Road Trip Through The State of Washington: The Other Side of Cascadia

The following are photographs from a road trip around the state of Washington, which is poorly named, because the famous American general and president had no idea of the northern part of the Oregon Territory’s existence. Like its highest mountains, Mount Rainier and Mount Baker, early white settlers settled on perpetuating the name of somebody or nobody, and certainly not anyone who had seen the dang things they were naming things after. Captain Vancouver gave Mount Rainier its name for someone who wasn’t with him and never even saw the mountain. As we should be calling Mount Rainier Tacoma, or the big snowy peak, the name Indians called it and all other big, snowy peaks, we should probably be calling the state of Washington something else, because it’s so confusing when people in the rest of the country talk about Washington and instantly think of the capital rather than this state that has nothing to do with the guy on the quarter and the dollar bill. I personally like the name Cascadia, borrowing from the Pacific Northwest Independence Movement’s name for the bioregion that encompasses the entire Columbia River watershed. 

There are 2 distinct Washingtons, and these photographs attempt to depict the other side of the state not commonly shown because most people think of Seattle and its world fair Space Needle, and industry behemoths such as Microsoft, Starbuck’s, Boeing, and Amazon. Just as non-Americans associate New York and Hollywood with everything American and those of us who live here know that the rest of this country is really the heart and soul of America, I feel like the Washington outside of Seattle is where you’ll find what is really going on in this part of the world, which to me is more defined by its land and resources more than internet retailers and overpriced mediocre chain coffee. 

Washington’s economy has been based on the extraction of natural resources for a long time, and it’s something the state and region has had to come to grips with. William Dietrich, retired professor at Western Washington University, recalls a logger deploring the clamoring of Seattle environmentalists about clear cuts, noting that Seattle is the biggest clearcut in the state. This struggle over resource extraction as the basis of the the state’s economy and the people who want to preserve the territory’s rugged beauty, continues today in many forms and continues to divide the state socially and politically.

Washington and Oregon and British Columbia together might better be known as Cascadia, a land divided, geographically and culturally, by the Cascade Mountains, which have come to be known as the Cascade Curtain. 

These pictures look at the other side of the Cascade Curtain and the Adventure Buddies’ tour through a wild Washington, rich in agriculture, silviculture, and great beauty. 

We started in Portland and took the less-traveled north side of the Columbia River gorge through country that produces some of the best wine on the planet to  arrive in Walla Walla, a town that has reaped the benefits of wine and food tourism, using the rich land it has been blessed with.

We then headed north through big clouds and enormous wheat fields and cow pastures, the Palouse region, to the Palouse Falls. We stayed in Ritzville, a town that depends on wheat and struggles to find its identity in the changing times. Then we toured north through Omak feasting on the local bounties at the Corner Bistro, a café that serves local produce and meats, and then camped deep in the Okanogan wilderness. Then we made our way to the Twisp Valley, one of the prettiest pieces of paradise on this planet. And then we headed back across the Cascade Curtain, on one of the prettiest drives known to man, to the wet side and Bellingham.

Columbia River Valley

Somewhere outside of Lyle, Washington, we made our first stop after leaving Portland. The landscape was like that of another planet, especially after coming from the west side of the Cascades with moss growing underneath our armpits for the past 10 months or so. Off the old highway on the north side of the Columbia River, we found the type of place you would expect to be ambushed by Indians if you were living in a western. Otherworldly rocks, deceptive dips in the landscape, and Ponderosa pines sprawled out as far as the eye could see with the Columbia River behind us. Across the river, Mount Hood stuck out, a huge pyramidical column, a gigantic mountain cone of snow standing over 11,000 feet. 

There are 2 sides of Cascadia, one on the left and one on the right, and whenever I’m out on the east side of the Cascades, I feel like I’m on the right side, at least for me. Finally, at this little stop along the Columbia River, I felt secure and sound, knowing that I was in the type of geography in which I feel at home. 

It’s true. There are 2 kinds of people. Those with claustrophobia and those with agoraphobia. I feel claustrophobic on the west side of the Cascades, and this little stop was the perfect anecdote to my sense of feeling like I am in a Sno Globe made of drizzle. Of course the agoraphobics would have been terrified with so much sun and wide-open country.

The Columbia River Valley and its surroundings is like a whole ecosystem in itself, a perfect place for farming and making perfect wines. The Columbia River basin and its strange rock formations and buttes that dominate its landscape are the result of the breaking of the ice dam that blocked ancient Lake Missoula at the end of the last ice age. We see the results of the resulting vast floods that carved the landscape making it defined, beautiful, and with a true sense of self.

Saffron. Walla Walla

Across this country, a lot of small farm towns are becoming ghost towns. Farm work that required so much manpower is now being replaced by mechanization, leaving these towns empty without any way to lure the young people that grew up there back to their streets. 

It used to be that these agricultural towns would ship off all of their best produce to the top restaurants in the cities and the town residents were left to buy the mediocre produce from large agribusinesses from other parts of the country. Some agricultural towns, like Walla Walla, have capitalized on the rich land surrounding them to produce a gastronomical revolution. Bolstered by the outstanding wineries that surround town, Walla Walla restaurants like Saffron are making good on the land. 

At Saffron, we had the rhubarb strawberry salad and pork belly with an absolutely outstanding Kerloo Cellars tempranillo. The strawberry flatbread with ricotta and mint for dessert was life-changing.

Walla Walla has blossomed with the local food movement. Where once its restaurants and supermarkets were supplied by the agribusiness giants, their food is now coming from where it should have coming from for so long: its own backyard. It’s not a novel concept. When you eat food that comes from the area and season in which it was meant to grow, you get real food. Sometimes the whole local organic food movement seems a little blown out of proportion. What they really should have marketed it to us as was just plain food.

The Difficulty of Finding Paradise: Tiger’s Canyon in the Blue Mountains

I remember when I first fancied myself a “Western writer,” I went mountain bike riding with my laptop and my over-sized headphones, and I went looking for inspiration in the Blue Mountains outside of Walla Walla, Washington, where I was attending college at the time. In the open air, I squatted down in the grass in the attempts of writing something profound and life-changing about nature’s wonders. 

Without having written one sentence, the battery in my computer didn’t last long enough for me to ponder the sunset and the blue of the aptly named mountains to write something that could equal the view. The smell of wild onions seeped onto my hands, which were distracted and led me to dig through the earth rather than tap away on the keys. It’s easy for me now to snicker at my naivety of wanting to be a wilderness purist, a Western conservationist, even with a backpack full of technology, but little did I know that I was fulfilling a life of dreams that have always inspired Westerners, one characterized by this balance between nature and comfort. 

Even now, in my brilliant escapes from the daily drivel of the modern world, my hands get itchy and search for my so-called smart phone or twiddle with my digital camera. As much as I enjoy the sounds of the forest and tend to leave my iPod at home, I do remember a fine moment on a camping trip in college when one of my old roommates handed me his Walkman and I listened to his Beatles’ Abbey Road cassette in its entirety without being able to move, paralyzed by the harmonies of “Here Comes the Sun,” as the golden orb split through the clouds floating over Tiger’s Canyon in the Blue Mountains. My Eden. My paradise, at least for forty-five minutes or so. So, in a way, Western technology can fuse with its wilderness, in order to create an Eden. Indeed, that is part of our way of being. 

Paradise, though, is truly elusive. 

We went back to Tiger’s Canyon, one of my favorite places in the world. It is a tiny, little corner just over the border between Oregon and Washington. After being stuck for so long on the west side of the Cascades—a place that’s like a a Sno Globe, except instead of snow, there’s drizzle—it feels good to get out to where the country opens up. It was the first time in a long while that I could finally relax without worrying too much about projects hanging over my head. We sat on a log, still for the first time in what seemed like years, overlooking a beautiful forest of Ponderosa pines. I could hear a woodpecker off in the distance. A junco was flicking to and forth. And just when I thought I had found paradise, I thought I should take a picture. The flies started buzzing us, picking at our skin. Despite the flies and the distractions of technology, we found a corner in this world that we could call ours. 

Nestled some 30 miles from the town so great they named it twice, Walla Walla, the place of many waters, we meandered up a dirt road with the dogs, a tent, and the kitchen sink packed into Tommy 3 Reds, my trusty little truck that just lives for crawling up these kinds of dirt roads that provide access to our refuges from the ills of the world. The ravens called us higher up the canyon, deeper into the Umatilla Forest. We set up camp at a saddle at about 4800 feet in elevation.

A single engine Piper Cub swung low and waved “hi” to us, a friendly gesture in a place where you’re lucky to see anybody for days.

We watched the sunset drinking a Columbia Valley wine, sitting on the poncho I got with a huge sombrero at a Mexican carnicería when I was a gringo Pancho Villa for Halloween during my last year in college.

Palouse Falls

Ritzville

I’m a 1000 miles from nowhere

Time don’t matter to me

‘Cause I’m a 1000 miles from nowhere

And there’s no place I wanna be

Dwight Yoakam

Ritzville is a pass-by town, a freeway town where farmers drop off their wheat to be shipped off. Unlike Walla Walla, it hasn’t made the transition into the local food movement that can bolster a town’s economy. Ritzville is barely hanging on. In these towns, it’s always the Mexicans who work as ranch hands or in the slaughter houses or run and work in the restaurants that keep these places alive. In Ritzville, it was no different. The only place that showed any sign of life was Las Casuelas, a restaurant on the main drag. Here, we were greeted with smiles and made to feel at home so far from our own. 

Movement, like that of our road trip, is made up of time and space. Being in nowhere makes time not matter.  It is in these places that I feel like there is no other place I’d rather be. When I’m in cities, I’m always thinking about the next spot, never content with who I am or what I am doing. But it is the Ritzvilles of the world where I feel like other times and places don’t matter anymore.  

Tokio Road

Settlers and even modern day people feel a great sense of dread in the plains. People complain about the flatness, but if you get out of your car and actually explore, you can see that there are lots of little dips and nooks and crannies to get lost in. And this is what makes people not from the so-called flatlands so terrified of the plains. The wide openness is truly terrifying but intriguing. You just have to get out of your car to truly appreciate it.

Grand Coulee Dam

 Now the world holds seven wonders that the travelers always tell, 
Some gardens and some towers, 
I guess you know them well. 
But now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam's fair land, 
It's the big Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam.
Woody Guthrie (1941)

Don't feel sorry for yourself 
I'll always wait for you 
Your ghost is a lightshow at night 
On the Grand Coulee Dam. 
The river is watching you 
At the drive-in tonight 
Who do they comfort now 
Since I've gone away?
Neko Case (2007

Moses Mountain 6762 feet

 In the Colville Indian Reservation, we turned off at a road with a sign labeling it as the road to the Moses Mountain Lookout. We drove some 7 or 8 miles up a torn-up dirt road, with a dry landscape of scraggly trees not unlike the Black Hills of South Dakota for its spookiness, stopping when it was too tough for Tommy the Truck to go on. We walked the last 2.5 to 3 miles on a wild, lonely road covered in tracks and scat of large critters, to find an enormous fire lookout and some space-aged weather equipment. The walk up was spooky and we wondered about the presence of bear, cougar, and Big Foot. But somehow we were comforted by the presence of a gravestone we found along the way:

Truman D. Picard 1947-1985
 Father-Husband-Friend

We discovered, with a little help from Google, that Truman was a forest lookout and worked on the Intertribal Timber Council, which is a consortium of over 60 tribes that is dedicated to protecting the natural resources on Native American lands. A scholarship is given in his name to Native Americans seeking degrees in Natural Resources. Somehow knowing that the place was sacred made us feel safe.

More Stars than there are in Heaven

Patterson Mountain: Methow Valley

Twisp River and Twisp Pass Wildflowers

Note the false morel.

Self-Portrait of the Adventure Buddies

  There are several requisites for travel. First, a world and a region of world to traverse; second, a traveller; third, means of conveyance, legs human or other, barks, carts, enchanted carpets, and the like; fourth, guidance by man personal, or man impersonal acting by roads, guide-boards, maps, and itineraries; fifth, multifarious wherewithals.

Theodore Winthrop, The Canoe and the Saddle

Portland: The City of Roses

Firstly, Portland appears to be a gastronomical paradise. Restaurants were outstanding and well-priced. We can only assume that prices were so reasonable because of the competition and the bountiful agricultural supply from the area surrounding Portland. We also loved this little store, Paxton Gate, which had beautiful preserved beetles, a wide selection of carnivorous plants, and intricate scientific instruments. Definitely worth a visit.