Dry Falls to the Cascades

Route

Wednesday, October 28th. After the raccoon night, we meandered two miles down a rocky dirt road to Umatilla Rock, which sits at a small lake ringed by towering cliffs. We had the whole place to ourselves. I took two work calls there, one of them a Teams video call. Not a single drop. Starlink came through yet again.

Those cliffs were once a waterfall. Dry Falls was 3.5 miles wide and 400 feet tall, more than twice the height of Niagara, which we'd seen just two weeks earlier. The Ice Age floods poured over it thousands of years ago, and the lakes at its base are its old plunge pools. Which means that last night we slept below one of the biggest waterfalls that ever existed.

Breakfast was yogurt and granola with honey, peanut butter, banana, and blueberries. Rhea got her leftover co-op sausage and passed on the blueberries, so I had hers.

Heading north on Coulee Boulevard, Banks Lake sat to our left, and walls of layered rock rose to our right, with boulders that had sheared off and stopped just shy of the road. With its flat-topped plateaus and wide valley floors, this felt like a little Canyonlands in Washington. It’s hard to fathom that water carved out all of this rock.

We parked at the overlook above Grand Coulee Dam for almost three hours. I worked through a string of calls while Rhea slept in the back seat, and the sun finally came out. Life is good.

The dam went up between 1933 and 1942, and in 1941 the government hired Woody Guthrie for a month to write songs about the project. He came back with 26, including "Roll On, Columbia" and "Grand Coulee Dam."

As we packed up, two guys pulled in with a new 4Runner, doing our trip in reverse: up the Oregon coast to Seattle, now headed for Spokane. We traded stories for a bit, then went our separate ways. Lunch was sardines at the back of the truck, for both of us, of course.

Past the dam, the road climbs hard out of the Columbia River valley, ears popping the whole way. North of the dam, it runs through the Colville Reservation, where lightning sparked a wildfire that burned about 138,000 acres this summer. It's so recent that the dead pines still hold their needles. Burned-out homes, burned-out cars by the road, and the smell of charcoal linger in the air. These communities must still be reeling. Here and there, the taller pines made it through with just their trunks scorched. Their bark is built for it.

Around 4pm, we drove out of a few passing showers onto the North Cascades Highway and into a bluebird sky, the western larches glowing yellow again. Then, around a bend, our first look at the Cascades: snow-capped giants rising straight off the valley floor into the clouds. In front of them stood a forest of bare, burned trunks from an older fire, with five- and six-foot larches and pines already coming up underneath. Shafts of light broke through the clouds onto the peaks. Truly godlike.

The descent was long and steep, so I kept pumping the brakes to cool them periodically the whole way down. Mount Washington taught us that one after smoking out the front right brake pad.

On a whim, we stopped in Twisp, a mountain town with a one-block downtown, and found Glover Street Market: organic, local, a hot bar, a salad bar, good beer, and every cheese you could want. It's Provisions in Sag Harbor, shrunk down and dropped at the base of the Cascades. Same kind of crowd, too. Good food connects people.

The plan was to camp at Pearrygin Lake. It was nearly empty, with two other campers and 15 or 20 deer grazing through the sites without a care, and a huge flock of Canada geese down by the water. Free and beautiful, but after last night I needed real sleep, and Rhea wouldn't have gotten a minute of it with those deer around.

So we headed into Winthrop, a country Western mountain town with a brewery, local watering holes, and good food. The kind of place I'd happily spend a long weekend. We took a room at the Virginian, a roadside motel built entirely of wood. $89 a night, $100 with tax, for a hot shower and a real bed. It felt like something out of Steinbeck's trip. Worth every penny.

Dinner was lamb and white bean soup from the Twisp market with sourdough from the Bozeman co-op, and it slapped. Then the brewery on the river, with seating out back. Cold out there, but the beer was delicious, and everyone was friendly.

Rhea

After the raccoon night, Rhea spent most of the morning at the dam out cold in the back seat. She needed it.

She loved the slow climb at 45-50 mph, and on the North Cascades Highway she went window to window with her head out, sifting through every mountain smell.

She has no idea she's the reason we skipped the lake. Those deer would have kept us up all night.