Idaho to Oregon, Compliments of the Pacific Travel Ass'n

The Pacific Northwest Travel Association — shortened on the cover to "Pacific Travel Ass'n" — was a regional tourism promotional consortium that issued travel literature for at least several decades; an Alberta branch is documented as early as 1949, suggesting the organization operated across both the American and Canadian Pacific Northwest. By 1978 it was producing this combined four-state guide for free distribution, likely through chambers of commerce, welcome centers, and motel front desks along major highways. No individual author or printer's credit appears on this face of the cover.

The spine text lays out what's inside in one breathless list: scenic areas, leading attractions, accommodations, dining, campgrounds, gift and specialty shops, traveler services — and then, in noticeably larger type, highway MAPS. In 1978, before in-car navigation, a printed fold-out road map was a genuine draw, and tourist organizations knew it. The four states covered together span roughly 265,000 square miles of the American West, from the Cascades to the Rockies to the high desert plateau country.

The cover stacks four full-color photographs in a vertical strip:

• A flat-topped butte or mesa rising from dry rangeland — the arid character places it in eastern Oregon, southern Idaho, or Montana's open country rather than the wet coast
• A skier in a bright red jacket on hard-packed snow (the red almost certainly a deliberate contrast choice for color print reproduction)
• Two canoeists on glass-flat water, backed by a dense stand of tall conifers — the species look consistent with Douglas fir or western red cedar
• A low-light amber landscape, possibly shot through haze or smoke, its subject harder to identify

The warm brown ground color and earthy palette are squarely in the graphic design sensibility of the mid-to-late 1970s, when natural, woodsy tones dominated outdoor recreation and tourism branding.