Revenge Trip? Nope, it's ON FIRE!

North Cascades Travelog #6
Winthrop, WA - Sun, 3 Sep 2023, 9am.

I remarked in my previous blog that this trip to Eastern Washington and the North Cascades is revenge, revenge for things we were not able to do in years past because of car trouble or poor weather. Well, where once poor weather kept us from appreciating Palouse Falls more fully, this year it was the government. All the trails down into the canyon are closed now because some dumbasses fell off the cliffs. Partly the closure is to protect other dumbasses from falling to their deaths— not that dumbasses actually pay attention to warning signs anyway— and partly it's because the local governments are fighting about whose budget has to be used to go and haul their bodies out. So that's why the other 99.9% of us can't have nice things.

Ah, but Palouse Falls was only the minor (thwarted) act of revenge travel this trip. The main part of the revenge was North Cascades National Park, where we cut our trip short six years ago when our car broke down. Now we'd come back for a few days and hike all those trails we were cheated out of hiking before! Except Mother Nature was ready for us. That bitch.

This morning we opened our guide books and websites to recheck the places we'd go hiking today and tomorrow. Whoops, there is a fire in North Cascades. Almost all the trails we wanted to hike are currently closed.

We made specific plans for this trip 6 weeks ago. That was relatively recent by vacation plans making standards! Everything was all clear then. This fire only started within the past few weeks.

I don't think the trails are literally on fire right now; I think the fires are mostly out, but things are closed until crews can make sure. And then there will need to be checks to make sure that everything's safe. You wouldn't want some dumbass shaking a dead tree and dying when it falls on their dumb ass. I mean, whose budget would even pay to haul their dumb ass corpse out of the woods?

Palouse Falls

North Cascades Travelog #3
Washtucna, WA - Sat, 2 Sep 2023, 1pm.

We got off to a somewhat lazy start this morning from our hotel room at the Spokane airport. We weren't rolling until almost 10, which meant we didn't get to our first real stop of the trip, Palouse Falls, until nearly noon.



Palouse Falls, named Washington's official state waterfall after a letter-writing campaign by local grade schoolers, is a plunge about 200' high. The official designation is a bit weird considering the falls is in... the middle of freakin' nowhere. I've marked the dateline this blog entry as "Washtucna, WA". If you've never heard of Washtucna, don't feel bad. It's a village of about 200. Our drive from Spokane airport was 103 miles.



Palouse Falls and Palouse Creek cut a steep canyon through basalt cliffs. One interesting thing here, geologically, is that this canyon is fairly young. During the last ice age, this part of Washington was tableland covered by glaciers. When the glaciers started to melt their water flowed along a different course down to the Snake River, which feeds into the Columbia. But the volume of water from the melt was so enormous that it pushed through a different route, finding a fissure in the volcanic rock, and quickly widened out that fissure into the enormous canyon we see today. So this entire canyon might only be 12,000 years old.

Thwarted Twice

Our return visit to Palouse Falls today was a revenge trip. We visited these falls 2 years ago, at a time when the air was thick with smoke from wildfires. The weather that day wasn't great, either. It was extremely hot (100+) and sprinkled rain. Because of all that we limited our hiking to walking around the top of the cliffs and skipped taking the more adventurous scramble down into the canyon. We'd come back another time and do the canyon descent, we agreed. Except now it's closed.

The state has closed off the trails down into the canyon, and stationed rangers in the park to monitor them, because apparently a few dumbasses got too close to the edge of the cliffs and fell to their deaths. Look, I agree that places that are truly dangerous should be made off limits, but nature is inherently dangerous. In mountainous parks there are any number of places where if a person takes one wrong step too far over an edge, it's a deadly plunge. I hate that the rest of us are confined to bunny trails just because of a few stupid people. This is why we can't have nice things. 😡

Roadside Sightseeing in Eastern Washington

North Cascades Travelog #4
Coulee City, WA - Sat, 2 Sep 2023, 4pm.

We've spent a lot of today blazing through the hinterlands of Eastern Washington. After our foiled revenge trip to Palouse Falls we started zig-zagging north and west across Washington toward tonight's destination of Winthrop. Why zig-zagging? Well, no roads go directly between these two distant and almost unheard-of places. And why Winthrop? Ah, that's out next act of revenge! More to come later on that.



Most of the drive this morning and early this afternoon has been dull, passing through rolling high desert type terrain. Around mid-afternoon things got more interesting, though, as we passed along a series of lakes beneath towering basalt cliffs. The photo above shows Lenore Lake, where we pulled off at a scenic viewpoint for a few minutes.



Just north of Lenore Lake is Alkali Lake, above. These two lakes are practically next to each other. The road actually threads along a narrow straight of land between them.

Driving through these remote areas also brought us past a spot called Dry Falls. We've been interested in seeing it since we saw it listed in a waterfalls book years ago. Yes, it's that dratted book. Would this be another bum steer from Professor Smedley Q. Boredom? Yes and no.



No, it wasn't a bum steer because Smedley was clear about this being a dry falls. Dry, as in there is no water... and probably hasn't been for 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. But yes it was a bum steer because Smedly understated the amount of imagination required to imagine seeing a huge waterfalls here. 10,000 years ago these waterfalls were at least 10 times the size of Niagara Falls. Imagine Niagara Falls, but 3 miles wide! Except these cliffs just look like cliffs,