Crossing Central Washington — Washtucna to Napavine

Palouse Falls — Drumheller Scablands — Othello — Hanford Reach — White Pass

(This posting is part of the Road Trip series. Meandering on the Way will return soon.)

There’s a nice freeway that runs east/west through the state of Washington. If you were traveling west, you could start in Spokane, a town of 230,000 near the Idaho border, and pretty quickly end up in the Seattle area, where 3,581,000 people live near the shores of Puget Sound. That would be fine. But there are lots of other ways to cross the state. You could, for example, start in a Washington town called Pasco. That’s where M started in June of 2025.

In Pasco, M stayed at a Hampton Inn that was in the midst of transitioning into something else. He dined at a Mexican restaurant called Trejo’s, which was really good. In the morning he found Washington Hwy 124 and left Pasco heading east. Soon he found himself on a bridge crossing over the Snake River, just a mile north of where it flows into the Columbia. Oregonians tend to think of the Columbia as that big old thing that runs west across the top of the state until it finally reaches the Pacific Ocean. But at the place where the Snake flows into the Columbia, the Columbia is actually flowing southeast, which was something that M had not expected. However, as he himself was beginning his westward journey across Washington by heading east, he could hardly object if the Columbia was doing something similar. (More on that later.)

Since his first destination was Palouse Falls, he eventually turned off of 124 and took a small road northeast toward Clyde and Lyons Ferry. The route led him out the farming country he’d been seeing and into something…different.

When M got to Lyons Ferry he found that it doesn’t have a ferry anymore. But it is still the spot where the Palouse River flows into the Snake River. And it is quite a place, in its way. For one thing, there is a rather striking railroad bridge over the Snake just downstream from where the Palouse comes in.

There’s also a highway bridge. At its north end there’s a nice state park down among the trees.

M crossed the highway bridge and found that the main road made a hard left. It then took him under the railroad bridge, which at that point looked like this:

From Lyons Ferry–the place of the two bridges–it’s just a few more miles to Palouse Falls State Park. To use the park, you have to display a Discover Washington recreation pass. Fortunately, M had bought such a pass. Less fortunately, he had forgotten to bring it. So he parked in the main lot anyway and hoped for the best. The place was mostly empty. Here’s his first glimpse of the falls.

And here’s the big picture:

Remember that railroad bridge at Lyons Ferry? That same rail line passes very near to Palouse Falls. M took the following photo from a little bridge where the Palouse State Park road crosses over the track. The falls are just a few hundred yards away.

Now that he’d seen the waterfall, it was time for M to get serious about his goal of traveling west. Naturally, his first step was to drive northeast. Sigh. But not for long. At a town called Washtucna (population 211, said to have been named for a prominent Palouse Native American) he turned left onto Hwy 126 and headed west. It was at about this time that the day started getting warmer, which was unfortunate because the air conditioning on M’s truck wasn’t working. The fan roared, but the air coming out of the vents was awfully warm. Great.

At this point M was aiming to get to the town of Othello, where he figured he could turn north and make a visit to a place called Drumheller Channels. It was only about 45 miles to Othello, but the temperature was up to 88. M drove with both windows slightly open to get some air circulation and to ameliorate the greenhouse effect. It was hot and noisy. He thought of the old days, a trip he’d taken with his family from Utah to Colorado in the early sixties. That had been a hot ride also–back in the days when cars didn’t have air conditioning. As far as M is concerned, we–as a society–should probably not go back to those days, at least not till things go truly bad.

From Othello it was just fifteen minutes to the Drumheller Channels National Natural Landmark. M had never before experienced anything called a National Natural Landmark. What was that supposed to be exactly? Well, here’s what it looked like from the viewpoint:

Hmm. M was not impressed. This landmark, whatever it was, just looked hot, dry and seriously lacking in shade. But, as it happens, there are some landmarks that you can only really see if you use your imagination. (And yes, that does mean that M had driven fifty miles through the heat just so he could visit an imaginary landmark, but bear with us.) The interesting thing about this landscape is the matter of how it came to exist–the past events that caused it to be what we see today.

There are in fact lots of places in Washington that are similar to this. The first person to study them and provide an explanation of how they were formed was an Univ. of Washington geologist named J Harlen Bretz. In the summer of 1922, Bretz became fascinated by the geology of the eastern part of the state. He saw that the landscape included what appeared to be very large potholes, ripples and water channels. These are the same features that are found today in rivers everywhere. The only difference was that the ones he was seeing in the landscape were up to a hundred times larger. He concluded that these channeled scablands–as they are now called–must have been created by one or more massive floods in the distant past. During the next few years Bretz published a series of papers on the topic, all of which were unanimously rejected by the Geology establishment, which was then dominated by Ivy League Geology departments.

Bretz stuck to his guns and forty years of academic debate ensued. During those years another geologist, Joseph Pardee, began publishing his findings concerning Glacial Lake Missoula. Pardee’s work provided more evidence in support of Bretz’s theories, as did analysis of satellite photos and other research in the 1970’s. In 1979, when Bretz was 96, he was awarded the Penrose Medal, the Geological Society of America’s highest honor. “All my enemies are dead,” he told his son, “so I have no one to gloat over.”

So…to properly appreciate the view at the Drumheller Channels National Natural Landmark, all you have to do is imagine that that there is a river flowing over this scene from left to right–a really big river, a river 500 feet deep and who knows how many miles wide. Let’s try looking at the photo again and this time adding in the river.

When M left the Drumheller Scablands viewpoint, it was getting to be lunchtime. He had prepared himself a lunch before leaving Pasco. Now what he needed was some shady place where he could sit down and eat it. His best bet was to find a park in Othello (pop. 8,549). He ended up in Pioneer Park, which may not be the most pleasant park ever made. It is on the main highway through town and just half a block from another busy route. But…it had a picnic table in the shade and a lovely view of this USAF T-33 training aircraft. The T-33 was developed in the 1951 for the express purpose of teaching experienced propeller plane pilots how to fly jets.

If you ever find yourself in downtown Othello, take a drive up North Broadway Avenue to the north end of town. That will take about a minute and a half. There you will see a half dozen or so large industrial buildings, some of which look like factories. M saw them as he drove through and wondered what they were making. Turns out it that pretty much everything in Othello is about potatoes. The industrial buildings are all either cold storage facilities or factories that make frozen potatoes. The complex in the north end of Othello is owned by a company called McCain. Another similar complex a few miles east of town is owned by Simplot. The production of these two facilities combined means that Othello processors account for 1.5 billion pounds of frozen potatoes annually, roughly 15% of all North American production. By coincidence, the small bag of Kettle chips that M had with his Pioneer Park lunch weighed exactly 1.5 ounces. They were delicious.

The day was advancing and M wasn’t even halfway across the state. It was time to get a move on. M got back in the truck and drove down South Broadway Ave till he could turn west onto Washington Hwy 24. This would take him across the top of a large arid plain called the Hanford Reach and then along to the city of Yakima. The Hanford Reach, as M saw it while driving across its northernmost section, looked like this.

At this point M was following Hwy 24 straight west through a portion of what is now the Hanford Reach National Monument. The Monument was created in 2000 and includes 325 square miles of land. Those 325 square miles had previously been part of a security buffer zone within the Hanford Nuclear Site. On the map below the jagged blue and gray line shows the extent of the original Hanford Nuclear Site. The gray areas are the land that was removed from the nuclear site in 2000 and turned into a National Monument. The white area in the center is the core of the original nuclear site and is now called the Dept. of Energy Hanford Reservation. It covers 586 square miles. The thick black line that runs from the upper left to lower right is the Columbia River. M’s route is shown in green.

You can see on the map that M crossed the Columbia River just a few miles west of a small gray square labelled B/C. M remembers crossing the river and noticing two things. First, how odd it was to again see the river flowing eastward and second, that it was a much smaller Columbia River than he was used to seeing. What he didn’t quite realize at that moment was how near he was to the site of the Hanford B and C nuclear reactors. Completed in 1944, Hanford B was the world’s first large scale plutonium production reactor. Hanford B produced plutonium for the world’s first atomic bomb–the test device that was detonated in New Mexico on July 16, 1945–and also for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

In the following years, seven more reactors were built on the south bank of the Columbia. All of them used river water for cooling. As the water passed through the reactors it became contaminated with radioactive isotopes of many elements and also with a number of toxic cleaning chemicals. When it left the reactor the water was directed into one of the more than one hundred “retention basins” where it was allowed to cool down from its 200 degree temperature. Retention time was “up to” six hours. Then, still quite warm, it was pumped back into the river. (See this article for details about the effects of this practice.) The Hanford reactor bank continued to produce weapons grade plutonium for the next 27 years..

Once past Hanford, Hwy 24 took M westward toward Yakima. He got there in mid afternoon and stopped only to get gas before taking Hwy 12 northwest into the foothills of the Cascades. Slowly but surely, as he climbed into the mountains, the temperature declined. Good. Before too long he reached the summit at White Pass and began descending down the west side of the mountains. The road was good but had only two lanes and was very curvy. The scenery made a nice change from that of the central and eastern parts of the state.

Shortly after he stopped to see the waterfall, as M was continuing down the mountain, going reasonably fast, he suddenly noticed a white car right behind him, very close behind him. It was some kind of exotic sports car, possibly a Lamborghini; he couldn’t really tell. Clearly the driver would like to pass. Just as clearly, what with all the constant curves, passing would not be safe. While M was stewing about this, another car came up close behind the white one. It was also an exotic, a Ferrari. Behind that appeared a red Porsche, and behind that several more vehicles of the same sort. M couldn’t see how many because of the curves in the road. He thought it must be some high end car club out on a run. They were probably based in Seattle and planned to loop back up that way when they were done with Hwy 12. M did not like being in the front of this particular group. It had been a long day and this was not something he had planned on dealing with.

After a few minutes and a few more curves, M realized that the experience was a little like driving the pace car at the beginning of the Indianapolis 500. The idea there is for the pace car to drive one lap of the raceway at a very moderate speed with all the real racing cars tucked in obediently behind. At the end of that one lap, the pace car darts quickly out of the way, the race drivers all hit the gas and the event begins. On this road, though, there was no place for M to pull over and get out of the way. But wait, maybe there was. What about that place? It was on the wrong side of the road but never mind. M turned on his left turn signal, hit the gas and quickly crossed over to the wide spot, braking hard as he arrived. He was rewarded with an almost immediate roar of sound as the line of sportsters all got back on the throttle. The white Lambo shot ahead and disappeared in the blink of an eye around the next curve, followed by all the other cars in the line. It turns out there were ten or more cars in the group. One driver, seventh or eighth in line, gave M a casual wave as they passed. Then it was all quiet again.

Eventually M got down out of the mountains and found the town of Morton, where he checked into a motel. The next morning he continued on through the towns of Mossyrock, Saltum and Ethel. A little after 10:00 AM, he reached Interstate 5 near the town of Napavine (pop. 1,988). He didn’t quite reach the shores of the Pacific, bur he’d gone far enough. He turned south toward Oregon and home.

Wait a minute, is that the same Napavine that hosts the annual Napavine Funtime Festival? Why yes it is. Thanks for asking. And did they used to have a parade starring a teenage beauty who had been chosen as that year’s “Princess Napawinah” in honor of the 18th-century Newaukum tribal leader for whom the town was named? Well…yeah, more or less. Was the princess usually a white girl? Uh..we dunno. But was she dressed in elaborate “pan-Indian” regalia of a kind never worn by any real Native American woman anywhere? By all reports, that is correct. Is there any good evidence that there ever was a real woman named Napawyna for whom the town could be named? Actually, no. Might the town’s name come instead from the Newaukum word “napavoon” meaning “small prairie?” Possibly. And does the town still honor Princess Napawinah during their Funtime Festival? Since 2023, no. And finally, are some longtime Napavine residents still really upset about that transition? Almost certainly.