I posted a few of my pictures on Flickr if you’d like to take a look. I tried to include those pictures that might interest folks who were on the tour.
All of these pictures are smaller (sometimes much smaller) than the full-size images I have at home. If you were on the tour and want one of the large images, please contact me through Road Scholar – you’ll find me in the Great Ice Age Flood tour!
Panorama pictures here (including HDR versions).
I’m on the bus again, about an hour out from returning to Spokane. It’s been our last day on the road and I’m ready to do the whole route again.
We started off the day with a pretty funky breakfast at the hotel – one of those continental breakfasts that look good but don’t end up so good. They did have a great variety – from pastries to cold cereal to eggs to even biscuits and gravy. We all loaded up with food, loaded up the bus, and headed out at 8:00 a.m.
Our first stop was back to the west of Walla Walla at a small site commemorating a local Indian tribe, but I was more interested in the plants growing around. One of the men on the bus knows and *lot* about native plants and I just found out on our last day…
Next was a stop at Wallula Gap where all the flood waters converged and left Washington proper to flow on down the Columbia between Oregon and Washington. We all got to hike up to the Twin Sisters and get some incredible views of the Columbia. It was a bit spooky climbing the loose rocks in parts, but one of our participants is a bit wobbly with a cane, and if *she* could make it then so could I. Perhaps the funniest part was climbing over or under a group of barbed wire strands to get onto the path up the side of the hill. I decided to be inelegant and just crawl under on my hands and knees – it worked great! A few people wouldn’t cross the barbed wire and they really missed out.
After the Gap it was back east to Lowden and then heading north toward Eureka (not sure of the road number). We stopped at a small Lewis and Clark spot and then back on the bus and we were heading east on 124 to Waitsburg. We merged on to road 12 and went and into the town of Dayton.
The little town of Dayton was charming! We’ve gone through a lot of small, old towns and many of them are sooo small and sooo run down… but not Dayton. It had very wide streets, people riding around on bicycles and a lot of appeal. I might be tempted to live there!
We had lunch at the Weinhard Cafe in Dayton and it was quite good. There were a few wooden marionette monkey puppets in the walls of the Cafe and for some reason I found them quite charming. The cafe was expecting us and even then I think we overwhelmed them a bit. A group of us wanted to get out and explore the city a bit, so we intentionally sat closest to the kitchen. We did get our food first, and our dessert first, and we were out the door before 1/3 of our group even got their food.
I wandered the town a bit looking for interesting buildings. As we left I looked over at the Café and their “closed” sign was out! It was 2:15.
After lunch we headed north on 12, took a left turn toward Starbuck (sorry, not Starbucks; and the town was so small I’m not sure there was even a coffee pot there, let alone an espresso machine).
Our bus continued a bit on 261 to the Palouse Falls. Several folks here said it was a great culmination to our trip and it did not disappoint! We even lucked out and got a rainbow at the bottom of the falls – the water drops 198 feet high. Pretty neat and well worth a stop.
And finally? Back on the bus, heading north to Ritzville and I-90 and here I am, typing right now.
We’ve got dinner at 6:45 tonight, an evening in the hotel, breakfast tomorrow morning and that’s it. Kinda sad to see it ending as groups of people are starting to gel now.
Dinner was actually a little teary-eyed. We ended the evening by singing America the Beautiful (surprisingly touching) and giving out lots of email addresses and hugs. I think I could be a true friend with a lot of these folks and now I wonder if I’ll ever see them again…
All in all a fabulous trip.
Would I do it again? In a heartbeat!
Was it worth the money? Unquestionably.
Will I be doing more Road Scholar trips? Just try and stop me!
What a fabulous day. Wow.
We left our hotel in Spokane at 8:00 and didn’t get to our next hotel in Moses Lake until almost 6:00 pm. It was all time well spent too.
More cool information about the first big flood from Glacial Lake Missoula (1 MegaTon of energy is the amount of energy in 1 million tons of TNT):
To quote our leader “few events is the history of the world have exceeded this flood”.
We drove east along highway 2 through Reardan, Davenport, Wilbur, heading toward Grand Coulee Dam.
I have to admit, I never made the connection before that “Grand Coulee” meant anything other than the name of the dam. Apparently “coulee” means channel. There are many channels here in eastern Washington left from the flood waters rushing through, some of which are: Telford-Crab Coulee, Lind Coulee, Moses Coulee and even the “Grand Coulee”. So, the dam is actually named for the channel in which it was built.
The Grand Coulee Dam is almost one mile across and rises 550′ above the bedrock in which it was built. I seem to remember driving across the top of the dam many years ago, but that kind of access ended after 9/11. Over 45 million cubic yards of soil and rocks were excavated for the dam and then 12 million cubic yards of concrete were brought in. That’s enough concrete to build a two-lane high way with a sidewalk from Seattle to Maimi with enough left over to build many benches too! The dam was once considered the 8th Wonder of the World – and is three times the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
After the dam we headed southwest along Banks Lake (which is within the Grand Coulee) until we came to Dry Falls. This was a great drive, but when we came to Dry Falls: Whoa baby – this was just the coolest site to see. Back when all the water came rushing across eastern Washington (from both Glacial Lake Missoula and Glacial Lake Columbia) a lot of it headed southwest and water, 300′ deep, went shooting off the edge of a cliff near Coulee City at the end of Banks Lake. Water ran over this cliff at a furious pace and there was so much, moving so fast, that the front edge of the cliff receeded backwards over 12 miles.
Dry Falls, now called that beause water no longer flows over it, is often compared to Niagra Falls – which is 167′ high and 1 mile long. Dry Falls? 400′ tall and 3.5 miles long! It’s estimated that more than 10 times the amount of water that falls over Niagra Falls (4-6 million cubic feet every minutge) fell over Dry Falls – that’s 40-60 million cubic feet every minute.
It was just a great site. Our weather has been almost perfect too. While standing overlooking the edge of Dry Falls I could see a dirt road far below… and even an outhouse? So imagine my surprise and delight when our bus driver decided to drive us down there! It was just too cool. I could just picture the new tourists at the visitor’s center saying “hey, there’s a tour bus down there!”
After Dry Falls things quieted down a bit. We drove north along highway 17 toward Mansfield and on the way saw terminal morains (gravel bars/mounds/hills left behind when glaciers recede) and lots of erratics – huge basalt rocks that were carried along in ice and then dropped and just left where they fell when the glaciers moved back north.
By this time we were running out of time so we drove along the Waterville Plateau and watched videos about the great flood. How great to learn something while driving along! We did stop at a fruit stand in East Wenatchee – I got some Rainier cherries at a good price. Mmmmmm
By this time we were really running late so we headed straight for Moses Lake without any additional stops. Even going as fast as we could, we got to our hotel almost an hour late. We’re at the Shilo Inn and I have a huge room to myself – it even has a couch, a table with two chairs, refrigerator, microwave… and a phone in the bathroom? Now I have to admit I don’t get out much, but a phone… there?
Anyway… had dinner at Sheri’s with the group – Road Scholar was paying for it, so we could order anything we wanted off the menu, except for alcohol. I’ve never seen so many people order pie at once! ha ha ha
