Tip of the Iceberg.

• Author: Harrington, Susan
• Position: Editorial

This month's coverage of the Pacific Northwest-Alaska Connection is just the tip of the iceberg. We are going to spend the next year gathering stories to tell about this topic in the 2015 special section. I'm thinking of little vignettes, spotlights on companies that have been here for years, like Odom, Osborne, and Oles, Morrison, Rinker, and Baker. Connections with communities like Bainbridge, Bellingham, and Blaine. Investments by companies headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, as well as Seattle and Portland. We'll try to identify, locate, and quantify the goods and services, the give and take.

Just figuring out what constitutes the Pacific Northwest is a good starting point. Some federal agencies think Idaho and portions of Wyoming and Montana fit the definition, and while that definition certainly lends itself to more connections, regionally--and realistically--those Rocky Mountain states in the Northwest and West are not the Pacific Northwest. It gets confusing. So we'll attempt to unravel the definition and come up with our own set of boundaries. For now, I invite our readers to check out the tip of the iceberg and take a look at this year's special section (page 30).

Another topic that is just the tip of the iceberg in this month's magazine concerns the economic impact of...