Highway Rest Stop - Sweet Creek Falls

Inland Empire Travelog #5
Remote Northeastern Washington - Fri, 14 May 2021. 4pm.

In my previous blog I described how one waterfall we visited was basically just an unmarked pullout on a remote country highway in eastern Washington. That's pretty shocking for a pair of drops totaling over 100'. Well, the next waterfall we visited today was given only slightly more honor.... Sweet Creek Falls is at basically a highway rest stop further east. Relative to Crystal Falls it's quite glorified. There are signs, and painted lines for parking spaces! But oh, how glorious it is.

A short, mostly level walk on a good trail leads to a view of the lower cascade.



Doubling back to the parking lot and taking the other trail, a slightly harder walk with some ascent, leads to view of the upper cascade.



Then, of course, there's the view of both cascades.



This is the kind of highway rest stop we really enjoy!

Done for the Day. In Bonners Ferry, ID.

Inland Empire Travelog #6
Bonners Ferry, Idaho - Fri, 14 May 2021. 10pm.

It's been a busy first full day here in eastern Washington and the Idaho panhandle. This area of the country is variously called the Inland Northwest— as opposed to the Pacific Northwest as it is hundreds of miles inland from the Pacific Ocean— and the Inland Empire. Tonight we hang our hats in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, after a day of 280 miles of driving and hiking several trails.

I've already written about a few of our hikes and one of our misses earlier in the day: Meyers Falls and Sheep Creek Falls, Douglas and Crystal Falls, and Sweet Creek Falls. We did make a few more stops after those including another miss. We tried to hike the route of a historic log flume, but the area was closed. It looked like it suffered flood damage in the winter and Forest Service hasn't been able to fix it yet. During an impromptu visit we made to a Forest Service station this morning we saw a crew getting briefed to go out in the field. A ranger explained that they're only getting to a lot of Springtime maintenance just now that the CDC has revised guidance on mask wearing.

This free brochure was handy to find hikes listed in our poorly written waterfalls guide

While the flume trail was closed we did check out a few other areas. Mostly they were roadside points of interest... without having awesome waterfalls lurking behind them.

Our guide to these stops was a free pamphlet we picked up at the hotel last night. See picture left/above. Its handy map on the front side helped us quickly locate treks that were hard to locate with our poorly written waterfalls guidebook. And on the flip side it contained concise directions that were generally more cogent than the book's— though the map also had faulty directions for Meyers Falls.

BTW, the guidebook— which we've dubbed Professor Smedley Q. Boredom's Very Dull Book Of Waterfalls— has a companion website now. We consulted the website for better pictures of the falls. The site is... let's say, precious. It seriously looks like they hired teenage MySpace users in 2006 to design it.

Dinner and a Room with a View

We checked in this evening at a casino/hotel on the Kootenai River. We don't care about the casino; we picked the hotel because it looked nice and had a reasonable price when we booked. Plus, we could reserve a room with a river view and balcony for just $10 more. Which we did.... And then when we arrived this evening we noticed that pretty much all of the rooms have balconies overlooking the river.

The hotel is conveniently located adjacent to Bonners Ferry's historic downtown... about as much of a downtown as a town of fewer than 3,000 people has, anyway. But it has a few restaurants within walking distance.

We walked a few blocks out to Mugsy's Tavern. There we ate hot sandwiches on the covered patio and I enjoyed a couple pints of beer. The food was merely okay but sitting down like old times again felt special. Unwinding after a long day made it doubly special.

Now we're back at the room. I sat on the balcony overlooking the river for a while then came back inside. It's getting a bit chilly outside! But we'll probably leave the sliding glass door open all night for the fresh air. It's nice that the balcony is angled so we have privacy even with the door and curtains open.