Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Coeur d’Alene, ID to Kent, WA
329 miles
You have to have wheels if you’re going to keep rolling and the time came today to replace the bologna skins that were passing for tires on the trailer. We now know better than most that there are a lot of Interstate miles where you wouldn’t want to change a tire on the side of the road. So, we took the advice of the proprietors of the Coeur d’Alene Camping Resort and drove strait to the Les Schwab Tire Center in Cd’A (as the local abbreviate it) and had new rubber installed. But not before Frank took an early morning walk around the 62-acre campground and snapped some keepers of the morning scene.
With the new tires spinning, we set out on the last leg of our trek to the Pacific Ocean. Frank thought Cd’A was a pretty ugly town in a beautiful setting. Picture upper Ritchie Highway with mountains and pine trees. The best part of the town, from what we saw, was the area where we camped, to its east, closer to 4th of July Pass.
Bob said that the same guy who named that unpronounceable volcano in Iceland probably named Coeur d’Alene.
We were a bit surprised by how Cd’A and Spokane, Washington, had grown together. Spokane, a much larger city, is about 30 miles to the west of Cd’A. Last time Frank passed through those parts, there was much more of a margin between the two. Spokane looked like a bonefide city, albeit a small one. It had a center-city core with old, tall buildings and aging infrastructure from an era when more attention was given to details in order to provide a polished, stylish, dignified look (picture DC street lamps and bridge railings).
In no more than 15 miles west of Spokane, the climate appeared to change rapidly from a misty, greenscape to an arid, cloudless expanse of brown grasses. Frank commented that we easily could have been back in parts of South Dakota based on how it looked. The desert conditions stayed consistent until we reached the Cascade Mountains.
We saw an entire, 100-car freight train on the horizon today. It was while we were driving on I-90 toward The Columbia River. It had two locomotives pulling and one in the rear pushing. Most East Coast kids have never seen such. Cool.
We were impressed with the watershed of the Columbia River. It is very wide and deep. The Columbia is a linear oasis through some of the most arid land we saw on this trip and its waters are used to irrigate hundreds of thousands of farmland acres to its east. Land that would be uninhabited and fallow if not for the mighty Columbia.
I-90 crosses the Columbia on steel bridge. Westbound traffic then climbs a tremendous grade that lasted for more than 15 minutes to a summit known as Ryegrass Pass. We passed tractor-trailers that were going as slow as 20 MPH. At one point, we were down to 40 MPH. The strange thing was there were no switchbacks. It was essentially a straightaway climb up a sloping hill that was at least 10 miles long. At he top we got our first glimpse of the Cascade Mountains and Mt. Rainer to the west. Sideling Hill on I-68 is sort of the same, but Ryegrass was of a much larger scale and you can't see Mount Rainer from the top.
The desert continued for a while beyond the Columbia River, then, just as suddenly as it appeared, it disappeared. Within the space of three miles, we went from no trees to thick groves of conifers as we transitioned to the Cascades region. The Cascades are so abrupt and so high that they trap almost all of the moisture as weather systems move to the east, creating a desert just to their east more than 100 miles wide. Apparently what moisture does get carried over the mountains gets trapped by the next mountain range, near Coeur d’Alene, in the Idaho Panhandle. This makes the northwest a weather zebra!
The building of I-90 through the Cascades was an engineering feat. Starting in Seattle, near sea level, the road climbs for more than 30 miles to a point between two mountains known as Snoqualmie Pass, then it curves left and right dozens of times as it winds its way down the other side. “Flat ground” to the east of the Cascades is noticeably higher than it is west of them. Bob and Frank took a bunch of windshield shots as we wound our way west toward the top. We then coasted forever into Seattle—wished we had a skateboard!
We checked out a state park that wasn’t too nice and then settled on a KOA campground in Kent, an industrialized suburb along I-5 to the south of Seattle and near the Seattle-Tacoma airport. KOAs are like McDonalds—nothing special but no surprises. The weather was beautiful; about 73 degrees and sunny with very low humidity. We heard that Baltimore and DC were suffering with 95+ temps today and felt sorry for our friends and families. We briefly considered trying to catch a Mariners game, and although we only drove 330 miles today, the thought of driving more through rush-hour traffic took the shine off that idea.
We just drove all the way across America. And except for Indianapolis and Omaha, we didn’t see any large collection people until we rolled down the hill into Seattle. 1) America is empty. 2) The people live near the oceans.
No comments:
Post a Comment