Visiting another world

Friday was good.

The weather was perfect. Traffic was mostly light. Duncan and I started out early and headed east on I-90. There's still an amazing amount of snow up at Snoqualmie Pass. I pulled over at a gas station for a moment just to see how deep it was, and I think it was over 15 feet.

We headed from there down to Vantage. I didn't really have a reason to pull over in Vantage other than to let Duncan have a break and to find a restroom for myself. I pulled over right by the Vantage bridge where there's a boat launch so that he could oogle the geese and have a quick wade in the water, since it was already quite warm. From there we went up to the interpretive center for the petrified forest where to my surprise I found out that they have petroglyphs that were moved from another Columbia River site to keep them safe. I took pictures of those and some of the petrified tree stumps before we headed off to "Grandfather Cuts Loose the Ponies." I stop there every time I am in the neighborhood (get it? NEIGH-borhood?) and climb up the hill and wander amongst the ponies. Every one of them is different, and you can't see that from the parking area. The view from the top is fantastic.

From there we headed to The Feathers, a popular rock climbing area. I was just there to take pictures of the purty rocks. I know next to nothing about geology, but I do like columnar basalt and other distinctive rock formations. The colors were fantastic, the way they break and erode is really interesting, and watching people climb these things like monkeys was really interesting. But I can hang around in a rock climbing area for only so long before I decide that it is time to see something else.

It was still early when we left The Feathers, so I headed east again with the intention of just following signs until I saw something interesting. There was a sign for Grand Cooley Dam, so that's where I headed. It was a pretty nice drive, though at first it was just flat and straight, though farmland with nothing to look at. Once we got past Ephrata the scenery changed into something more resembling the Southwest than what I think of as Washington.

On the way to Grand Cooley Dam we passed a couple of places that I'm going to spend more time in later this year. One was Sun Lakes and Dry Falls. Dry Falls was originally a waterfall. Looking at the cliffs and to Sun Lakes below, it is really hard to imagine that there could ever have been enough water in the area for it to be a waterfall, but at the end of the last ice age, it was. I'm going to read up about it before I go for real. I think I'll camp there for a weekend. Nearby was the Lenore Lake Caves. I have no idea what's in the caves or how deep they are, but from the bottom they looked interesting. I didn't go up because another carload of people arrived at the same time. They were kinda freaking me out and I didn't feel safe, so off I went.

From there the drive up to the dam was really nice. The scenery is interesting and constantly changing. There's a town called Electric City. From there, there's no phone service, I can tell you that much. The dam was pretty much a dam, so we used that as a turnaround point.

The drive home was fine, until we hit the traffic. Holy crap, the traffic. I-90 is having some work done, so they have one lane shut down for maybe a mile. It took me about 3.5 hours to get through from Cle Elum to just below Snoqualmie Pass. It was miserable. We were sitting for up to 15 minutes at a time. People were getting out of their cars, walking their dogs, hanging out in the last of the sun.

I got off the freeway at the Roslyn exit, drove in to town, got gas, let Duncan pee on a few trees, found a restroom for myself and then headed back out to the highway. That took about half an hour. By the time I got back to the freeway, the people that I had been near when I left the freeway were the same people I merged into at the end of the offramp. Gah! It was disheartening, to say the least.

So aside from the 5 hour portion of the drive that should have taken two hours, it was a very nice, relaxing, enjoyable day that gave me a few ideas for things I'd like to do this summer.

Pictures are here.