Washington Backroads

We took another of our favorite type of weekend excursions:  Exploring the "road less traveled".  These are the types of road trips where we try to stay on two-lane blacktop (or even less!) as much as possible.  We do our best to avoid freeways. The last time we did it was when we wandered the Okanogan county area last year.  Several times we found ourselves on dirt roads too.  They tend to be our best experiences.

We loaded up and took off Thursday right after I got home from work.  We drove a total of 977 miles, and took over 2000 pictures between the two of us during this weekend.  The weather was nice and mild, the car got good gas mileage, and nothing went wrong.  It was a great time.

One of our more interesting drives was our first departure from the freeway.  The Vantage Highway parallels Interstate 90 going east from Ellensburg, so we opted to take that route to get "off the beaten path."  As we approached the west side of the Columbia River, we found ourselves among the many wind-turbine generators (149 of them I found out this morning) that Puget Sound Energy has built there, called the Wild Horse Wind Farm.  It was quite a sight to see--Those things are huge!  On our return trip last night we stopped for better pictures and an even closer look at them:

We didn't do much straying from the highway on our way over because we needed to get to our little motel (which I'm sorry to say we failed to get a picture of) in beautiful downtown Colfax, Washington. The next day was when our photographic adventure really started.

Our main objective of the trip was to go to the top of Steptoe Butte, the highest point around, and take pictures of the rolling patchwork display of farmlands below.  We arrived there easily (it's not far from Colfax), and was at the top by about 8:45.  While it wasn't the most perfect lighting, it was nevertheless pretty awesome and well worth the drive up.  Here are a couple shots from up there:

We spent the rest of the day wandering all sorts of small roads.  We kept coming to little sleepy towns--some of which were little more than just an intersection--and took pictures of whatever caught our eye.  Sometimes old buildings, sometimes scenery, sometimes just something interesting.  The weird thing was when we'd stop the car and get out.  I remember more than once hearing nothing at all.  Total silence.  Sometimes we'd hear a lawnmower in the distance or something like that.  There was one stop in the town of Oakesdale where we stopped on the main drag and got out.  There were people coming to the town post office to collect their mail.  I was near one lady when she came out and, just making small-talk I said, "I feel like I should be whispering when I talk in this town."  I meant just that it was quiet.  She apparently took it slightly different:  "I know," she said, sadly, "We've lost 4 businesses last year."  She shook her head, adding, "it's a shame."  I looked around.  Four businesses was probably a quarter of the whole town.  No wonder it was so quiet.

It was at that point that we hit one of two things that totally "made" our weekend.  A cropduster!  From the edge of Oakesdale we could see the bright yellow plane in the distance.  We blasted up the road and stopped near where he was turning around.  After a couple passes we'd move the car closer and closer.  Finally, we were practically beneath him.  We timed it well, because we got a couple more passes from him before he finished up.  The best part was when he buzzed us after he finished!  Too cool.

 

Several more jaunts into small towns like Rosalia, Tekoa, Latah, and many others and we decided to head over the border into Idaho.  Almost instantly after crossing the border the weather and terrain changed.  There was snow almost everywhere we went.  We "chased" down a couple leads for potential pictures, like Wallace and the little town of Murray, but we finally gave up.  The weather was "iffy" while we were there, and nothing was really jumping out at us.  We gave up, hit the freeway (gasp!) and headed on a breakneck straight shot back to Steptoe Butte to see if we could add sundown shots to what we had taken up there that morning.  We made it (just barely!) and got some pretty interesting shots up there.  We hoped to get "long shadows" before the sun went down, but we apparently missed that part.

The next day was our last day.  After leaving the motel we headed out, determined to zig-zag our way home, staying on small roads.  Well, boy did we hit the gold mine!  One road we decided to take was a dirt road, and we stumbled across a bunch of cowboys with a big corral of calves, all ready to be branded.  After talking with them, they let us have the run of the whole thing, taking as many pictures as we wanted.  It was a blast!  That totally made the trip.  I mean really--how often in our lives to we city folk get to take part in a cattle branding event?  We took tons of pictures of that, but here are a couple:

After we left the branding, we found ourselves stopping at several other places.  We got pictures of hawks circling above us, screaming at us to leave their nesting area, pictures of podunk little towns, pictures of decaying structures, signs, and lots of other things that caught our eye.

Like I said--we've got tons of good pictures but it will take us a while to get them put up on our Smugmug site.  Stay tuned!