Wandering in Washington
Sorry for the delay in a new posting. No, the Montana spring water didn't get me; I've just been taking a break from blogging.
I spent the better part of Thursday in Sandpoint, enjoying the window seat in the Ponderay motel, eating a tasty omelette at the Hoot Owl Cafe, hanging out at the Common Knowledge Bookstore and Tea Room (with wireless), and visiting the lovely city park and beach on the edge of the beautiful Lake Pend Oreille. At the end of a pedestrian pier is a small version of the Statue of Liberty. A welcome to immigrants in this radically Right area? Maybe a welcome to New Yorker tourist money. Then I headed west along the Pend Oreille River, with a brief stop at the Albini Falls Dam. Just before Newport, Washington, on a whim, I turned up the county road that hugs the eastern side of the Pend Oreille River. Also on a whim, I turned into the Pioneer Campground, part of the Colville National Forest, and decided to spend the night there. I pitched the tent, then drove back into Newport to pick up a fire log and a wilderness McDonalds dinner. Back at camp in the midst of tall pine trees, I ate my Big Mac and set the log alight in the fire pit. The blaze was sufficient to read by if you sat right by the fire. The temperature was such that sitting outside was comfortable, but sitting next to a fire was also nice. As I read, the moon rose, nearly full and very white behind the screen of pine needles. When the log was consumed, I walked down to the river to see the moon unobstructed. In the dry mountain air, it was a striking, intense platinum. In my years in the hazy humid east, I'd forgotten the moon could look like that, so clean and immediate, making the vast sky seem vaster.
The next day I continued up the county road, enjoying many glimpses of the Pend Oreille River through the pines until an intense thunderstorm reduced visibility. At Ione (eye-own), with the rain abating, I crossed the river and drove into town. Lunch was a delicious chicken fried steak at the Inner Passage Bar and Grill. It is situated on a bend in the river such that its picture windows are filled with a view of the water, almost like a lake, surrounded by the pines and hills. Then south along the west side of the Pend Oreille (Route 31) to the Tiger Market. This is primarily a museum, with a few gift items, an old fashioned cooler of sodas, and a rack of tourism brochures, run by volunteers. It is all that is left of the once thriving town of Tiger. It is at the intersection with Route 20, which I turned onto to go west over the Selkirk Mountains to Colville (CALL-ville). At a stop to view the Crystal Falls, a man with a British accent read my license plate and called to his wife, "Read this. They fought the British and nothing changed." The motto on the DC license plate is "Taxation without Representation". I found the man's ironic remark particularly amusing, because I had just been hearing about the Whiskey Rebellion, in which our Founding Fathers imposed a tax on whiskey produced in the western territories, whose inhabitants had no representation in the matter. (I'm listening to CDs of Undaunted Courage, Steven Ambrose's biography of Meriwether Lewis, focusing on the Lewis & Clark expedition.)
In Colville I viewed the Hixon Castles in a little garden at the Keller Historical Park. These are fantastical structures made of little stones and pebbles. A couple were castles, about 3 feet high, similar to a fancy sand castle creation. Others were fancy pillars and cairns.
After a night in Colville, I decided to take a county road through Aladdin and past Deep Lake to Boundary, a general store just a few hundred yards from the Canadian border, then follow the Columbia River down to Kettle Falls, which is 8 miles west of Colville. This was a very pretty drive, but a cloud hung over it, literally and figuratively. The figurative part was that I hit a deer that leapt into my path shortly after I started up the Aladdin Road. Not wanting to be the cause of death of any sentient being (mosquitoes and cockroaches excepted), I was initially very upset, until the deer staggered upright and then ran up the hill. Thus relieved of that sorrow, I had only to be irked at the dent in my hood -- but at least that was the only damage.
In Kettle Falls, I spent some time at the library. A woman at the other end of the table finished tutoring a boy in common denominators, then came over and asked if those were my DC plates. She had lived in the Washington DC area before moving to this other Washington. After chatting a bit about the local politics, she said good bye and, "Watch out for the deer." Right.
From there, I kept following the Columbia south. Actually, from several miles above Kettle Falls, it was Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir created by the Grand Coulee Dam. The Columbia's valley is steep enough that Lake Roosevelt doesn't have a typical maple leaf outline, but basically just appears as a very wide river. I spent a peaceful hour listening to the lake waters lap at a beach I had all to myself, then continued on to the free ferry at Gifford. This carried me into the Colville Indian Reservation and a windy road westward through the Kettle River Mountains to Route 21. That I followed south to another ferry across Lake Roosevelt (which had made a right turn since Gifford), crossing the water under a blazing red and orange sunset sky. On the other side, the road climbed steeply, with a number of gnarly hair pin curves, up to the plain above the river. This was filled with wheat fields flowing endlessly to the horizon. In one field, 4 or 5 combines, headlights on, were harvesting through the dusk and into the night.
The motel that night was in Wilbur, which sits in the middle of all those wheat fields and provides the only trees for miles around. In the morning I headed southwest on Route 2. It was a bright, clear day. Huge swells of golden wheated land stretched under the enormous blue sky. Hovering not far above the horizon was the gibbous moon, appearing three times its normal size, and ghostly in the daylight. It was near flat-side down, looking like a benediction. In Almira, I saw an honest-to-God working blacksmith shop. In Hartline, a low, conical silo had wheat spilling out from the bottom. I reached Coulee City, which is by Dry Falls Dam at the southern end of Banks Lake, within the Grand Coulee. Coulee is a French word for a deep ravine. The Grand Coulee is an impressive valley created by glacial activity. The Grand Coulee Dam was built not only for hydroelectric power, but also for irrigation of the dust-choked eastern Washington plains. Water from the Columbia is pumped into Banks Lake as an irrigation reservoir. I stopped on the road over the dam for pictures. The cracks of the asphalt shoulder were filled with kernels of wheat; I presume they were the accumulation of a few kernels from each truckload of wheat that passes that way. I followed Route 135 north along Banks Lake, which is clearly named for the wall of vertical rock along the west side of the Grand Coulee, to the Grand Coulee Dam. In the clear day, with the stark walls of rock and the deep blue lake, the views were spectacular.
The Visitor Arrival Center at Grand Coulee Dam is one of the nicest I have ever been in -- great displays that were informative without being either too dumbed down or too overloaded with information, lots of hands-on displays (e.g., a jack hammer you could "operate"), a nice theater for the film about building the dam, and large windows looking at the dam. One of the displays is a simple metal frame showing you how large a cubic yard is, then letting you know the dam that appears immediately out the window contains 12 million cubic yards of concrete. The dam has three power plants -- two original, and a third that has such advanced technology that it alone produces 60% of the power from the dam, enough for the needs of Seattle and Portland. I stopped for a picture under a skyscraper-height transmission line tower and heard the electricity snapping and buzzing far above my head.
Then back to Wilbur via Route 174 (thus making a big circle) and east into Spokane. The land was predominantly wheat fields; closer to Spokane there were stretches of desert grass and sagebrush, sometimes with stands of pines. In Spokane the land was solidly pine covered. In that city I was treated to the warm hospitality of my cousin Jack and his wife Becky. On Sunday, after breakfast of pancakes with home-grown raspberries to die for, they gave a tour of the city. It appears to be a very pleasant place to live. It is in a hilly area with tall lodgepole, spruce and ponderosa pines everywhere. The Spokane River snakes through a deep ravine in the middle of the city. Downtown has a very pretty Riverfront Park, with concrete walks curving through grass and flowers, lots of sculpture, a clock tower left over from railroad days, and a gondola ride over a dramatic, solid rock, falls area of the river. The old main east-west route is very commercial, but, refreshingly, with local businesses instead of the Anywhere America franchise lineup. Interestingly, while there were lots of espresso huts in town (often in what had been gas stations), I saw no Starbucks in the heart of the city -- only on the newer fringes. My sister points out that the espresso culture up here is what would have incubated a Starbucks company, but the established part of the city must have been too saturated too allow an upstart Starbucks franchise. The day was capped with a drive to Coeur d'Alene for a most pleasant dinner on the deck of a floating restaurant, watching dusk fall on the beautiful Coeur d'Alene Lake.
Monday I drove back to Colville via Route 385. The lovely mountainous scenery was hazy from a fresh round of forest fires. I returned to Kettle Falls by simply going west on Route 20 instead of up to international borders patrolled by ferocious deer. From my visit to Grand Coulee Dam, I now know that the Kettle falls and the original town are under the waters of Lake Roosevelt. The town relocated to the site of Myers Falls, which explains why the Myers Falls Interpretative Center is in Kettle Falls. I went to see the historic St. Paul's Mission on a bluff above the river, built in 1847 on the road to the Hudson Bay Company's Fort Colvile, now also under water. The sign for the mission had a picture of Fr. Jean Pierre DeSmet. You may recall that name from South Dakota, near the Minnesota border. That man got around. An interpretative path, from the hewn log mission replica to lake views, went through pine forest, redolent in the 90 degree air, peaceful and hushed with the pine needle cushioning.
After the night in Kettle Falls, I am ready to stop going in circles and to head west to the ocean (well, to the sound). Will let you know all about it.
I spent the better part of Thursday in Sandpoint, enjoying the window seat in the Ponderay motel, eating a tasty omelette at the Hoot Owl Cafe, hanging out at the Common Knowledge Bookstore and Tea Room (with wireless), and visiting the lovely city park and beach on the edge of the beautiful Lake Pend Oreille. At the end of a pedestrian pier is a small version of the Statue of Liberty. A welcome to immigrants in this radically Right area? Maybe a welcome to New Yorker tourist money. Then I headed west along the Pend Oreille River, with a brief stop at the Albini Falls Dam. Just before Newport, Washington, on a whim, I turned up the county road that hugs the eastern side of the Pend Oreille River. Also on a whim, I turned into the Pioneer Campground, part of the Colville National Forest, and decided to spend the night there. I pitched the tent, then drove back into Newport to pick up a fire log and a wilderness McDonalds dinner. Back at camp in the midst of tall pine trees, I ate my Big Mac and set the log alight in the fire pit. The blaze was sufficient to read by if you sat right by the fire. The temperature was such that sitting outside was comfortable, but sitting next to a fire was also nice. As I read, the moon rose, nearly full and very white behind the screen of pine needles. When the log was consumed, I walked down to the river to see the moon unobstructed. In the dry mountain air, it was a striking, intense platinum. In my years in the hazy humid east, I'd forgotten the moon could look like that, so clean and immediate, making the vast sky seem vaster.
The next day I continued up the county road, enjoying many glimpses of the Pend Oreille River through the pines until an intense thunderstorm reduced visibility. At Ione (eye-own), with the rain abating, I crossed the river and drove into town. Lunch was a delicious chicken fried steak at the Inner Passage Bar and Grill. It is situated on a bend in the river such that its picture windows are filled with a view of the water, almost like a lake, surrounded by the pines and hills. Then south along the west side of the Pend Oreille (Route 31) to the Tiger Market. This is primarily a museum, with a few gift items, an old fashioned cooler of sodas, and a rack of tourism brochures, run by volunteers. It is all that is left of the once thriving town of Tiger. It is at the intersection with Route 20, which I turned onto to go west over the Selkirk Mountains to Colville (CALL-ville). At a stop to view the Crystal Falls, a man with a British accent read my license plate and called to his wife, "Read this. They fought the British and nothing changed." The motto on the DC license plate is "Taxation without Representation". I found the man's ironic remark particularly amusing, because I had just been hearing about the Whiskey Rebellion, in which our Founding Fathers imposed a tax on whiskey produced in the western territories, whose inhabitants had no representation in the matter. (I'm listening to CDs of Undaunted Courage, Steven Ambrose's biography of Meriwether Lewis, focusing on the Lewis & Clark expedition.)
In Colville I viewed the Hixon Castles in a little garden at the Keller Historical Park. These are fantastical structures made of little stones and pebbles. A couple were castles, about 3 feet high, similar to a fancy sand castle creation. Others were fancy pillars and cairns.
After a night in Colville, I decided to take a county road through Aladdin and past Deep Lake to Boundary, a general store just a few hundred yards from the Canadian border, then follow the Columbia River down to Kettle Falls, which is 8 miles west of Colville. This was a very pretty drive, but a cloud hung over it, literally and figuratively. The figurative part was that I hit a deer that leapt into my path shortly after I started up the Aladdin Road. Not wanting to be the cause of death of any sentient being (mosquitoes and cockroaches excepted), I was initially very upset, until the deer staggered upright and then ran up the hill. Thus relieved of that sorrow, I had only to be irked at the dent in my hood -- but at least that was the only damage.
In Kettle Falls, I spent some time at the library. A woman at the other end of the table finished tutoring a boy in common denominators, then came over and asked if those were my DC plates. She had lived in the Washington DC area before moving to this other Washington. After chatting a bit about the local politics, she said good bye and, "Watch out for the deer." Right.
From there, I kept following the Columbia south. Actually, from several miles above Kettle Falls, it was Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir created by the Grand Coulee Dam. The Columbia's valley is steep enough that Lake Roosevelt doesn't have a typical maple leaf outline, but basically just appears as a very wide river. I spent a peaceful hour listening to the lake waters lap at a beach I had all to myself, then continued on to the free ferry at Gifford. This carried me into the Colville Indian Reservation and a windy road westward through the Kettle River Mountains to Route 21. That I followed south to another ferry across Lake Roosevelt (which had made a right turn since Gifford), crossing the water under a blazing red and orange sunset sky. On the other side, the road climbed steeply, with a number of gnarly hair pin curves, up to the plain above the river. This was filled with wheat fields flowing endlessly to the horizon. In one field, 4 or 5 combines, headlights on, were harvesting through the dusk and into the night.
The motel that night was in Wilbur, which sits in the middle of all those wheat fields and provides the only trees for miles around. In the morning I headed southwest on Route 2. It was a bright, clear day. Huge swells of golden wheated land stretched under the enormous blue sky. Hovering not far above the horizon was the gibbous moon, appearing three times its normal size, and ghostly in the daylight. It was near flat-side down, looking like a benediction. In Almira, I saw an honest-to-God working blacksmith shop. In Hartline, a low, conical silo had wheat spilling out from the bottom. I reached Coulee City, which is by Dry Falls Dam at the southern end of Banks Lake, within the Grand Coulee. Coulee is a French word for a deep ravine. The Grand Coulee is an impressive valley created by glacial activity. The Grand Coulee Dam was built not only for hydroelectric power, but also for irrigation of the dust-choked eastern Washington plains. Water from the Columbia is pumped into Banks Lake as an irrigation reservoir. I stopped on the road over the dam for pictures. The cracks of the asphalt shoulder were filled with kernels of wheat; I presume they were the accumulation of a few kernels from each truckload of wheat that passes that way. I followed Route 135 north along Banks Lake, which is clearly named for the wall of vertical rock along the west side of the Grand Coulee, to the Grand Coulee Dam. In the clear day, with the stark walls of rock and the deep blue lake, the views were spectacular.
The Visitor Arrival Center at Grand Coulee Dam is one of the nicest I have ever been in -- great displays that were informative without being either too dumbed down or too overloaded with information, lots of hands-on displays (e.g., a jack hammer you could "operate"), a nice theater for the film about building the dam, and large windows looking at the dam. One of the displays is a simple metal frame showing you how large a cubic yard is, then letting you know the dam that appears immediately out the window contains 12 million cubic yards of concrete. The dam has three power plants -- two original, and a third that has such advanced technology that it alone produces 60% of the power from the dam, enough for the needs of Seattle and Portland. I stopped for a picture under a skyscraper-height transmission line tower and heard the electricity snapping and buzzing far above my head.
Then back to Wilbur via Route 174 (thus making a big circle) and east into Spokane. The land was predominantly wheat fields; closer to Spokane there were stretches of desert grass and sagebrush, sometimes with stands of pines. In Spokane the land was solidly pine covered. In that city I was treated to the warm hospitality of my cousin Jack and his wife Becky. On Sunday, after breakfast of pancakes with home-grown raspberries to die for, they gave a tour of the city. It appears to be a very pleasant place to live. It is in a hilly area with tall lodgepole, spruce and ponderosa pines everywhere. The Spokane River snakes through a deep ravine in the middle of the city. Downtown has a very pretty Riverfront Park, with concrete walks curving through grass and flowers, lots of sculpture, a clock tower left over from railroad days, and a gondola ride over a dramatic, solid rock, falls area of the river. The old main east-west route is very commercial, but, refreshingly, with local businesses instead of the Anywhere America franchise lineup. Interestingly, while there were lots of espresso huts in town (often in what had been gas stations), I saw no Starbucks in the heart of the city -- only on the newer fringes. My sister points out that the espresso culture up here is what would have incubated a Starbucks company, but the established part of the city must have been too saturated too allow an upstart Starbucks franchise. The day was capped with a drive to Coeur d'Alene for a most pleasant dinner on the deck of a floating restaurant, watching dusk fall on the beautiful Coeur d'Alene Lake.
Monday I drove back to Colville via Route 385. The lovely mountainous scenery was hazy from a fresh round of forest fires. I returned to Kettle Falls by simply going west on Route 20 instead of up to international borders patrolled by ferocious deer. From my visit to Grand Coulee Dam, I now know that the Kettle falls and the original town are under the waters of Lake Roosevelt. The town relocated to the site of Myers Falls, which explains why the Myers Falls Interpretative Center is in Kettle Falls. I went to see the historic St. Paul's Mission on a bluff above the river, built in 1847 on the road to the Hudson Bay Company's Fort Colvile, now also under water. The sign for the mission had a picture of Fr. Jean Pierre DeSmet. You may recall that name from South Dakota, near the Minnesota border. That man got around. An interpretative path, from the hewn log mission replica to lake views, went through pine forest, redolent in the 90 degree air, peaceful and hushed with the pine needle cushioning.
After the night in Kettle Falls, I am ready to stop going in circles and to head west to the ocean (well, to the sound). Will let you know all about it.
posted by Annventurer | 10:54 AM
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