Monday, June 1st
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. But a journey of 1300 miles starts with spending $100 for an oil change and then $85 for a tank of gas. Then you have to pack up your stuff. Then you have to rest.
Tuesday, June 2nd
After a night of rest, M made some sandwiches and then finally got on the road. He was headed up into Washington to pay some more attention to the scablands–the areas affected by the great Missoula floods that occurred during the latter phases of the Ice Age. E, meanwhile, was forced to miss this grand tour so she could attend to a host of engagements and appointments. Luckily for her, M made an extra sandwich and left it for her in the fridge. She was most appreciative of this and even forgave M for locking her out of the house when he left.
M took I-5 to Portland and then I-84 east as far as Biggs. There he exited onto U.S. Hwy 97, turned north and crossed the Columbia River into Washington. As the highway climbed up out of the gorge, he stopped at an old viewpoint, one that looks like it was designed and built in simpler times, perhaps sixty or seventy years ago. Old as it is, this stretch of U.S. 97 was not the first paved road to climb this long slope from the bottom of the gorge up to the rim. The earlier road, older and narrower, was in fact the first macadam highway in all of the Pacific Northwest. It was built between 1909 and 1913 by Samuel Hill, a lawyer, businessman and world traveller. Hill believed strongly in the need for good inter-city highways and paid for the road himself, largely to demonstrate how paved roads could transform vehicular travel and transportation. The demonstration was so successful that by 1913, a new era of publicly funded highways had begun.
Though eventually replaced by U.S. 97, much of Hill’s prototype highway still exists. It is closed to motorized vehicles but open to pedestrians and cyclists. Here’s what the area looks like from the air.
Although both roads climb the same slope, Hill’s 113-year-old road has more low speed turns and a much gentler overall grade. This should not surprise us: it was engineered for the motor vehicles of his era, which were far slower and less powerful than later ones.
The Columbia Gorge is one of the windiest places in Oregon and now hosts dozens (hundreds?) of wind turbines.
By the time M got up out of the gorge it was…lunchtime. Siri found him a nice park in Goldendale. Thank goodness for parks. Or more precisely, let’s be thankful that some sufficient number of human beings like parks enough to think that we ought to spend public tax money to create and maintain them.
Of course central Washington is not all parks, which is good because that would be boring. Here’s a place just south of the town of Toppenish. It’s also pretty nice…
After lunch M drove up to Ellensburg, where he bought another $85 worth of gas. How far is it from Corvallis to Ellensburg, you might ask. Well…most sources say that the driving distance is 306 miles. In fact all the sources say that, except one. While M was checking those various sources, an AI popped up to offer a more complete answer:
Could that possibly be true? Should we spend some time trying to imagine a universe where it would be true? No, we need to move along. From Ellensburg M turned east and drove to Ephrata, WA where he checked in to a motel.
Hey, wait a minute! Wasn’t Ephrata the town where the guy was arrested last January for stealing body parts from the cemetery, storing them in his house, and distributing them online? No! That was Ephrata, Pennsylvania, not Ephrata, WA. Whew! Now where were we? Oh yes, geology.
Ephrata, WA has given its name to a geologic feature called the Ephrata Fan. To explain the fan, we have to start around sixteen million years ago, a time of intense volcanic activity over large areas of present day Washington, Idaho and Oregon. The lava that emerged from the earth at this time was highly liquid. Instead of building up large cone-shaped mountains, it just oozed up from the ground and flowed outward, covering the surrounding area with a new layer of rock from 80 to 300 feet in thickness. One hundred and seventy-five of such vents have been identified in Washington state alone. Over a period of several million years, the cumulative effect of these flows was to cover the whole area with a layer of rock that in some places was many thousands of feet thick. The weight of all this new rock–called basalt–was so great that it caused the granite layers beneath it to actually sink farther down into the earth.
When this great upflow of lava finally ceased–about six million years ago–the result was a vast gently rolling landscape. The bedrock has since been covered with layers of gravel, sand and soil, but the current landscape still follows the contours of the underlying basalt flows. More on that later.
But now we skip ahead to a mere fifteen thousand years ago, a time when the great Ice Ages were gradually coming to an end. That process created a series of massive ice dams in northern Idaho and Montana. When one of these dams failed, huge quantities of water would suddenly flow eastward and down into Washington. Wherever they flowed they would immediately wash away all the loose gravel and soil and then begin to erode the basalt. The result of some of that erosion is what M came to see.
Wednesday, June 3rd
The town of Ephrata is twenty miles from the mouth of what is called the Grand Coulee, which is one of the huge channels that resulted when the late Ice Age floods cut their way through the highlands on their way to finding the sea. As M drove up from Ephrata toward the coulee, he found himself in a wide, flat area, much of which looked like this:
But why were all these rocks dropped here? And why is the area in which they were dropped shaped like a fan? After flowing many miles through a relatively narrow channel, the Ice Age flood waters came out onto a vast open area. At that point the flood spread out into a fan shape, becoming shallower and losing some momentum. The floodwaters were carrying huge amounts of eroded materials. As the current slowed, the largest rocks fell to the bottom first while smaller sized sediments were carried farther along. This created something like a large river delta–except on land. Geologists call it the Ephrata Fan.
Today, there is soil on top of the rock layer and in a few places farmers have been able to dig up the rocks and push them aside to the edges of the field. This is similar to New England fieldstone walls, except that these rocks are two, three or four feet in diameter and can only be moved with heavy machinery. Or, as M observed in one case, a clever farmer could leave all the rocks in place but irrigate the land with giant sprinklers. What would that do? Make the rocks grow even bigger? Naw. M assumes that the farmer was growing grass between the rocks to create pastureland.
Eventually M passed by the small town of Soapville and started up Hwy 17 into the mouth of the Grand Coulee. Eventually he got up into the main part of the coulee, where he saw the sights and did some hiking. One of his hikes took him up to the coulee rim, where he took the photo below. It shows the view looking back down the coulee in the direction he had just come. In the background you can see the nearly vertical coulee walls where the floods chewed away hundreds of feet of ten-million-year-old basalt. Above the cliffs you can glimpse some of the gently rolling countryside that the old lava flows created and which still exists over much of eastern Washington.
Later in the day M explored both the lower and upper sections of the Grand Coulee, partly by road and partly on foot. What he found there is pretty interesting–if you like that sort of thing–maybe interesting enough to merit a separate posting. We will pass it by for the moment. M finished the day with a quick visit to Grand Coulee Dam and a longish drive to Spokane. Arriving there at rush hour was quite a shock after a day of empty spaces. He made it to his hotel–but just barely.
So, you might be thinking, was anything going on in Washington besides sage brush and old rocks? Well, as it happens, M did manage to drop by a fishing hole on the western edge of the fan. He himself doesn’t fish, but he found others there who do.
Thursday, June 4th
From Spokane M headed south, aiming for a place called Steptoe Butte. Steptoe is a rarity for this area–a landform created by an actual volcanic cone. It is only about four million years old, much younger than the underlying basalt. It rises 1200 feet above its surroundings. M drove to the top. It was an arduous drive but quite worthwhile. The weather was very fine and the summit is the perfect place to see the landscape of rolling hills and wavelike patterns that were shaped by those ten to sixteen million year old lava flows.
The first photo in the series above is the view to the south; the last photo is the view to the northwest. As you see, the northwest area hosts a fairly extensive wind farm. While he was at the top of Steptoe, M chatted with an old farmer who had also come up to enjoy the view. He lived just a few miles south of the butte and was very pleased that the people of his county had put through regulations that effectively prevented the erection of wind turbines in their area. Comparing the two views–south and northwest–you couldn’t blame him. He also asserted that wind turbines were useless anyway since they never produced enough power to justify their initial cost. Darn. How did he figure that out? Wasn’t that supposed to be a secret?
From Steptoe M continued south to Pullman, WA and thence to Lewiston, ID. M had never seen Lewiston before. It turned out to be a fairly ordinary settlement in an extraordinarily beautiful setting. M found his way through Lewiston (and neighboring Clarkston) and got himself onto Hwy 129 going south toward Oregon. Then, in the seemingly innocent small town of Asotin, disaster struck. Foolishly confident that he was still headed south, M actually veered off to the west. After a while the pavement ended and soon he found himself nudging his truck through a herd of cattle who were also traveling down the road in a westerly direction. A little while after that the rolling hills turned in roller coaster hills…
In the end M left farming country and ended up making a quick tour of Umatilla National Forest. By the time he got back to his proper road at the town of Anatone, he had wasted a couple of hours and a certain amount of expensive gas. Not that the Umatilla National Forest wasn’t nice. It was beautiful. It was also totally deserted, which M likes, and in the area where he stopped to eat his lunch, he got a pretty good view.
Fortunately, M had gotten up early enough and driven through Umatilla National Forest fast enough that he still had time to get to his campground at Wallowa Lake. On the way there he stopped at a wayside on Oregon Hwy 3, which turned out to give a view of what our maps now call Joseph Creek Canyon.
This canyon was one of the places where the Chief Joseph Band of the Nez Perce had their traditional winter home. In the bottom of the canyon wintertime temperatures are considerably warmer than in the surrounding highlands. Here the Nez Perce built semi-permanent structures and cached large quantities of camas bulbs for use in times of famine. During the time of troubles with the whites the band left the area and were never able to return. Chief Joseph himself seems to have been an extraordinary person who was much admired by friend and foe alike. His image still haunts the northwest.
Friday, June 5th
A day of driving, eight and a half hours. Breakfast cooked on the Coleman in the campground, lunch at a rest stop off I-84 in the gorge, dinner at home.
Saturday, June 6th
Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day–June 6, 1944. We marked the occasion by going to an actual big screen multiplex and watching Pressure, a movie about D-Day that focuses on the weather. Specifically, how did Eisenhower know if the weather was going to be good enough to allow the invasion to take place on June 6th? The film closely follows actual events. The story is almost certainly overdramatized, but not–thank goodness–oversimplified. Brendon Fraser plays Eisenhower, Kerry Condon plays his aide and long time companion Kay Summersby, and Andrew Scott plays the central role of James Stagg, the British meteorologist who had to make what might be history’s most fateful weather forecast. All three actors do good work here and we liked the film a lot.
And speaking of things WW2ish, here’s an Irving Berlin song from that era. This version was recorded on April 9, 1941, at a time when Britain was already at war but the United States was not.
Monday, June 8th
A day of mundane errands, gardening and grocery shopping. There was only one event of significance, as documented below.
Tuesday, June 9th
Family member A has qualified to join a team of Vancouver sim drivers to participate in an international virtual racing series. Races are streamed live every Tuesday, but are also available for later viewing. To follow Andy’s progress, go to Pit Road Productions on YouTube and look for Shop v Shop Imola Round 2 or Shop v Shop Watkins Glen Round 1.
