Guide
Road closures on the coast highways
Checked September 13, 2026 against the Washington State Department of Transportation and state law.
The Highways tile repeats what the Washington State Department of Transportation publishes about the roads your town depends on. On this coast most of those roads have no alternative, which is what makes a closure here different from a closure somewhere with a grid.
The roads, and why one closure is a long way round
The routes below are defined in state law, which is the only place their endpoints are set out exactly.
| Route | Runs |
|---|---|
| US 101 | the spine: from the Columbia at Ilwaco north by South Bend and Raymond, through Aberdeen and Hoquiam, then by Lake Quinault to Forks and on around the peninsula |
| SR 103 | Seaview north through Long Beach to Leadbetter Point — the Long Beach Peninsula’s only through road |
| SR 100 | Ilwaco west and south to the state park at Cape Disappointment |
| SR 105 | Raymond west by Tokeland and North Cove to the shore north of Westport, with the spur from Westport back to Aberdeen |
| SR 109 | Hoquiam northwest by Ocean City, Copalis, Pacific Beach and Moclips — built and signed as far as Taholah |
| SR 115 | Ocean Shores east and north to SR 109 — the only way on or off the Ocean Shores peninsula |
| SR 4 | US 101 at Johnson’s Landing southeast by Kelso |
| SR 6 | Raymond east to Chehalis |
| SR 110 | US 101 north of Forks west to La Push |
| SR 112 | the Makah Reservation boundary east by Clallam Bay to Port Angeles |
One legal oddity worth knowing: the statute defines SR 109 as continuing to Queets, but that stretch was never built. The road ends at Taholah, and the department’s own travel page calls it “SR 109 between Hoquiam and Taholah.”
Look at that table as a network and the exposure is obvious. Ocean Shores has one road. The peninsula has one road. A closure on US 101 north of Hoquiam does not add twenty minutes to a journey; it adds hours, because the detour is around the whole Olympic Peninsula.
What the alerts actually say
Each alert the department publishes carries a start and end location with a milepost and a coordinate, a county, a start time and an estimated end time, a category, a status of open or closed, and a priority. The priority values are a fixed set: highest, high, medium, low, described as the “expected impact on traffic.”
The category is looser than it looks. The department documents it only as “categorization of alert, i.e. Collision, Maintenance, etc.” — those are examples, not a published list, so the tile shows the department’s own words rather than sorting them into categories that do not officially exist.
The road that is being taken by the sea
At North Cove, SR 105 runs along a shoreline that has been retreating for a century — the stretch known as Washaway Beach. This is not a storm event; it is the permanent condition of that road. The department relocated SR 105 in 1971 “after coastal erosion caused part of the highway to wash away into the Bay,” and it is now building a dynamic revetment and restoring dunes between the Shoalwater Bay Reservation and Panoramic Lane to “help protect the road and nearby community from coastal erosion and rising sea levels.”
If you are reading the board for Tokeland or North Cove, that work is the reason to expect roadwork on your only road out, and the reason a winter storm there is a different proposition from a winter storm elsewhere.
Storms, and what this coast actually gets
Winter here is wind, water and trees rather than snow and ice. A guide should not attribute more than an agency has said, and the department’s published seasonal guidance is about snow and ice, so the honest position is this: the live alerts are the record of what is closed, and the tile shows them. What makes a coastal closure worse than its length suggests is the absence of a second route, not anything exotic about the weather.
An older bridge or a long single-carriageway stretch can also close for structural repair, sometimes for days at a stretch and sometimes overnight for weeks. Those are announced in advance as alerts and news releases rather than appearing suddenly, which is the one case where checking before you set out genuinely buys you something.
How to check, and the number that no longer works
511 is gone. The department switched off the statewide automated travel information line on 19 May 2023: “Starting Friday, May 19, Washington state travelers will no longer be able to access automated statewide travel information by calling 511.” Any page still listing a 511 number for Washington is out of date. Call volume had fallen from 2.2 million calls in 2009 to under 302,000 in 2022.
What replaced it, in the department’s own list: its online traveler information and real-time travel map, the mobile app, traffic cameras and email alerts, and — the one that still works with no signal — highway advisory radio on 530 AM and 1610 AM. On a coast with long stretches of no mobile coverage, the radio frequencies are the ones worth writing down.
Sources
- Washington State Department of Transportation, real-time travel map — the live picture, and the source the board reads
- Department of Transportation, Traveler Information API alert reference — the fields, the priority values and the category caveat
- Department of Transportation, deactivating the 511 phone number
- Department of Transportation, SR 105 Graveyard Spit dynamic revetment and dune restoration
- Chapter 47.17 RCW, state highway routes — where each route’s endpoints are defined