Day One – Eastward Bound

It is time for Wood’s Prairie to go a wandering again. This journey has one main objective, a 50th Anniversary to celebrate in Minnesota! After that? Well, we will see where the wind blows us.

Since we have travelled this road a number of times, there are a couple of established stops along the way. Leaving Wood’s Prairie at 5 AM meant that we didn’t encounter usual morning commute slow downs and arrived in Cle Elum at our favorite breakfast location, the Cottage Cafe.

They have the best biscuits, gravy, and eggs breakfast that never fails to please. Light and fluffy biscuits on a bed of golden hashbrowns topped with their homemade sausage gravy, yum! And a bonus, it is always too much to eat at one sitting, so we have a "to go" box with our next breakfast ready to heat up.

The flat landscape of Eastern Washington eventually changes to the rugged basalt scablands as. The black rock pokes above the grassy prairie lands in broken chunks and blocks. That landscape is followed by rolling hills with more dark green conifers the closer you get to Spokane. 

As the miles roll on, we reached the mountainous Idaho panhandle and climbed up the timber covered Fourth of July Pass and then on to Lookout Pass. We lucked out this trip and had clear skies for this drive as opposed to the torrential downpours we have driven it in the past.

Not far across the Montana border, after driving about 630 miles (that is a long day for us) we pulled into one of our favorite DNR campgrounds, Sloway Camp. This small camp is nestled into a pine forest along the bank of the Clark Fork River. 


Some people might consider a downside for this campground being that the train runs on the other side of the river. In the middle of the night, the train whistle sounds loud, but while relaxing in the evening we enjoy watching the train rumble along.

So our journey begins...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day One – What a Difference a Month Makes

Image
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...
Read more

Day Three – The Spanish River Valley and the Wasatch Mountains of Utah

Image
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...
Read more

Day Thirteen.2 – A Grand Sunset

Image
When you visit the Grand Canyon National Park, if you have the time, watching the sun set behind the rim of the canyon is an experience like no other. We arrived at our chosen location about two hours before sunset. The crowds had thinned out and the canyon was peaceful. The upper portions of the canyon walls were taking on different hues of golden red while the canyon depths were shades of blue and lavender hues. And the colors changed by the minute.   Far below the rim, the Colorado River was running its course already in the shadows of evening. While thousands of feet above the river crows, eagles, and condors soared on the wind currents. As the sun neared the horizon this day, it had to sink through clouds until it emerged above the rim. The golden orb lit the bottoms of the clouds with a glorious artist’s color palette of gold, peach, pink, mauve, and lavender.  Finally, the sun dipped below the horizon leaving a glow on the rim. A peaceful quiet fell over th...
Read more