Wood's Prairie Travels

Today’s travel began with a trek through the Great Salt Lake valley which entailed several hours of freeway traffic through congested cities that all blur together. You can’t tell where the cities begin or end other than what the truck’s GPS indicates. This is definitely not our favorite part of traveling, however once we began to climb up the Spanish River Valley on Highway 6 we encountered scenery that was much more to our liking. The muddy Spanish Fork River has carved through layers of sedimentary rock exposing cliffs of rock blocks along with many different layers of varying thickness and hue. As we climbed sweeping turns through the Wasatch Mountain Range up to Soldier Summit, we began to gain elevation. Before long there were patches of snow tucked into crevices. We even drove through one snow flurry, although with temperatures in the mid 40’s we didn’t have to worry about snow sticking to highway. Once through the Wasatch Mountains we crossed the Wasatch valley with vau...

We headed out on day two to conquer Oregon’s Blue Mountains. As we saw from the east side, they live up the name that pioneers gave them when seeing the snow-covered mountains in the distance. Our morning began by climbing up Cabbage Hill with a view of the patchwork fields of eastern Oregon. It was a nice morning to begin our travels with clear skies and low 60’s. We continued up and down through the passes of the Blue Mountains. Farmland quickly gave way to pine forests with the occasional glimpse of snow patches hiding in the shadows.  There are a number of spots we would like to go back to explore more on future trips. Sporadic homesteads, both new and old, led us to wonder what a winter in these upper elevations would be like? You would definitely have to be self sufficient for months at a time.  Eventually we wound our way down from the slopes onto the flat southeastern Idaho lava fields. The road to Shoshone Falls was closed this year, so we will have to make anot...

Wood’s Prairie takes to the road again. Our destination this trip is to the desert southwest red rock country. Specific plans? Nope, whichever way the wind blows us. We are hopeful that we can avoid too many large crowds, but we’ll see. Day one saw us heading east on I-84 in Oregon up the Columbia Gorge. As it turns out, we travelled this same road one year and one month earlier on our jaunt down to Texas to see the total eclipse of the sun. However, what a difference one month makes in the Pacific Northwest! The first thing we noticed was that there weren’t snow patches in the shady areas of the gorge’s basalt cliffs. Of course, that meant that there were far fewer waterfalls splashing down the crevices of those basalt columns. I snapped a picture of Oregon’s famed Multnomah Falls. That is a favorite spot for visitors, especially in the spring, as was indicated when the parking lot was so full that it was closed when we drove past. Our next observation was that the varying shades of...