July 2018 Adventure - Hell ain't so hot! Part 1
Since this trip was to be part business, part pleasure, and we wanted to maximize the latter, Ann took a half-day off on Wednesday and we drove like bats out of hell (let’s see how many hell analogies I can use in this series of posts) and drove from home to Spokane, Washington in a single afternoon/evening. Actually, we stayed in Spokane Valley, but given the distances, Spokane is close enough.
To give you some perspective of our trip, we did the stretch shown in red below in a single day. We spent parts of 4 days driving the stretch in blue. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which was the more enjoyable drive.
The reason we headed up north was to have some work done on Beast. Van Compass, the guys who put the skid plates and a set of rear shocks on Beast during Overland Expo West last year added a new product that we decided would be a good addition for our upcoming September-October month-long Grand Adventure - a winch. And since they moved from southern California to Post Falls, Idaho in the year in-between then and now, we headed north.
We’d put off on getting a winch put on beast because we didn’t want a massive front bumper with all the extra weight that comes with it. But these guys engineered an excellent solution (one of the guys is an engineer, so when we say engineered, we mean engineered), where they remove the front fascia of the vehicle, replace the Mercedes metal bumper with their fabricated bumper that is a bit more robust and has a carrying platform for the winch. Then they cut a small hole in the fascia where the license plate goes, and then reattached the Mercedes front body panel. The bumper also has a front hitch which serves two roles - it’s a recovery point where someone can pull us out if necessary, and it carries the license plate hitch so we still have a front license plate. So instead of looking like something out of a Mad Max movie, Beast still looks pretty much like her self - ready for the zombie apocalypse but classy enough for civil society.
You can see the winch hook right behind the license plate, with the red safety tag on it. The winch itself is hidden behind the bumper and the light bar. Ingenious design! We also beefed up the rear springs, installed off-road shocks on the front and sumo bump stops above each wheel axle to help cushion the big bumps better. And they installed Ann’s birthday present to me, a skid plate for the rear differential. Thank you Ann! They mentioned that we’d dinged the differential at least twice, but nothing was leaking. As he put it, “It was pretty dirty down there, you’ve obviously been taking this thing places!” Yup! And we intend to take it to plenty more.
The installation took the entire day as one might expect. Ann and I rented a car and had a relaxing day with fresh coffee before the drop off, a nice breakfast afterwards, and then an early showing of Ant Man and the Wasp! We are not above mindless entertainment. Now if we can only add the shrinking feature from the movie's Mercedes Sprinter to Beast! Or at least an enlarging Pez dispenser gun in the back - way cooler than James Bond’s oil slick.
Late in the day we picked up Beast and headed south. Like many trips, the planning for this one had gone all over the place. At one point we were going to work our way down through Central Washington, or to head west to the Washington Cascades to check them out. But as the trip dates approached, the temperatures for the central part of the state looked to top 100 every day. So I thought about heading south to the Wallowa mountains in Oregon. After checking those temperatures - a good 10 degrees cooler, though still hot - that’s where we headed. Generally, the game plan was to enjoy the mornings however we could (photographing if possible), drive during the heat of the day, and then find a nice place to relax and hopefully photograph towards the evening. It was a plan at least.
So our first stop was to check out the Palouse area, a region of south east Washington that has become a favorite of photographers over the past 10 years or so. We could see why. Even in the heat of summer, the landscape is wonderfully sculpted and the various crops play with light in a way I’ve rarely seen. It is a worked landscape, with farms dotting the land throughout and small, agricultural communities every so often, but it’s a beautiful worked landscape, much like the images I’ve seen of Tuscany.
As you drive through the Palouse you begin to realize that there is something unusual about the rhythmic up-and down and weaving back and forth you do as you drive through the hills. They’re not quite like foothills - there are no mountains you’re heading towards. Just hill after hill after hill. But they’re not shaped like normal hills. They’re sculpted differently and there is an eerie quality to them if you play close enough attention.
It isn’t until you drive up Steptoe Butte that you begin to understand the enormity of the Palouse, and begin to recognize the shape of the hills.
From that distance you realize that the hills look like a sandy creek bed under flowing water, or, from our experiences, the bottom of a creek making its way out to the ocean. And once you understand the history of this place it makes sense. These hills were shaped by water, masses of flowing water much taller than these hills, and flowing upwards of 80 miles per hour. During the last ice age, huge lakes formed to the north and west of this area, dammed up by ice that formed in narrows. And periodically they broke, sending huge volumes of water across the landscape of Washington and Oregon. This happened 40 times or more. It shaped the Columbia Gorge and made the Willamette Valley one of the most fertile valleys in the world with all the rich silt the floodwaters bought. The eeriness one feels when driving through this landscape is one of scale. You’re used to this landscape being beneath your feet, not rising above you. Its beauty, like that of volcanoes, is the result of tremendously destructive forces at a geologic scale. They're impressive.
But for us, it’s now a photographic playground, and what a playground it is. We stopped at a viewing area just short of the very top of Steptoe Butte, mainly because there was a group of photographers up there all pointing their cameras in one direction. Ann and I wandered around looking in very different directions.
As you can imagine, it didn’t take me long to put on my telephoto lenses and start abstracting the landscape. With the different crops, exposed areas that had just been harvested and the shadows from the setting sun, I had a field day.
We were limited in our time and from our viewpoint, but this area would definitely be worth coming back to. Especially given the number of side dirt roads (“This road has no signs - drive carefully!”) we passed just waiting to be explored. I’m sure Ann and I could have a lot of fun here.
It was getting late so we made our last photographs, hoping to get down the butte before the rush of the crowd and because it was the end of a long day and we weren’t sure where we were going to stay.
There’s a scarcity of camping areas in the Palouse, so we decided to skip trying a county park that would have taken us away from our main route (7 sites, first come, first served . . .) or to see if the RV park in Colfax had an open space, and elected to spend another evening in a hotel. An hour or so later we were in Pullman, Washington ready to call it a day.
Being a good college town, Pullman afforded us a range of breakfast options the next morning. We opted for good coffee and whatever the cafe had for breakfast, which happened to be a very delicious quiche. We took our time, intentionally relaxing because hey, we were on the vacation part of our trip! Ann and I wound up having an interesting discussion about photography and different approaches to working, so we were doing "photography"! Eventually, it was time to hit the road!
The morning was beautiful. Driving south from Pullman, it didn’t take long to hit the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers and we took the long descent into Lewiston. A few miles later at Asotin, now on the other side of the rivers, we started the steep climb back up and from there were periodically reminded that we were in deeply etched flatlands.
We eventually entered Oregon and decided we needed a stop. We wound up pulling over at the Joseph Canyon Viewpoint. Out came the iPhone to give you an idea of how beautiful this part of the state is. Reading the information signs, we realized just how broad an area the Nez Perce Tribe inhabited. We recalled our side-trip down the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway during last year’s Yellowstone adventure, where we read about how Chief Joseph escaped capture via a canyon even steeper than these. That was in Wyoming, part of this same, huge area where the New Perce lived and called home. It makes one think.
We headed on and when we hit Enterprise we stopped for lunch. Afterwards we decided not to follow the crowds into the Wallowas from the north side, so we headed east when we hit the town of Joseph to see if we could find a campsite on the eastern side of the mountains. The map showed several campsites along the Imnaha River and we were sure there’d be something, so we made a right and headed up river.
The Imnaha is a lovely river, so of course we made a couple of stops to enjoy its beauty.
We wound up driving to the upper-most campground and found a great site that gave us the sound of flowing water as background music.
Ann saw an interesting sap formation in a tree and asked if my macro lens would get it. So out came the cameras and . . . of course it could.
Ann suggested ideas about shading certain background areas so she played director and I was the camera man. I think it worked out well enough.
Ann had grabbed her gear too so while she was making her photographs, I turned towards some rocks in the river to see what I could get.
It had been a long day of driving, and we were pooped. We still had to wait a bit for the temperature to drop, but being next to the river, it didn’t take long for things to cool off once the sun approached the horizon. Then the sound of the river quickly put us to sleep.