (or fiord).

“The word “sound” in this sense came from Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse sund, which also means “swimming”; it may have originally meant “sea strait narrow enough for a man to swim across”.

“…The Puget Sound is a deep arm of the ocean.”

While looking this up, I also found this page.