Jack Kerouac spent a couple of months as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, in case the sorrowful name wouldn't already be a selling point for the Northwest's most bookish hikers.

This lake in Okanogan County has many names, including Epso Lake, Bitter Lake, Salts Lake, and Spotted Lake. Most seem to reference the lake’s unique chemical composition: crystalline deposits cause bowls or pans to form on the surface, and the lake gets incredibly hot in its depths.

This high peak in the Picket Range has been called "aptly-named."

Like many others in the Picket Range, this name might be pretty straightforward: You could have a frustrating hike ahead of you.

This submerged reef between Spieden and Henry Island was named by British Royal Navy captain Henry Richards while exploring the San Juans. The justification seems self-explanatory (and Richards was a pretty big fan of self-explanatory names—he named one island Dinner Island after his crew ate dinner on it).

This bay in the San Juans was named because of a raid that destroyed a Lummi village along this bay. A British navy captain started calling it Massacre Bay after finding a burial site.

This small island on the San Juans lies just off Orcas Island—notably, directly off Obstruction Pass State Park. In 1841, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes thought this island was getting in the way of an otherwise-ideal route for large ships. Obstruction Pass separates the island from Orcas.

This name, rather than referencing some kind of tragedy, is more descriptive; the rocks along this point on Shaw Island “had a considerable amount of fracture” when British explorers encountered it.

This bay was named on a British expedition in 1859. At low tide, water completely clears out of the bay—making it more of a part-time bay.

So while this La Conner city park’s name sounds like it could be an insult, it actually has a pretty wholesome backstory. The short version: The town loved a very special dog so much that they named a park after him.

Dirty Biter, according to the plaque near the statue erected in his honor, was everyone’s very good boy, switching from home to home as he pleased. He even had his own barstool at the local tavern, where he’d go for broasted chicken, steak, and burgers.

In 1982, when he was about 10 years old, he was killed in a dog fight, prompting the town to build a memorial, which still stands today.

The name origin for these mountains on the edge of Ferry County is unclear—but could be descriptive based on the distance between the peaks.

This apparently very strenuous climbing destination was named by a Forest Service trail-building crew in 1919, although the meaning behind the name is appropriately unclear.

George Vancouver named this one "in consequence of the change we experienced in its neighbourhood."

Several things around the Northwest—in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and BC—are named Cultus, like Mount Cultus, Cultus Lake, and Cultus Creek. It’s from Chinook jargon meaning useless or bad, so lakes with undrinkable water and no fish, bays with no anchorage, or places with just general bad vibes.

Charles Wilkes was apparently disappointed when his expedition approached this point. Before Wilkes got to it, it was called Hadsks.

We’ve gotten a few tips about Manson—but its name was not considered a bummer by those who named in 1912, more than 20 years before famed murderer and cult leader Charles Manson was even born. (In that same vein, plenty of non-murderers are still named Manson.)

But here’s the story, which is its own kind of bummer: American Indians still owned a lot of the land around Lake Chelan until 1906, when Congress passed legislation that limited the Native allotment to 80 acres, prompting a flurry of white speculation. An irrigation company bought up a bunch of land, then conveyed it to what was called the Lake Chelan Land Company, owned by Seattle banker Manson F. Backus, to sell it off to settlers five acres at a time. The land company would go bankrupt by 1920, but the town on the eastern shore of Lake Chelan still bears Backus’s first name.

This one doesn't have a particularly depressing story attached to it; Charles Wilkes just named it to note that it's one end of the Hood Canal.

The lake, which anchors the Seattle neighborhood of the same name, was so named because the tannic acid from logs dumped into the lake made the water so bitter that horses refused to drink from it.

This little island, which has a bummer name of unclear origin (tip us if you know), is just offshore from the University of Washington’s Waterfront Activities Center and Husky Stadium.

Apparently the name of this small peak in the Tiger Mountains came from steam whistle sounds during early logging days, but that reference seems to be lost in time translation. Regardless, it’s a popular takeoff spot for paragliders.

This creek, which flows into White River, was on White River Lumber Company land when it was named, although what prompted it is unclear.

While it sounds like part of an extremely intellectually distressing horror movie, this formation on Mount Rainier is named because Ingraham Glacier is so crevassed that climbers have to take an apparently disappointing route below it.

This 5,200-foot mountain in Lewis County was named for the frequent stormclouds around its peak.

Cape Disappointment had two perfectly good names—Kah'eese to the Chinook and Cabo San Roque to Bruno Heceta—before English fur trader John Meares came along and couldn't find everything.

Seriously: Meares was working off Heceta's map, which included the cape and what's now known as the Columbia River. He couldn't find the river, so he noted that the river does not exist and named the cape after what he was feeling, and somehow that's the name that stuck.

The same cattlemen who named Mount Horrible named Mount Misery, if that tells you anything.

The story goes that a group of cattlemen had to endure some nasty storms here in the 1880s.