Best Western Adventures

Series 3

THE CROSSING OF THE COLUMBIA

After hiking for three hours doing the APE cache, we were all starving. No one had eaten since "brunch" that morning. We headed for the first food place we saw, a Burger King in Cle Elum. If anyone finds themselves headed east out of Cle Elum, don't do what we did. I don't even know what we did but somehow we had no choice but to go west on I-90 and it took a few miles to get turned around.

I had wanted to grab some caches in Ellensburg, but we missed those exits, too, and by then we really just needed to make up some time. We could tell we were getting closer to Yakima, WA, when we started seeing camoed Humvees traveling on the other side of the highway. Yakima boasts a large Army training center, and as a matter of fact, when we lived in Oregon, my husband was sent there for his annual training. It is a high desert area, so he remembers it being hot during the day and cold at night.

Yakima was completely different than I thought it would be. We get our apples at work from Yakima, so I had this impression of it as a shady orchard type area of Washington. That couldn't be farther from reality. I saw no trees in our visit to Yakima, nor much shade.

We stopped at a rest area near the training center and I found the cache there, near an overlook into a gaping canyon. My hair was blowing so wildly that it was hard to keep it out of my eyes to search for the cache. Luckily it wasn't hard to find - there was nothing to hide it behind. I also found a benchmark about 100 feet north of the cache, but since the website shows the nearest benchmark as 1.3 miles west, I have no idea how to log this benchmark find.

Heading south from Yakima towards Highway 97, we stopped through the town of Toppenish, which has a strong Native American history. The town boasts 55 murals on various buildings celebrating the history of the Native Americans. These pictures were on the side of the gas station we stopped at to try to get some beer. My husband wanted me to take a turn at the wheel while he chilled out. Apparently you can't buy beer in Toppenish. Must be a (high and) dry county.

Continuing south on 97 headed for Bend, OR, where we dream of living someday, we could see several mountain peaks to the right. We were having an ongoing debate about which mountains they were, until we saw this sign:

That kinda cleared things up for us. Turns out I was right about all of them except Mt Adams. That was the one mountain I didn't recognize, mostly because I had never heard of it before.

My favorite view of this trip was seeing Mount St Helens.

At this point, we started to descend into a valley and lose elevation. The sun was beginning its slow descent, and so was the eighteen wheeler in front of us. He must have been a rookie driver, because he was riding his brakes the entire time going downhill. We really enjoyed smelling his brakes burning, and kept playing leapfrog with him the way down into the Columbia River valley.
Suddenly, on the left side, we could see the Columbia River, running west towards Mt Hood.
We drove on into, and then over, it, and just like that, we were in Oregon. It felt like coming home.