A Saturday drive.
Having gone skiing the day before because K had the day off, yesterday we decided to take a Saturday afternoon drive. We hit up the Goodwill first, scoring (maybe most-excitedly) a deep-dish pizza pan for $4. Although K might argue her pair of $100 shoes she found for $7 basically brand new was better. Then we got coffees at Dutch Bros. for the drive before heading up, as we've done a few times, Badger Mountain Road.
The top of Badger Mountain is a much, much different landscape than the Wenatchee Valley and its mountainous environs to the north and west.
Here, just past Badger Mountain Ski Area, the road splits north to the sprawling town of Waterville. Except it's not sprawling, and kind of scary even on a Saturday afternoon. There were exactly zero cars parked in downtown, and we saw two random guys meandering the streets. Otherwise, Waterville pretty much resembled a ghost town. From the barren downtown, we turned east on Highway 2.
The weather, and light, was kind of epic. It seems the Waterville Plateau is oft-graced with epic weather.
We dropped down into Moses Coulee. Holy cow awesomeness. Spectacular. Seriously, stunning scenery and so incredibly different than what we're used to. And it's thirty minutes from our house. We'll be back to explore more. At some point before hitting the southern end of Banks Lake, we passed by a few glacial erratics.
Also, super-cool. These basalt boulders just lying in the middle of wheat fields. It was glaciers, after all, that created the Columbia plateau, carved out the coulees, and left these boulders in their wake. The view north, across an irrigation lake, led back to the eastern fringe of the North Cascades.
Just before we hit Coulee City, we turned south to begin the loop back home. Looking for a restroom, we ended up finding Dry Falls.
We had read about this feature, but didn't realize it was so close to home. The history of it is pretty fascinating. According to the Wikipedia article, it's estimated the falls were five times the width of Niagara, with ten times the flow of all the current rivers in the world combined. Wow.
We'll come back when more than just the restrooms are open at the visitor center.
The rest of the drive was scenic, through the Lower Grand Coulee past Sun Lakes (where K and I, in fact, had come many, many years ago when we were first dating and it seemed like such a long drive, probably because it was) and Soap Lake.
Yep, that's my wife, ten years ago. Photographed by her trying-to-be-artsy now-husband.
A wheat field, the North Cascades far off in the distance, and the setting sun.
Deep Lake, and the moon rising over a wheat field in the heat of summer.
Our afternoon yesterday then, south to Ephrata and back west to Quincy and home.
All-in-all, a spectacular Saturday afternoon drive through some really, really interesting (and hugely-diverse) landscapes.
The top of Badger Mountain is a much, much different landscape than the Wenatchee Valley and its mountainous environs to the north and west.
Here, just past Badger Mountain Ski Area, the road splits north to the sprawling town of Waterville. Except it's not sprawling, and kind of scary even on a Saturday afternoon. There were exactly zero cars parked in downtown, and we saw two random guys meandering the streets. Otherwise, Waterville pretty much resembled a ghost town. From the barren downtown, we turned east on Highway 2.
The weather, and light, was kind of epic. It seems the Waterville Plateau is oft-graced with epic weather.
We dropped down into Moses Coulee. Holy cow awesomeness. Spectacular. Seriously, stunning scenery and so incredibly different than what we're used to. And it's thirty minutes from our house. We'll be back to explore more. At some point before hitting the southern end of Banks Lake, we passed by a few glacial erratics.
Also, super-cool. These basalt boulders just lying in the middle of wheat fields. It was glaciers, after all, that created the Columbia plateau, carved out the coulees, and left these boulders in their wake. The view north, across an irrigation lake, led back to the eastern fringe of the North Cascades.
Just before we hit Coulee City, we turned south to begin the loop back home. Looking for a restroom, we ended up finding Dry Falls.
We had read about this feature, but didn't realize it was so close to home. The history of it is pretty fascinating. According to the Wikipedia article, it's estimated the falls were five times the width of Niagara, with ten times the flow of all the current rivers in the world combined. Wow.
We'll come back when more than just the restrooms are open at the visitor center.
The rest of the drive was scenic, through the Lower Grand Coulee past Sun Lakes (where K and I, in fact, had come many, many years ago when we were first dating and it seemed like such a long drive, probably because it was) and Soap Lake.
Yep, that's my wife, ten years ago. Photographed by her trying-to-be-artsy now-husband.
A wheat field, the North Cascades far off in the distance, and the setting sun.
Deep Lake, and the moon rising over a wheat field in the heat of summer.
Our afternoon yesterday then, south to Ephrata and back west to Quincy and home.
All-in-all, a spectacular Saturday afternoon drive through some really, really interesting (and hugely-diverse) landscapes.
