August 11, 2006: Interstate 90 & Home

We’re finally back in Washington State! I haven’t included any “Signs of the Northwest” in this post as I have for most other parts of the country. I’ll leave that to you, dear reader, when you come here. If you’ve already been here, though, or live here, feel free to post suggestions. It wasn't as easy as I first imagined to think of distinctly Northwestern things; Starbucks and Microsoft and Boeing are everywhere now. Drizzle and salmon and the Space Needle would have to be on the list, I suppose. Hmm...

Nor did I take any photos on today's drive, so I'll include a couple of photos I took last year, just to give you a taste of Washington scenery. Here are Mt. Rainier

and Puget Sound. It'll sound exaggerated or immodest if I rave about the beauty of my state, so if you're not a local, you'll simply have to come and see for yourself.


Today’s drive was around 600 miles, not quite the single-day distance we covered when we drove south on I-5 or north on I-95, but durned respectable nonetheless. It started badly, though, with the thumping sound of a rear left tire that was about to fail. We limped into Missoula to buy lunch at Safeway and a pair of new tires at Les Schwab.

Outside Missoula, we passed the turnoff to wonderful Glacier National Park. We’d love to visit, but tomorrow is my thirtieth high school reunion and, like a horse racing for the barn, we’re eager to get home. Besides, I promised the family that, by hook or by crook and come hell or high water, we’d be home by today. Glacier is roughly 300 miles out of our way. Since it’s only around 500 miles from Seattle, we can more easily get there and have more time to enjoy it on another trip.

We continued northwest across Montana through the Rocky Mountains. Debbie took over for a couple of hours and drove us into northern Idaho. We gained an hour as we crossed into the Pacific time zone at the Idaho state line. In Coeur D’Alene, Debbie and I swapped positions again. With a tired little cheer, we re-entered Washington, passed by Spokane, and stopped for pizza in the small town of Ritzville, where gas was $3.18 a gallon.

Eastern Washington, well irrigated by the mighty Columbia River (Roll On, Columbia!), is the dry, sunny, agricultural side of the Evergreen State. It has scrubby, gently-rolling hills. We descended into the Columbia Gorge at the cleverly-named town of George, Washington, and crossed the bridge that traverses the broad river. Ascending the other side of the gorge, we soon reached Ellensburg, famed for another rodeo, though it doesn’t have the nerve to call itself the “Rodeo Capital of the World” as Cody, Wyoming, does.

Before long the Cascade Mountains came into view, and we were wending our way upwards and over Snoqualmie Pass through thick forests of pine and fir. Then the sparkling lights of the metropolis that surrounds Puget Sound appeared. We crossed Lake Washington on one of its three floating bridges and completed this grand circle tour in Seattle, the Emerald City and our Home Sweet Home. We refilled our tank at a more reasonable $2.93 a gallon (if anything about gas prices can be called "reasonable" these days). As we pulled into our garage at 11 p.m., the odometer read 118,864 miles. The boys were fast asleep.

Complain about cars all you will, but they have so many advantages over other forms of transportation that there really is no comparable alternative. Trains and buses have very limited routes and schedules. Air travel has become exorbitantly expensive. And considering the situation at airports, which has only become worse in the wake of the successful British terrorist plot, we’re certainly glad we didn’t fly.

“Wait!” I hear you say. “The bomb plot was foiled.” No, it wasn’t. The terrorists plotted to sow terror and, without causing a single death, they succeeded. People are terrified, airports are snarled, and US business is suffering (and will keep suffering, especially my own, international education). But Americans are an innately mobile people and, like us, will never stop traveling.

August 10, 2006: Cody & Yellowstone

Just west of Cody is a narrow canyon blocked by a dam, which an informational sign in our hotel room labeled the Buffalo Bill Damn. I’m sure Bill uttered the expletive often, never realizing that the hydroelectric project he worked to have built would one day bear his name. But the Buffalo Bill Dam was first called Shoshone Dam, after the Native Americans whose land was expropriated to erect it. (Sacagawea, one of Lewis and Clark's translators, was born a Shoshone.)

The visitor center presented a video that recounted its construction, an epic that stretched from 1904 to 1910 and created, at 325 feet, the tallest dam in the world at the time (it was later raised to 350 feet). Floods, subzero temperatures, and other incredibly challenging conditions killed seven men and drove three successive contractors into bankruptcy. (You can bet they called the structure “damn” many, many times.) Another video explained that more than fifty dams now provide water, electricity, and flood control to the Western US, making possible our agriculture, our industries, and the very cities in which we live.

We resumed our westward movement through the parched landscape, on course for Yellowstone.

From time to time, a distinctive rock formation would catch my eye.

When we spotted this strange log house on a hilltop, we stopped and inquired. Locals told us that the man who built it died before it was finished, whereupon his family sealed it up and left it as it was.

Just down the road was this massive pile of antlers and skulls in front of a shop selling “antler art.”

Yellowstone National Park was the world’s first such park, established by President Grant in 1872. It covers nearly 3,500 square miles and encompasses the caldera of an ancient volcano, whose still-active interior provides entertainment as it pumps steam through sulfurous fumaroles, geysers, and mud pots.

Thank goodness for the thermal features and the bison, since otherwise the Yellowstone scenery is so much like that of the Northwest that it might be hard to interest the boys in it.

We drove past the east entrance, through a major road paving and reconstruction job, and then through an area recovering from a recent forest fire (though nothing even remotely as extensive as the many terrible fires that devastated large swaths of the park in 1988).

As we traced the shoreline of Yellowstone Lake, stopping now and then for photos, the boys announced they were hungry. A diner in the settlement of Fishing Bridge provided our lunch. The diner is part of a huge store where we also did some shopping for gifts. As one would expect at a national park, fishing is no longer allowed from Fishing Bridge.

When you think of Yellowstone, you think of geysers, pre-eminent among which is Old Faithful. Less spectacular but more beautiful to my eyes are the colorful pools of simmering water whose temperatures range from 100 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit. (That's Debbie reflected in this pond.)

A ranger at West Thumb explained to the boys that the colors in the water are Yellowstone’s smallest wildlife, microorganisms that thrive in heat, the brown and orange ones in the cooler water and the green and blue in the hotter.

We left the lake and drove over the Continental Divide to Old Faithful, which went off on schedule.

I must admit it wasn’t as spectacular a performance as I expected.

I saw it in 1968, so I’m sure it seemed larger then, but I had forgotten how quiet it is.

At the distance we were kept, it was almost silent.

After the eruption, Debbie took a photo that I think gives an accurate impression of what I look like when I'm about to lose my temper. Our boys, who were clearly homesick, sorely tested my patience today. (OK, so steam wasn't literally coming out of my ears.)

We followed boardwalks to see some of the other pools and geysers in the area.

This one, Castle Geyser, has built up one of the largest sinter cones in the world.

I found a professional photographer taking a picture of this scene with an antique 5 x 5 camera, the kind that has a bellows to facilitate focusing.

By the time we got back to the main lodge, the main attraction was spouting again, so it’s safe to say that our excursion lasted approximately 90 minutes.

We toured Old Faithful Inn, sometimes called the jewel in the crown of National Park lodges. This monumental timbered building was designed by architect Robert Reamer and erected in 1903 and 1904.

It has a magnificently spacious lobby – a cavernous six stories high – and small details like this writing desk that indicate the care with which it was constructed.

We got four dishes of ice cream in the smallest size available (at least three scoops each) and as the sun set, we ate them on the wide second-floor balcony that overlooks the hotel’s namesake. The kids really were enjoying their dessert much more than their expressions seem to indicate.

Our $50 National Park Annual Pass has turned out to be an excellent value. Just two of the parks, Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, together added up to $50 in admission fees, but we also went to Bryce, Zion, Cape Cod, Badlands, and Devil’s Tower, all free. (We only had to pay for the tram ride up Gateway Arch, the tour of Mammoth Cave, and parking at Mount Rushmore.) And if in the next year we go to other national parks – those in Washington State, for instance – or to any of the same parks again, those visits will be free as well.

We left Yellowstone through West Yellowstone, Montana, and headed north to find a room for the night. My passengers quickly fell asleep. At 1 a.m., we pulled into the casino town of Butte, gassed up at $3.05 a gallon, checked in with a friendly night clerk at the Days Inn, and carried the boys up to bed.