Yakima, Grand Coulee Dam, Idaho, Couer D’Alene
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It was cool in the morning. I needed to put on sweat pants and a long sleeve shirt. The light coming through the trees is great. There’s a trail around the lake so we took a walk around before breakfast. Really a nice spot. I took a bunch of pictures including the standard cliché shot of Mt. Adams with the reflection in the lake. Actually I took that one multiple times…
Les whipped up some hard boiled eggs and some oatmeal (which I choked down most of). We got the tent and stuff put away pretty quickly and we were on the road.
We decided to check out the other lakes to see if we made the right choice. First stop, Chain of Lakes, which was pretty much “Chain of Lake and some places where a lake used to be”. Not much in the way of campgrounds or anything. Not too exciting. Next stop, Ollalie Lake which didn’t have quite the setup of Takhlekh but was pretty nice. Lots of bugs humming in the bushes though. So, looks like we chose the right lake.
We hit the “main” road again and sure enough, we were 34 miles from Randle (but apparently safely away from Trout Lake). First stop, Layser Cave “Interpretive Center”. After a brief tour of the area to actually figure out where the heck it was, we headed down the trail. The “interpretive center” turned out to be 3 signs explaining why the cave was interesting, but actually it was kind of. The Indians lived in it 4000 years ago and drove deer into box canyons where they harpooned them with atlatls when they weren’t walking 50 miles to the other side of the valley to pick huckleberries. Sounds like fun.
Unfortunately they got driven off when one of the mountains erupted and wiped out the food supply. Apparently they were never able to find it again. In fact nobody found it again until they were scouting the area for logging in 1987 so I guess you can’t blame them.
About 15 miles from Randle we finally discovered the other camping sites we had seen marked on the map that we would have been totally screwed had we tried to reach the night before. There was Blue Lake Creek, which was not too exciting and North Fork Creek which is small but next to a nice stream with lots of rocks to climb on.
We finally hit Randle and headed off for Yakima. The road to Yakima is really pretty. We stopped at a scenic overlook where what I guess is the Yakima River falls down a big canyon into the Yakima valley. The sign said the land was multi-use and that they had developed new methods of logging to allow that. Basically what that meant was they didn’t cut down the trees on the steep canyon sides. Other than that, we couldn’t really see what was so different.
Yakima is okay as towns go. We stopped there for postcards and gas, tooled around looking for a mailbox and basically spent an hour or so. Then off to Grand Coulee Dam.
The road to Grand Coulee reminds me a lot of Nevada. Brown, dry, scrub grass, and not much else of interest. It went on like that for an hour or two when we hit Dry Falls. It didn’t sound too exciting and we almost didn’t stop. Then we saw the hole. It turns out that Dry Falls is what caused the Grand Coulee. The Coulee is a big hole in the ground that the “largest waterfall in the world” caused in the days of the glaciers. Pretty impressive as holes in the ground go. Probably a mile across and 500 feet deep with various buttes and mesas and what not inside of it. It was too big to capture on film.
From there we headed up a canyon that surrounded a lake. It looked like a movie or a fantasy land. It reminded me of something at the time which I couldn’t place but now I think is Planet of the Apes in that beginning part where the spaceship first crash lands. Very alien planet-like.
We’re now near Grand Coulee Dam. The single largest man made concrete structure in the world. I’m prepared to be impressed. We arrive. I’m not impressed. Sure it’s big but it doesn’t come across as big. It’s a dam. It’s not too architecturally interesting. It’s tall but doesn’t seem that tall. It has a fairly uninteresting “interpretive center” (we used to call these visitor centers and gift shops but that was before political correctness). I was kind of hungry so maybe that entered into it. As I mentioned before, I’m not a whole lot of fun when I’m hungry. Plus, I wanted to make it to Idaho and this didn’t seem really worthy of the side trip. So, time to move on. We headed off towards Spokane. The sun was going down and we’re crossing many miles of harvested wheat fields. The light makes the field a golden color that probably improved the scenery immensely. The road is dead straight for 70 miles.
By Spokane, we’ve decided that a motel is the way to go so as long as we’re staying in the motel, we might as well go to Couer D’Alene. That’s where I wanted to get to anyway. So we did. We found the “It’s cheap, stay here” motel, otherwise known as the Budget Saver Motel (the low price leader). And true to their word, we got the two bedroom suite for $36. I’m spared a night of Les snoring. Not a bad deal.
The Rustic Rustler beckoned for dinner. Les made a move on the blond waitress but was foiled. She had an interesting tattoo of a rose on her ankle which Les discussed with her in some detail. It pretty much convinced me I don’t want a tattoo. We stuffed ourselves on barbecue, beans, cole slaw and fries and returned to watch Denver choke on 4th and goal against the Bills followed by a really bizarre movie on the Sci-Fi channel that had Dennis Quaid and Debra Winger in it but was really weird. Two brothers that can create fire and who are always mad at each other so they’re always fighting and therefore always setting fire to everything around them.
The beds were pretty comfortable and we got a good night’s sleep.
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