Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

North Cascades Travelog #16
Coulee Dam, WA - Tue, 5 Sep 2023, 10am.

Today we're headed back to GEG airport in Spokane to fly home. Our 4 day trip to eastern Washington and the North Cascades is almost over. Almost over is not the same as over-over, though. There's still stuff left to do and time to do it! We stopped in Coulee Dam, Washington, to see the Grand Coulee Dam.



The Grand Coulee Dam is the largest dam and largest hydroelectric generation plant in North America. The photo above shows a view from outside the visitors center. The scale of this behemoth can be hard to discern from pictures. The dam is 5,223 feet wide— nearly one mile across. It's 550 feet tall. People often marvel at the Hoover Dam east of Las Vegas... the Hoover Dam is about 32% taller (726 feet vs. 550) but, at 1,244' across, less than one-quarter as wide. The Grand Coulee contains 11,975,521 cubic yards of concrete, more than 3.5x the volume of the Hoover Dam, and the collective 6,809 megawatts its hydroelectric generators can produce is more than 3x the Hoover Dam's output.

Just to put that 550' height figure in perspective.... If the Washington Monument had its base at the river level at the foot of the dam, only the tip would peek over the bridge at the top of the dam, by five feet. The Statue of Liberty's torch (the highest part of the monument) would come just over halfway up the dam, even including the 151' tall pedestal the statue stands on. This dam is big.

Big Nuts, Big Tools

When you've got a size queen like this dam you're going to need big nuts and big tools.



"Everything's bigger at Grand Coulee," this sign at the visitors center explains.

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. 😡

North Cascades Travelog #2
GEG Airport - Sat, 2 Sep 2023, 8am.

Some people begin trips by driving to the airport at night, staying over at a hotel, and flying out first thing in the morning. We turned that upside down by driving to the airport yesterday, flying to Spokane, and then staying over at a hotel. Yes, come Saturday morning we're still at the airport.



We're not in the airport, mind you, but at it. We've stayed in an airport before. Not Recommended. Here we're in a Marriott Springhill Suites that's across the street from baggage claim and the car rental desks. The photo above is the view from our window this morning after dawn. Fortunately Spokane is a small enough airport that there weren't flights taking off and landing all night.

Oh, and last night's flight?



Thirty minutes late. 🤣

But, hey, that was almost a benefit. Southwest marked the delay hours in advance, so we didn't sweat the traffic as much getting to the airport. And once at the airport (traffic was less bad than it could have been) we had time to eat some supper in the terminal without having to wolf it down. And since we were only driving... *looks out window again*... about 100 feet last night, getting in 30 minutes late wasn't much of an inconvenience. 🤣

As we returned from our four-day weekend trip Olympic National Park a few weeks ago I thought about how we schedule vacation and travel... versus how, ideally, we'd schedule vacation and travel.

This year we've traveled to the state of Washington three times. Twice were trips to Spokane, from which we branched out in various directions north, east, south, and west by car. The third was our recent trip to Olympic NP via Seattle. Across these three trips we spent 11 days: 3, 4, and 4. We combined a couple of Monday holidays with a few days of personal vacation to stretch out three weekends.

That's great, right? I am so glad we've been able to take this trips. I don't regret any of the trips one bit. And yet... I yearn for more.

What's more? First, just within the areas we went to in Washington (and neighboring Idaho and Oregon) we could have used another 1-3 days. Second, there are other areas we'd have loved to visit in Washington. For example, Mount Rainier. North Cascades National Park— not in a tow truck.

Could we make additional trips to visit these? Sure. And we almost certainly will. If wildfires and smoke in the Pacific Northwest hadn't been such an issue this summer we might have made 4 total trips already. But you know what would have been better than that? Making one long trip.

The drawback of taking lots of short trips is that we spent a lot of time on the out-and-back travel. Given flight schedules, the airport rigamarole, and driving to & from the airports, a 4 day trip really becomes a 2½ day or 2 and two-half days trip. All that flying back and forth costs money, too. It would be so much better if we just took one trip of 14 days instead of, say, 5 shorter trips. We'd have time to do a lot more once we're there— and we'd spend less on travel, too!

But taking a full 2 weeks off really doesn't work. It doesn't work because meager vacation allowances in Corporate America— compared to what our European counterparts enjoy— make it hard to save up for 2 weeks of time off. And while that's not impossible, merely hard, what makes it even harder to accomplish is the corporate culture that has evolved around small vacation allowances. Management balks, colleagues complain about the job being left undone, and there's a widespread worry that teams and projects will fall apart in your absence— because companies basically haven't developed the institutional skill to handle routine leave of much longer than a week.

We've never had two-week trip. The longest we've managed is 11 days. That's a week off work between two weekends, plus a day on either end. We've done trips like that a few times now— three times, I think— but never longer. Shit, I've taken business trips longer than 11 days!

Northwest Return Travelog #16
Spokane, WA - Mon, 2 Aug 2021. 2pm.

I've explained in my past couple blogs how I consider it important when traveling to have a few runner-up plans, or at least a sense of reasonable alternatives, in case Plan A goes south. With wildfires, heavy smoke, and challenging weather some of our plans this weekend have gone... up in smoke. One of the ideas on our runner-up list was visiting the flower gardens at Manito Park in Spokane. Though even those went slightly sideways.

"I want to see the lilac garden," Hawk insisted. Except when we got there this afternoon none of the lilac bushes were blooming. That whole section of the park looked half dead. Fortunately almost everything else was in bloom. We parked at the Japanese garden and started there.



After a short stroll through the Nishinomiya Tsutakawa garden we headed back out the gate and walked up the hill toward the park's rose garden.



As you can see in the distance of the photo above the weather was not exactly great. It was warm and a bit muggy, and the sky was shrouded with a combination of clouds and thick smoke. How can you tell the difference between smoke and clouds? Both are gray above, but the smoke is especially apparent near ground level when looking 100m away. Still, we were here for the gardens. We tried not to let the weather and smoke detract too much from the experience.

Photography Lesson in Real Time

I started taking a lot of pictures of individual flowers in this area. There are so many colorful varieties! As I reviewed the first half dozen or so in my camera, though, I found the pictures were... off. I have a nice camera, nice lenses, and I know how to use them.... What could be wrong?

What was wrong was I was trusting the camera when I needed to trust myself instead. Specifically, my ability to know what to focus on and then actually focus on it. Here's a side-by-side comparison that shows the difference:



In the view on the left the camera is set to autofocus. In auto mode the camera picks out something with high contrast and focuses on it. In a flower close-up that might be the edge of a leaf or a prominent isolated feature such as a stem in the background. Not desirable! On the right I've switched the camera into manual focus mode and I've nailing the focus on the pistil. Much better!

BTW, the reason exact focus is so critical in these pictures is I'm shooting with a lens with a fairly wide aperture. In technical terms it's f/2.8. At that setting, and when shooting close-up, there's very shallow depth of field. Having the focus point off by even half an inch can make a huge difference. Half and inch is literally the difference in the composite above. If you shoot at a much smaller aperture, which is about all that's available with smartphone cameras, your focus isn't as sensitive to small differences. You also won't see those blurry background unless you use post effects to put them in.



Now, knowing what to do and doing it 100% of the time are different things. In the pic above I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't get the bee in perfect focus. Partly that's because the damn thing moves! But when I zoom in on the full size original I see that the hairs on the bee's hind segment are in focus while the eyes are slightly out of focus. Yes, that's half an inch again— and it can seem like a mile!

Enough shop talk; back to the gardens.



Manito Park isn't all rose gardens. The rose garden is only one section of the park. There's also this traditional garden area, which I believe dates to the park's creation in 1904. (In the Western US that counts as old!)



Watching people of different ages enjoying the park I thought about what it was that I was enjoying. Seeing children here, especially, reminded me that when I was a kid I would've gotten bored after about 5 minutes. What's different now?

Partly it's that as an adult, especially as a middle age adult, I'm okay with taking it easy more of the time. But mostly it's the photography. Photography is how I engage with places like this.



There's the challenge of making a great pictures, like I wrote about above with that focus comparison. There's the joy of practicing and skill and getting it right. And there's the fact that exploring an area with a camera encourages trying different perspectives.

Northwest Return Travelog #14
Palouse Falls State Park, WA - Sun, 1 Aug 2021. 1pm.

I generally plan trips around "anchor" activities. I find one or two things I really want to do. They form the basis of the trip; they anchor it place. Then I plan other activities around them. Sometimes I trust that I'll find other activities once I get there. For example, we've enjoyed hking Bassi Falls in California several times. It's not a full day activity, though, so each time we go we combine it with other activities in the area. The first time we went we weren't even sure what was in the area; we merely trusted that there'd be other fun things to do there. (There were.)

For this trip Palouse Falls in remote western Washington was our first anchor. "What's it near?" we asked, looking to combine it with at least one anchor to make the long trip worthwhile. Nothing, it turns out. Then I spotted an awesome loop hike of waterfalls in Idaho— Elk Creek Falls— and figured out we could stay in Lewiston/Clarkston halfway between them. Together those anchored the trip. With a location locked in I searched for other activities nearby and quickly found the Wallowa Lake Tramway to the top of Mt. Howard as another awesome activity. Then I found an awesome (if misnamed) hike called Oregon Butte in Washington. Four awesome activities in 4 days = awesome trip.

So, what's so awesome about Palouse Falls? Let me start with 1,000 words worth in the form of a picture:



Palouse Falls drops 200 feet over a cliff into a deep canyon. It has been designated the Official State Waterfall of Washington. That's quite something considering the many amazing falls on the western side of the Cascade Mountains.

The geology of this area is interesting. Signs near the main lookout points (atop the plateau in the upper right of the picture above) explain it. First, layers of basalt rock up to thousands of feet thick were created by volcanic action. Plate tectonics pushed these layers of rock upward. During the Ice Age large glaciers formed atop these rocks. When glaciers melted or moved they unleashed massive floods. Rivers sometimes multiple miles wide carved channels across the rock. That's how the huge canyons of the Snake River, the Columbia Gorge, and others were created. That's how these relatively calm rivers flow at the bottom of absolutely massive gorges.



Palouse River isn't even that big of a river, BTW. It's no Snake River and certainly no Columbia River. In fact this gorge is a natural accident. The Palouse River used to flow to the west of here. During one of those Ice Age floods it overflowed its course and carved a new route through a fissure in the basalt. The flood carved the fissure fast enough that it became the new route. That fissure is now this canyon.

Coming back around to the topic of anchor activities... I mentioned it here not only to explain my general approach to trip planning and how I conceived this particular trip but also to set up two additional points. One point is that sometimes an activity, even an anchor activity, fizzles. Palouse Falls is kind of a fizzle today because of the combination of weather (it's cloudy all day and starting to rain now) plus heavy smoke in the air. I had hoped to get amazing pictures of the falls and maybe even hike/scramble all the way down to the bottom of the gorge. Neither are in the cards today.

The second point is that sometimes a planned activity is a total loss. Our plans to hike Oregon Butte this weekend went up in smoke. Literally. As in, there's a fire burning there right now. 😳 Because things like that happen— not just massive wildfires but even simpler things like seasonal closures, construction (which thwarted our honeymoon trip years ago!), or protected species of birds nesting (which closed off one of our anchor activities at Acadia National Park two months ago)— it's critical to be flexible with alternatives. For that it helps to have a list of runners-up. We had planned to spend today at Oregon Butte. With it being a no-go we moved up our visit to Palouse Falls to today instead of tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll visit a flower garden in Spokane before we fly home. That's one of our "runner up" activity ideas. Now it's been promoted.

Northwest Return Travelog #12
Joseph, OR - Sat, 31 Jul 2021. 3:30pm.

On our way back to our hotel in Clarkston we stopped in Joseph, Oregon to see Chief Joseph Days... or at least what's left of it. "Chief Joseph Days" is a week long western fair "Always the last week of July" as signs in Joseph proclaim. Well, today's the last day of July, so yeah... we're seeing the tail end of it.

There was more going on this morning when we passed through town on our way to the Wallowa Lake Tram. Streets were blocked off, and people were assembling for a show. There had been a big parade earlier in the day or earlier in the week. That we could tell because... well, literally because of the sheer amount of horse shit on the main road. By this afternoon at least that mess had been cleaned up.

We chose not to stop for the fair this morning as we wanted to make sure we'd have enough time for our hike. We didn't want to be on the mountain past 2pm as the weather forecast warned of afternoon thunderstorms. Already thunderstorms are looking likely, so that was a good call. Though at 2:30 when we got back to town the show was already winding down. It looks like there had been a big street fair with lots of vendors. Now only a dozen or 15 are still here, and the proprietors look wrecked. We parked to tour what's left of the show for a while.

Chief Joseph

Chief Joseph was a leader of the Nez Perce people who once made this area, around Wallowa Lake, their home. He was the tribe's chief when it came into conflict with white settlers in the 1870s. Joseph negotiated a treaty with the US government for his people to remain on their land, but in 1877 the US reneged. The military came to escort them off, and war was declared.

The Nez Perce fought a war that became one for military history books. Though the band numbered fewer than 800 they waged a fighting retreat of over 1,000 miles as they sought refuge first in Montana and then in Canada. The US Army stopped them short of Canada. Joseph surrendered, negotiating terms for his people to move to a reservation in Idaho. The US government promptly reneged on that, too, and sent them to a military prison in Oklahoma where most died from disease.

Joseph survived and became a statesman, advocating for native peoples to Congress in Washington, DC. Military leaders respected him for his military prowess. Civilian leaders respected him for his intelligent philosophy. But they all continued making promises and then breaking them. Not the most shining chapter in US history.

Here in the town named for Chief Joseph there's not a heck of a lot about him. The statue in the picture has a few quotes from him on plaques at its base. Most of what I've written here is my distant knowledge from US history classes years ago bolstered by a quick visit to Wikipedia. The week long fair bears his name but aside from that seems to be an ordinary county fair, western US style. Little we saw at the fair was related to the Nez Perce or Chief Joseph except in name.

"Bro Country" Music

As for the street fair.... I think I was most impressed by the country-western singer working hard all afternoon in a long-sleeve shirt and denim jeans. It was hot! And at least while we were there he had pretty much zero audience. I didn't particularly like his songs— they were "bro country", like a song about all the ways a dog is better than a woman— though I admire his vocal talent. And his hard work in the summer heat.

I walked up to thank the musician as he and his crew were shutting down for the day. I know entertainers live for the audience; that's why I wanted to show my appreciation. He was grateful. He shook my hand enthusiastically as his manager came over and insisted I take a card.

I carefully didn't say that I liked his songs. I complimented him on his voice, his playing, and him busting his butt in the heat. He was playing for 2 or 3 semi-interested people at a time. I've seen less talented musicians perform for crowds of 22,000. But I'm not going to buy an album of songs about how a dog is better than a woman because it doesn't fuss if you put your boots on the table.

Northwest Return Travelog #10
Atop Mt. Howard, OR - Sat, 31 Jul 2021. 12:30pm.

"This would be a lot easier if they put in an escalator," I occasionally quip to passers-by on tough uphill hikes. Well, in a few places they have. ...Well, not literally an escalator, but an equally effort saving thing: a tram lift. There's a tram to the top of Mt. Howard above Wallowa Lake in northeastern Oregon, and that's where we went today.



The tram looks deceptively simply from the lower terminus. What you see in the photo above is only the lower one-third of the tramway. In total the tram ascends 3,700 vertical feet over a travel distance of 1.83 miles. It takes 15 minutes each way.

We bought our tickets and queued in line. The fee of $38 each seemed steep at first but it works out to about a dollar per 100 vertical feet not climbed. When I think of it in terms of, "Would I pay $1 to ride an escalator for the next 100' of ascent?" it's obvious why it's a good idea. Plus, unlike an escalator, we don't even have to stand. We got to sit in a nice little tram car for the ride.



The 15 minute ride is a lot of time for snapping pictures. I made use of it by snapping a lot of pics. 😅 Many of them turned out poorly, though, because of trees popping up in the way as the tram whisked through the forest. And all of them were marred by the ash-laden sky around us. Even so, the views were so inspiring that 15 minutes seemed to pass in more like 5-6. Then we alit from our cab and breathed in the... alas not fresh and clean... air atop Mt. Howard at elev. 8,150'.

From here we'll hike a loop trail a few miles around the top of the mountain. Stay tuned for more! Update: Views atop Mt. Howard.

Northwest Return Travelog #7
Moscow, ID - Fri, 30 Jul 2021. 5:30pm.

This afternoon we took a slight detour on the way back from hiking Elk Creek. Instead of retracting our route directly back to Clarkston we angled due west for a while to the town of Moscow, Idaho. There was a gem shop Hawk wanted to visit there, and it seemed like a good place to find dinner sooner than getting back to Lewiston/Clarkston.

Moscow has a still-active old time-y downtown. It's a college town, so a constant stream of fresh energy— and especially, fresh money— has kept the town from rusting out the way most of Small Town America has.

Moscow reminds me of Chapel Hill, NC, where I was a graduate student. The town is part old time-y holdout, part arty bohemian cheap-chic, and part yuppie. Though last time I visited Chapel Hill (a few years ago) the yuppie stuff had overgrown the main street like kudzu in North Carolina's pine forests.

For dinner we picked a Mexican restaurant with sidewalk dining. That was important to us as Idahoans have largely stopped wearing masks. "It's optional," everyone says, pointing to the CDC guidance that says masks should be worn by everyone not fully vaccinated. The Idaho Panhandle is an area with less than a 40% full vaccination rate, yet the region's no-mask rate is over 90%. As one comedian recently quipped, "Somebody up in that bitch lyin'!"

Food at the restaurant was good, especially for being a) so far from the Mexican border and b) in a small town. Though that's kind of what we expected from a college small town, as opposed to a dying small town.

Northwest Return Travelog #5
Elk Creek, ID - Fri, 30 Jul 2021. 1:15pm.

After visiting Lower Falls on Elk Creek we huffed and puffed back up the trail spur and continued the main loop on the way toward Middle Falls. As the water flows, Middle Falls are just upstream and around the bend from Lower Falls. For we land animals who don't want to trek straight across the steep slopes of the canyon walls it's a bit further around.



Given that the canyon walls are very steep there no trail down to the base of the falls. The vista point for Middle Falls is actually kinda far away, as you see in the photo above.

The haze in the photo is from wildfire smoke. Though I've tried to clean up the picture as best I can, the smoke is pretty much unavoidable in the region right now.

With the large distance to the falls I regretted not packing my telephoto lens. I am not sure why I didn't bring it. I don't think I forgot it.... I think I had a momentary thought of, "My pack is already heavy enough with all this water I'm carrying because it, like, 100 degrees out, I think I'll save the weight of this lens." ...Which is penny wise and pound foolish, because my telephoto is actually much lighter than "the brick" mid-range zoom I bought in January and carry around as my main lens.



"The Brick" does have its redeeming qualities, though. The most important is its excellent sharpness. The shot above is a heavily cropped section from a shot taken from that view point. The framing of the full picture was a little tighter than the first one, but not by much. Oh, and I used my fancy neutral density filter to get the silky water effect like at Lower Falls. And again I took these shots hand-held.

Was it possible to actually get closer to the falls, not just zoom in? Yes, though it was dicey. An obvious foot trail led steeply down the slope from the vista point then lateraled across the canyon to the basalt outcropping just above the falls. The path looked treacherous so I didn't try it. A second chance did come later, though, as we were hiking the spur trail to the Upper Falls. We had gone up over another ridge and back down. I could tell by dead reckoning we were not to far from the top of Middle Falls. A faint use trail led out of the forest and right onto a rocky ledge over the edge of the canyon.



I had fun shooting this picture almost straight down onto the lower part of Middle Falls.

Update: See Upper Falls in my next blog