HELLO SHERWOOD, FAMILY AND FRIENDS. 

The Talleys are back. Lets get rolling. Get those gardens in. Get that house painted. Get those kids educated. Do good works. Eat a taco. Drink a cold beer.

And keep on howling. The pandemic ain’t over, until the “fat lady gets vaccinated”.

We drove a total of 8,709 miles on our month long trip, through parts of West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

Our kids gave us hugs, we ate good food, spoke with eccentric and cheerful people, visited scores of dog parks, including one in Short Pump, Virginia it affixed with an Astroturf surface, sprinklers, dog swimming pools, lounging areas, dog exercise equipment, flat screen TV, and WiFi.

We camped in amazing, starkly beautiful places, mostly by ourselves, stayed in a high end hotel in Bellingham, WA and a dive motel in Sprague, WA.

Now we are home. And I must say, crossing those Blue Ridge Mountains, gliding down into the Shenandoah Valley and into the Queen City, our fair city, and back onto bucolic Sherwood Avenue, with its historic houses, accomplished, cheerful people, and  its funny and happy children, I never felt more at home.

HOWL WITH ME TONIGHT FOR A LITTLE RAIN, DON’T YA THINK?

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AMERICAN TRAVELS

Day #13 – #17, April 11 – 15, 2021 – A Map of Our Travels

We are at the Bellwether 1, a mighty fine hotel if I do say so myself. Off season rate $200/night. In season rate $300 to$900 depending on view. Now we are living high on the hog.

We meet up with Henry and Anya, his companion, at the “Paws for a Beer” dog park, where locals and itinerate visitors like us gather to drink fine beer and watch our dogs play. It is amazing how freed up dogs get when their owners get shit-faced and stop paying attention. We ate Pilipino cuisine, drank our share of good beer, and like to froze to death in the 40 degree evening.

The next day we went with Henry and Anya to a small embayment, Mud Bay, off the much larger Bellingham Bay, just south of Bellingham. We walked the tidal flats, and watched all manner of shore birds probe for crustacean delicacies. Later Henry took us on a tour of some of his fine landscaping projects and we finished out the day with a fine dinner.

 

 

 

Tuesday, April 13

We are off again, headed south on I-5 in the normal bumper to bumper traffic headed for Seattle, with 14,411 foot Mount Rainier looming above the surrounding landscape fifty miles to the southeast. Rainier is a large active stratovolcano in the Cascade Range and the highest mountain in Washington and the Cascade Range, which is made up entirely of volcanoes.

Volcanologists say Rainier has a very high probability of eruption in the near future and they considered it to be one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. When it blows its top, the large amount of glacial ice on the mountain will melt and mix with ejected pyroclastic material, rocky debris, and water to produce fast moving, massive violent 100 – 400 foot deep mudflows, that will shoot down from the volcano like a locomotive into surrounding landscapes. The flows will follow the course of the Puyallup River, which will quickly fill up. Then they will spill out into the river flood plain and destroy every thing in their paths. According to the United States Geological Survey, “about 80,000 people and their homes are at risk when Rainier blows its top.”

Think Mt. Saint Helens, the most recent member of this group of volcanos that erupted in 1980. Go there to see how volcanic activity molds the landscape.

I’m getting the hell out of here.

As with all landscape features in America, indigenous peoples first named this mountain. Various Salishan and Puyallup people called it Talol, Tacoma, Tahoma, Tacobeth and Pooskaus, all meaning variously “snow covered mountain and mother of waters”. But who cares what a few pesky indigenous people think about the names of things.

A silly little footnote about naming things. On Friday, January 31, 2014, in the lead-up to Super Bowl XLVIII, the Washington State Senate passed a resolution temporarily renaming the mountain Mount “Seattle Seahawks” until midnight after the Super Bowl, Monday, February 3, 2014.

Sometimes human beings can be rather frivolous.

Speaking of looming, to the southwest on the Olympic Peninsula loom the mighty 35 million year old Olympic Mountains on the Olympic Peninsula. The western slopes of these mountains are the wettest place in the 48 contiguous states. One can find stunning temperate rain forests there where mosses, 10-foot ferns and lichens festoon tree trunks and branches. Sitka spruce and western hemlock tower on high, dominating this spectacular forest environment. Seventeen major rivers radiate outwards on all sides, spilling out into the Pacific Ocean and various associated bays, canals, harbors, and straits. In addition to the temperate rain forest, one can find steep slopes, and sub-alpine forests, alpine meadows and lakes, glaciers, and rocky peaks.

The Olympic Mountains are not volcanic. Good place to hide when Rainier blows up.

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Onward we go, crossing to the eastern side of the Cascade Range at Snoqualmie Pass. On to Richland, where one can pay a visit to the Hanson Manhattan Project, a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the world’s first nuclear weapons. Think Robert Oppenheimer, who designed bombs for the Manhattan Project from his lab in Los Alamos.

On July 16, 1945, “weaponeers” detonated the first nuclear bomb at the “Trinity Site” on New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. The explosion resulted in an unprecedented release of energy: the equivalent of some 20,000 tons of TNT. The blast was so powerful, so hot, that it fused sand and other minerals into a new “man-made” mineral named trinitite.

A month after this test the United States dropped plutonium “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, killing between 129,000 and 226,000 people instantly.  Many others died from chronic radiation sickness. Remarkably, this was the only time nuclear weapons have been used in the history of the world.

Lets keep it that way!

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We crossed the Columbia River and drove into Umatilla, Oregon (population 7,000 – 2,000 of which are incarcerated inmates at Two Rivers Correctional Institution) where we holed up in an EconoLodge for the night because high winds prevented us from even thinking about setting up the trailer.

From Umatilla we headed southeast on I-84 across the Blue Mountains, which are unique as the home of the world’s largest living organism, a subterranean mat of mycelia (intertwining filaments) of the colonial fungus Armillaria ostoyae. This monstrosity covers 3.7 square miles and possibly weighs as much as 35,000 tons.

Botanists call it the “Humongous fungus”. Who says botanists don’t have a sense of humor?

For thousands of years indigenous peoples, the Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla roamed the river valleys and northern slopes of these mountains. The southern part of the Blue Mountains were inhabited by several different bands of the Northern Paiute, who also roamed about in the Great Basin, which we will enter soon. This landscape feature is the largest endorheic watershed in North America. That means it has no water outflow to other external bodies of water, such as rivers or oceans. Any surface water flow converges instead into lakes or swamps, which there are damn few of in the Great Basin, since for most of the year it is dryer that a dog-sucked bone. Geologists also call land features such as this closed or terminal basins or internal drainage systems. Geologists are not as poetic as botanists.

The Great Basin spans nearly all of Nevada, much of Oregon and Utah, and portions of California, Idaho, Wyoming, and Baja California, Mexico. It’s low point is in Death Valley and its highest point is 14,505 foot Mount Whitney in east-central California, the highest mountain in the contiguous United States.

Onward we fly, to Pendleton (population 17,000 which includes approximately 1,600 people who are incarcerated at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution). These Oregonians sure do love their prisons. Next to Meacham (population 50) where on July 3, 1923 President Warren G. Harding, traveling through the region while taking part in events commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the covered wagon migration of 1843 (The Oregon Trail) stopped, and declared Meacham the capital of the United States for one day. More frivolity.

Then on to Hilgard (population 50), La Grande (population 14,000), and Baker City (population 10,000), named after Edward D. Baker, the only US Senator ever killed in military combat.  Then through Huntington, (population 440), Fruitland (population 5000), Middleton (population 6,000), and finally arriving at Celebration Park, situated on the northwest edge of the 485,000 acre, BLM managed, Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area, which has the densest concentration of raptors (birds of prey) of anywhere in America.

We are deep into the Great basin now, camped all by ourselves in a field of thousands of 15,000 year old massive volcanic boulders gathered at the face of a a 200 foot volcanic flow wall. The boulders spill out onto the surrounding landscape and sit unmoving, frozen in time, until the next catastrophic geologic event. Our camp site was right on the shores of the famous Snake River.

 

Geologists have decided that about 14,500 years ago, a hugh lake occupied the present-day basin of the Great Salt Lake, but the Bonneville Lake, as it is called, was far larger, covering about 32,000 square miles. Don’t ask me how they know this stuff. Far above my pay grade.

During the last ice age lava flows began to divert water from various rivers into Lake Bonneville, which caused the lake to overflow at Red Rock Pass, near present day Pocatello, about 14,500 years ago. This was a sudden catastrophic geologic event. These same smart geologists say that the maximum discharge of the flood was about 15 million cubic feet per second or about three times the average flow of the Amazon River. The speed of flow was approximately 16 miles per hour and though peak flow lasted only a few days, voluminous discharges may have continued for at least a year.

The flood spilled out onto the Snake River Plain, carrying with it the hugh boulders, among which we are now camped. Paiute Indians wintered in this area for thousands of years and etched pictures (petroglyphs or rock art images) dating back 12,000 years, on these boulders.

 

Sitting alone in the late afternoon sun contemplating such matters as these natural occurrences and products of them, the time scope involved, the wonderous and grand nature nature of them, makes me happy.

 

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The next day, April 15, 2021 we hit the road again. On Kuna Cave Road we saw a hugh veal operation. Male dairy calves are of little or no value to the dairy farmer so are used in the veal industry. Veal farmers feed calves a special diet that tenderizes and colors the meat a whitish hue, apparently pleasing to veal eaters. This particular operation had hundreds of individual stalls in which the calves were jammed, with little or no room to move about. In front of each calf was a bucket of feed. That is the way these unfortunate creatures are forced to live out their days.

I am not a veal eater.

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On Kuna Mora Road, we passed by one of the more curious sights we have seen in our travels. We call it the “Fence of Shoes”. For about four miles, the fence on one side of the road had shoes on each fence post and others hanging from the fence its self. No one seems to know who started this bizarre practice and for what reason. Go figure.

Twin Falls in next, then into Jackpot, Nevada (population 1,200) with four hotels and associated casinos, a post office and one gas station. Folks from all over Idaho, where gambling is illegal, come to Jackpot, get liquored up, smoke themselves to near death, and play various games of chance, in hopes of “hitting the big one.” Few ever do.

Along comes Contact, a mining ghost town, then Wells (population 1,500). We are traveling on the Great Basin Highway, through a broad, super dry valley with slopes rising up to treeless mountain ranges on either side. Next comes McGill, where the Kennecott Utah Copper Company mined local ore deposits for copper until in 1983, when the price of copper fell, and the high grade ore deposits petered out. The company closed the mine and demolished the smelter. With the primary employer gone, the population of McGill decreased to its current levels, which are practically zero. An oft repeated story in mining country.

We tried to find a camping area in Goshute Canyon, but the directions were weird, so we bailed and traveled to Ely, Nevada (population 4,035 for a stay in a La Quinta.

Sawyer was happy. He loves to stay in motels.

Adventurers founded Ely in the 1870s as a stagecoach station for the Pony Express. Later miners discovered significant copper deposits nearby which would become one of America’s major copper mining regions. Today, downtown Ely has a very good coffee shop where Emily got the best chi latte she ever had, and about a dozen small historic hotels with attendant casinos and bars where folks can get liquored up and have their pocketbooks emptied.

We passed a pleasant evening at the La Quinta. Showers all around, including Sawyer.

Tomorrow, we will continue our southeastward path toward toward warm weather in Arizona and New Mexico.

Namaste’