Hello,

This is our first post in quite a while - maybe a year or two!  Our apologies, but house renovations and other activities have slowed down the blogging.  However, we just got back from a neat little trip into eastern Washington, and we wanted to share some photos with you.

The origin of the trip was to go see the areas of eastern Washington that were impacted by the Missoula Floods about 18000 years ago.  If you would like to learn more about these floods, you can visit Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods.  For the short version, towards the end of the last ice age, a glacier blocked the Clark Fork River in northern Idaho, which caused a large lake to form in Montana, flooding the area where Missoula is today.  Then every 50 to 70 years or so, the lake would get deep enough to "float" or break through the ice dam and a huge roaring flood would race out of the lake, across northern Idaho, across eastern Washington, and down the Columbia Gorge.  It is estimated that the amount of water flowing across this area was 10X the combined flow of all of the rivers in the world today.

We also decided to add some hiking detours and some touristy stuff.  We left Portland on Sunday, Sept 29th and traveled to Yakima, WA on the first day.  We were going to come back to Yakima later in the trip to do some wine touring, so we didn't spend any time there on this part of the trip.  On Monday, we got up and drove up to the little town of Leavenworth, WA.  It's a small town that has decided to remake itself in the fashion of an Austrian Alps town.  We arrived just as Oktoberfest was going on, but it is much slower during the week than on weekends.

 

We rented a house outside of Leavenworth in Icicle Gorge.  The first day, we drove up to Lake Wenatchee and did some hiking around it. There was not a lot of good hiking around the lake itself as there are many homes on the lake.  We did find a nice trail on the south side of Lake Wenatchee up to Hidden Lake.

Lake Wenatchee

The next day (Wednesday), we did a hike up Icicle Gorge in a very light rain.  Some friends told us later that the remnants of Typhoon Atlas were hitting the Pacific NW at this time, but we never knew it.  Our house didn't have any TV, so we were unaware of what was happening.  The Icicle Gorge hike was beautiful.  There were all types of wild mushrooms.  We'll include a couple of pictures (out of the hundreds we took).  The first one below is about 18" across!  There were lots of this type growing throughout the Gorge.

We talked to another hiker who said that we really missed the big mushroom show.  He said that the previous weekend was the big show, and there were many more mushrooms and about 10X the variety.  We were pretty impressed with what we saw, so no complaints from us.

We also found a place on the Icicle Creek where someone had set up tons of balanced rocks.

Check this out!

On Thursday, we left Leavenworth and drove up to the Grand Coulee area.  We stopped and checked out the Moses Coulee, where the first Missoula Floods came down before it was cut off by the advancing Okanagan Glacier.  The later floods were directed down the Grand Coulee.  The panorama shot below is the Dry Falls State Park. When the area was in flood, it was the equivalent of 5 Niagara Falls.

We had rented a house on Banks Lake (a huge lake used for recreation and irrigation).  We visited Steamboat Rock State Park, which is a huge mesa still standing after the floods.  It was a great place for Angus to hike and swim!

Pine tree growing on rock!

We had two great days in the Grand Coulee area.  We saw some kitschy stuff, like the Windmill Farm.

And we saw some super impressive stuff, like the Grand Coulee Dam.  This is an amazing accomplishment.  Behind the dam is Lake Roosevelt, which is 151 miles long and goes all the way to the Canadian border.  

We left Grand Coulee and headed back to Yakima, and spent a day touring the Wine country around Zillah, WA.  It was beautiful, and we bought way too much wine.  We had a great picnic at the Bonaire vineyard with Bung - the owners' Australian Shepherd who helped Angus eat a lot of treats!

Bung (back) and Angus (front)

We also visited the 2 Mountains and Dineen Vineyards. We bought a Cab Franc at Bonaire, a red blend at 2 Mountains, and the Cab Sauvignon at Dineen. If you are in the area, do yourself a favor and visit Dineen.  It's a very small vineyard, making a few hundred cases a year of Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and some others.    We sampled wines while Angus chased a tennis ball.  You know the vineyard is dog-friendly when they have a Chuck-it and tennis balls ready for the dog!

It was a great trip.  It's difficult to winnow down to just a few pictures for the blog.  Hopefully this gives you some idea of the area.