Four Mountains

Tahoma, its lenticular cloud drifting inland.

Late Fall and Winter are not supposed to be prime viewing for Cascadian peaks, but a drive today during which I could see Rainier and St. Helens pretty well reminded me that I've been inordnately fortunate this season. Like the week befor Turkey Day, when I got this shot of Tahoma (aka Tacobud, aka Mount Rainier, aka several other Salish and Sahaptian names) from the north. Far to the north, zoomed way beyond the lens capabilty and into the low-end camera digi-zoom range. What the image lacks in resolution, it gains in poetry, with the whisp of peak-cloud above and the rolling Cascadian holls below.

Il Posteriori de Montana Santa Helena

A few days later, and many miles south, I snuck up behind Mount St. Helens (various native names, many of which amount to "smoking mountain") and got the shot above. As I recall (dimly), I was standing on the edge of a gravel quarry full of bullets and cartridges and garbage, but lift the lens above ground and shoot into the distance, and beauty repoaces ugliness in the memory of that day.

Not far away in distance or in time from the St. Helens shot, I was able to spot Mount Adams (ask the Yakama about the name, because I just don't know). This is the west side, more or less, and in November, it was still not so snow-covered as you might think on the brink of December. Snow was late this year, and no doubt it looks different now.

And finally, here's Hood (I'll let the Oregonians talk about their names for this one). Shot from the north or northwest, way across the Columbia. I have better photos of this, but it's not bad, and it's from that same week, it's the pick for this post.

These shots are from different perspectives in the space-time continuum. I've had what they call a "five mountain day," when I was high enought (strictly elevationally speaking) to see the peaks of five of the snowy Cascadian volcanoes from a single spot. Jefferson, Hood, Adams, St. Helens, and Rainier, viewed from Table Mountain above the Bonneville damn.

The regular Cascades seem high enough (thousands of feet higher than the Appalachian chain, which formed the pinnacles of my growing up years), but when you get to one of those peaks, and see these snowy monsters looming high, you begin to understand big mountains. Hawai`i Island has similarly large volcanoes, although the tropical clime robs (or disrobes?) the snow mantle of its awe-inspiring potential, and the full mass is hard to appreciate without being well out to sea. Even in Olympia, Tahoma looms large, even larger when you remind yourself that it is 50 miles away, but still imposes itself on the horizon of any clear day.

I am pretty sure that the closest I will ever get to these peaks are the flanks, and that most of my appreciation will be from a distance. There's no inner drive to conquer and avail myself of "summit" as a verb. But as long as there are clear days and cameras, I will pull over and take a minute to appreciate and take a photo for memory's sake.

Lion Rock

 

On a trail somewhere in the Blue Ridge there is this rock. Looks like a lion's face to me. That is all. 

One Kid, Two Kid, Red Kid, Blue Kid

Here's one kid. She is punching a snowbank, which insulted her family, or otherwise earned her wrath. She could care less that it is bigger than she is, and is happy to be the center of the shot.

 

Here is two kid (numero uno, in birth order), walking atop a snowbank that she saw as a walkway to another view. She is happy to disappear into its immenseness, and would be unhappy were her face to be recognizable.

I love both of these kids. They are both osum. They have some samenesses, and they have some differences. It would be sad otherwise.

With both of them, there is magic. The combination of complements, or play of opposites, or whatever they are to each other, creates alchemy. The kind that can turn a Northwest mid-winter day cloudless, that can make their dad's stoiclear eyes tear up with happiness. 

Some Mountain Photos

 

First, Silver Star. I saw this on a clear summer day. There was just enough wildfire smoke in the air to slightly blur everything. Normally, pastels make me yawn, and I like bold and saturated colors. But the almost impressionistic softness rapt me in happy appreciation.

 

Not far from the first photo, looking south across the river to Oregon, I caught sight of Mount Hood.  The cones in the foreground may be Boring Volcanoes, one of the best oxymoronic-sounding geologic names I know. 

 

On the same trip, returning home, I went through Chinook Pass for the first time. Just after peaking, starting down the west side, you come to this view of Tahoma/Rainier. Wordless.

Wings Over Cascadia

This past May, not that long after the snow had left, I arrived in a Cascadian meadow. Too early for camas and yampah, ground still pretty squishy, so I was jumping the gun relative to the traditional calendar that has drawn people up here since forever ago. But, this was when the opportunity arose, and I took it.

Likewise for the sandhill crane pictured here. What I've heard is that one or two show up at this meadow in any given year, but no breeding occurs. More likely, in the midst of migratory flight, it looks down upon this island of grass in vast forest, and swoops in for a closer look, a rest, a meal. The meadow is welcoming enough that it may stay the season, stop the flying and settle in on ground thinly peopled, a nature preserve in fact. Ironically, this meadow is the handiwork of millenia of human handiwork, a home occupied each summer while people dug roots, raced horses, traded, and did whatever else, including at some point setting fires that maintained this non-forested Cascadian oasis.

May may be early for the human foods (that I know of), and full flower is still a month away, but for the other creatures life is in full swing. Foliage and flowers have the small flyers flitting from plant to plant. This swallowtail may not be rare, and it takes no talent or acuity to find one, but I still feel fortunate to have seen so many of these fluttering paintings.

Some are more subtle, and the closer you look, the more you see. This moth appeared to be a caterpillar-pillaged leaf when I first saw it. Eventually, it grew uncomfortable with my gaze and took off on tattered wings while I stood, nearly stuck in the muck. 

That day, I meandered a mile or two. Not exactly trudging, but not flying either. The clouds of tiny insects, flocks of birds, and solo flyers all took their travels into a third dimension. This little plain of grass surrounded by mountains opened up a patch of sky so they could fly free under a warming sun while in the dank woods beetles crawl.

Pleading the 5th

The flag says the wind is waking on this 5th of July. The sole sign of the 4th is an over-stuffed trash can, visited now by a raccoon who nearly tricked me into missing sunrise, but this is all aftermath. I'll get back to it eventually.

A glow through the curtain crack told me it was after 4AM, when the sky near the Canadian border wakes and stretches, scratches at the dark, itching to become dawn. My family sleeps; I slip onto the balcony to see the shift. This is my church.

Above, the celestial blue is deep, but shallower than bottom, already less than the darkest our short Summer night offers. The horizon rolls out red as I stare out toward sea level, maybe 20 feet below my vantage and stretching for miles across the Strait.

Straight lines, but none of them able to withstand close examination. First and most obviously fallen: the horizon. A seismographic line of dark beneath the red, mountains pushed up by countless quakes, volcanic peaks like Baker and Glacier stand in for the big events, while mumbling multitudes remind me of the lesser but commoner rumblings that keep the Cascades rising.

Just above, lines between blood red and bled red, between the warm hues and blues. Infinitely many and fine lines. All straight in my pitiful little human view, but arched across the planet's fulsome curvature. And just where are the lines between redder, red, blue and bluer? I cannot pin them down, each dissolves color into colour, moving as unchecked as the rotation of our sphere through aeons, never to be delineated.

The water's surface, could I see it off in the dark distance at the foot of the rising Cascades, would be as straight as it gets. Pre-dawn calm, glassy smooth, perfect reflectory for the light show and the jagged silhouette of the mountains. But curving around the globe, warped by tides, and at any close view too cleaved and waked, blown splashed eddied and flaked to be truly straight for even a few feet. Water flows and will not be imprisoned by plane geometry, though for a crystalline moment it may let you squint and imagine mirrorine perfection, time unmoving.

Over the next hour, the calm is invaded as the approaching sun awakes winds. First, rifflets--islands forming. Then an archipelago. No white-top chop, not yet waves, really, no undulating horizon, but still the glass has shattered, letting me know that the flatlining peace of the un-dawned day is about to pulse to life and light. Before too long the meditative reflections have been swept away: the schooner's mast rippled apart, the seismograph of hills even more spastic, the stars and planets lost again.

Still, there are islands of calm. Lees maybe, or less romantically, sheens of oil or whatever was in last night's fireworks. But the way the wind blows and the tide flows, and these islands of calm remain, I suspect they are the deep waters running still. In and around one, a seal's head and wake sketch dances on the surface, then disappear. A pause, and then another dance. Neverlasting, never over. A fishing hole, maybe, some mystery known only from the underside.

Closer, in the thin strip by the strand, a raccoon mama emerges from the rip-rap and scrub-brush to investigate a trash can filled beyond capacity by last night's revelers. My eyes obey evolution and look. The tableau beyond, no matter how sublime, cannot compete with the creature. Like a fly crawling across a master's canvas, it demands attention, at least momentarily making the human eye follow motion and forget art.

But not for long. I've seen a grander motion already, and resolve to focus on it. From peaks left of the big mountain, shadow rays have shot subtly through the glow. Fanning darker into the lightening sky, lines of blue hue washing the warmer colors, paradoxical announcement of light soon to come. My eye rides them down to their center.

And in a bowl twixt peaks comes a brilliant green flash. More than a flash, a growing bubble, bursting finally into the yellow curve of the rising sun.

And day dawns.

Quickly the red draws itself on a line west, beyond my view. Maybe at my zenith, still there for the watchers beyond Tatoosh, but soon enough passing them as well, racing across the Pacific, chasing away stars and dragging up winds in its wake.

The sun stabs straight at me, as it always will over water. This low, the glaring orb remains attached to the long ellipse of the blade, and for the first time I see the sun's first reflection as a paddle, the sun a knob on the handle, slender Salish style, dipping into the sea. And so starts another journey.

Backroads: 14 Gorge Power Maximum

 A couple of entries ago, I got us on the road, climbing 14 upriver past cascades, through the Cascades.

The range took its modern name from the falls of the Columbia. As a whole, not as high as it's iconic volcano peaks: Tahoma (and its many spellings, including Rainier), Baker, Adams, Hood, and pre-blast Saint Helens. But it's still thousands of feet higher than the river, a mile of basalt to cut through to get to the lowlands and taste that sea.

Ergo gorge. Gashing into one of the world's largest lava flows, the big river relentlessly seeks sea, beating through rock to reach that salty embrace.

Route 14, rails, and trails all use the river's path. It's the flattest route, the furthest inland. My mind's blown, hundreds of miles inland, the river is still only hundreds of feet above sea level. In the last century, people dammed most of it, drowning the cascades, but also allowing boat traffic. Barges haul immense loads up and down the aquatic path.

The dams also harvest electricity, scraping electrons, smiling over spilt water. It beats burning coal (though plans are afoot to start shipping our coal to Asia, which is upwind,...brilliant), but the damns were pretty bad for the salmon people.

Another thing that likes to travel the gorge is the air. Cold air sinking across the winter plateau drops into a creek, a river, and finally the river. Oceanic storms push wet air into that Cascadian gap. The winds are legendary. Chinook winds bring spring, thaw the land. Gorge winds suck in world-wide windsurfers, fill the sails of tourism entrepreneurs, and all manner of metaphoricity.



Meanwhile, back in the real world, people discovered that they could scrape electrons off the wind. Oh, and make money. Turbines have sprouted rapidly, lately, and scouts scour the land, anonemeters in hand, looking for the next place to plant a wind farm. The ones in the photo here were cranking. 130-foot blades, tips moving 200 feet per second. They do a number on unlucky birds, and it takes a lot of bulldozed roads to erect and service these things. No energy is pure green, but like hydro, this one doesn't require overseas warfare. 

Wind and water flowed through the gorge as long as it existed, flowed so it could exist. Tales of raven and the other animal people tell how long ago they deciedd that the river should only flow one way, but river road Route 14 lets you go either way. Not quite as fast as the windmill tip, but a heck of a lot faster than the first 15 millenia of human travel in this ancient path.

Great Wednesday Part II: Cracker Plays Glacier

So I get to the venue, which is half bar and restaurant, and half general store to the last town on the road. Again the bad news good news oscillation set in, somehow ending up higher on the good side. I was about to order a porter when the bartendress said something about it being really foamy, so I asked for a Guiness, since it has a high nutritional value, and my reserves were depleted from all the climbing. But having a Guiness tap handle is different from having the drink itself, so I had to choose something else. Giving in to the hop-mad NW default, I asked for an IPA, only to learn that that keg had just poured its last. Unwilling to go Belgian (I continue to boycott Leopold's domain long after that devil got his due), I looped back round to the porter, and when they tried, it worked just fine.

As the chocolatey goodness coursed its way into my system and I was feeling happy, the other shoe dropped. There would be no ordering dinner and sitting around until the show started, because they were kicking us all out to let the band set up. Come back at 9 for first-come, first-served tickets. I squesked into the general store part just before closing, got the best food on offer (beef jerky, oh well), and decided to make a last-minute run to the end of the road for a view of Mount Baker.

After making it through an are of one-lane road controlled by robot traffic lights, I saw a bunch of cars coming down, and guessed form the fading light that I would not be treated to a sunset show, but I pushed on, blazing up straightaways and ripping the curves as fast as possible. At the end of the road, reflected in lakes, I caught the last red glow of the summit another 5000 or so feet above. Better yet, a big bright moon looking like it was resting on a ridge, carressed by trees.

No time to dally, though, and I looped around to rush down the hill even faster, fearing that hordes had showed up in my absence, maybe denying me entry to a place that looked like it could not hold more than a few dozen people. I skidded into the lot to see more than 50 people outside, and edged by way about midway through the amoebic crowd. Normally I don't cut in, but a large number of these were college kids with no real clue what they were about to see, and there was no sense them getting in while a true crumb was stuck outside.

I talked with a couple people, including Heather a brash hippy chick. There was a time in the '90s when I encountered a series of hippy chicks named Heather, all from Santa Cruz, a place dear to Cracker Van Beethoven. I took it as a good omen. The crowd kept good humor, milling about in the main drag, watching locals on ATVs roll through, and inexplicably smoking a lot of cigarettes but no weed.

9 o-clock came and went, and while some pompadoured doofus talked loudly so we could all confirm his idiocy, the crowd overall began to get antsy. After a while, the band came out to say there were technical difficulties, but they were working on a solution that would make loud music without eletrocuting them. (Based on Lowery's blog, such an accident might well be interpreted as part of the show, like when his DIY pyrotechnics backfired.) Through the windows, we could see cords connected and taped dow, ripped up, gear reconfigured, and finally an anorexic version of the black things from 2001 being erected. Then, music to my ears, a "Mr. Wrong" soundcheck. Pompousdour proclaimed this a country vibe, as if nobody else could hear.

Then they let us in. I got stamped and headed out back in search of a tree instead of a stinking bar toilet, looked at the stars a minute (could not make out the Big Dipper), and headed back in. Where despite a thick crowd I walked easily to the end of the bar, and quickly got a beer. There I found myself standing in a good spot, clear view of the band, close to another drink if I wanted it, and standing by a couple guys more my age than the college kids.

And I had a rare experience. Usually, in that idle conversation starting where you find out what each other do, my being an archaeologist trumps what the other people do, and sometimes they get awkward about it, apologizing for being corporate tools or whatever it is they do that is so boring by comparison. But these guys were in the beer industry, which makes them natural allies of archaeologists. I offered to pick up the next pitcher and share with them instead of getting individual cups, but they just said thanks and told me I should drink their beer. At this point, I realized that the bad-news half of the cycle had given up, that someone had beaten him up and sent him down the road, and it was to be smooth sailing.

The band came in, not complaining about the small venue or antique wiring at all, ensconced themselves in their corner (no stage, all egaltaritry here in Glacier), and I realized that the mob was focused elsewhere, and me and the beer guys would have a pretty much unobstructed view. Soon after they started playing, the obligatory (and for some reason familiar) gyrate-in-front-of-the-lead-guitarist chick appeared, but she was short enough that we could still see the band just fine.

Song after song that I know and love, the improvised sound system sounding very good (even if Sal seemed spooked from time to time by that 2001--or is that 2010?--monolith). If you know a band's songs, and have heard them a year or so apart, during which time they've toured relentlessly, it is easy to hear how much they love the music and have mastered all the fine points. I kept noticing how right on the inflections of guitars and background vocals were. Perfect.

There was a brief while when I wondered about the monolith and the band, especially lead singer David Lowery. He was hidden behind sunglasses even though there were no lights, he maintained a certain distance from the crowd (seeming unaware even when a wasted shaman kept dancing an pointing into the singers face), I began to wonder whether the beard was to cover the faux flesh of an android, a suspicion egged on by his robotically precise strumming. Was he the man who fell to earth?

But nah. Just rock.

The bar was not big, and the band was pent up in a corner. Frank halfway back into an alcove, guarding a hoard of chairs and tables. Sal just inches away from the pool table, stealing occasional wistful glances toward it. David perched in front of the crowd with nowhere to go. Johnny with no amplifiers to stand on or stage to work, face to face with the dancing girl until she was lured away by the shaman to dance in the center. The lights were just wall fixtures like in people's houses, and the windows behind them, looking out onto the porch, completed the illusion of a house party like they have not played in years.  Outside those windows were hippies who could not or would not come in, dancing, peering in, and sometimes talking with friends inside between songs. It was very nice to be by a window and catch this part of the show. And to top it off (both in terms of elevation and imagery) above and behind the band from by vantage point was an old copper still.

And through it all, no diva-ness. No bitching about the people outside betting a free show. Or about the facilities, or the encroachments on the stage, or the parade of people waling right in front of the band to get to the beer. Maybe a little bit if entrapment, when the bans asked how long the delay was, and some guy said "47 minutes" and was immediately accused of being uptight and German, with David proclaiming "I call bullshit on 'Glacier time,'" that being akin to Hawaiian time and other laid-back chronological reckonings. In fact, the guy was probably not from Glacier, and most of the crowd was pretty laid back about the delay.

But then David did acknowledge one guy for uttering the strangest boast he's heard from a crowd ("I have better handwriting than anyone in the room!"). And when some other person made the connection between a monmologue about rednecks and the song "Get Off This," they praised his multi-dimensional intteligence and added it to the encore. Two sets, two-song encore, and hours of rocking.

Long fieldwork the next day kept me from catching the Seattle show the next night, but I may not have gone anyway. A small show, like a house party with better sound, emerging into a cold starlit night instead of urban streets? Yeah, I'll take that.

Great Wednesday, Part I: The Field

Recently, a friend sent an email explaining why Wednesday is such a great day. If he's aggreeable, I'll post his brilliant and hilarious epistle, but for now I'll just tell you about a fine Wednesday I enjoyed this past week. It began with fog, the curtain that opens to the most gleaming northwest days.

Driving to the project area, I reached the gate that gave me the first gift of the day: a lock that opened easily. The road excellent by backwoods standards: well trammeled gravel neither washboarded nor potholed, logging trucks nowhere barreling down at me, just peaceful driving through misty mysterium.

Then up and around a bend, out of the woods and into the sun, above the clouds, a few watercolor wisps soaking upward, stroking and softening blue sky. Mount Baker and the Twin Sisters poking through to join me and the birds. Pausing in this peace, consulting maps, and then working down smaller roads to drop into a stream valley.

And I do mean drop. This mountain's black rock shales off steeply, and the thinning a few years ago (because yeah, it's a Doug-fir plantation) just made room for the youthful survivors to stretch out a bunch of poky branches over the bones of the thinned. Downed stuff and branches both too weak to support much weight, so there was to be no walking, just de-climbing this hill, a deliberate scramble down. Good fun.

By way of work, I was checking out every flat spot and cedar along the way. At about 1400' elevation they began to appear, right about the time I could hear the falls: cedars seamed and flattened by the healing of old scars, marking vertical strips of bark pulled off by people who would make things mundane and sublime from it. The scars were old and appeared among the stumps of long-ago logging as well. These trees may be common, but finding a grove still thrills. Here, the people of old left something special, they had stripped many trees twice, on exactly opposite sides. Hmm...

The last dozen meters or so was pretty much vertical, but enough roots stood bare and abandoned by the gritty soil and rocks racing to the streambed that I was able to ape my way down into this black-rock canyon. No real trace of the century old site I was looking for, but the rocks were rewarding enough. Black and metallic, some flat and straight, others as snaky and ropy as the the inside of a lava tube, then pockets and layers of pure white crystals. If not actual heavy metal, then  aesthetically so.

All of this falling from the bedrock, which down here lays exposed and sculpted by the water, smoothed soft lines and hard rock. Not far upstream was the fall I'd heard, a curvacious sluice dropping the stream into an oval hole in the rock below, then a further fall under and through the rock, emerging to the bottom pool. Maybe a person could go through, which would be really cool, but not something to do without a rope tied to your ankle, held by somone trusted and strong. So I did the next unsafest thing possible, which was to climb the flow-less mossy side channel and then cantilever myself as far out over the top as possible. Sometimes you just don't feel like back-tracking, especially since I could crack a leg in that tangle of trunks anyway. [If I had it to do over again, I would do it differently. This time I'd take off my boots to let my monkey toes grip, thorns be damned.]

I continued far enough upstream to know that the second sites I was seeking had, like most of this mountainside, long ago slid and slurried its way down to be buried under untold tons of bedrock and glacial debris. Then the long way up, regaining 700 feet of elevation I'd had to relinquish to get down. The tangles of salmonberry, dead branches, and rotten downed wood were no more help on the way up than down, and having to lift my feet high for each step made my heart pump faster than a keg at a frat party, my sweat to pour faster than gin at a yacht club.

It was grueling, to be blunt, but in a good way. Like, yeah I'm 45, but I'm not dead yet. I can keep climbing, kicking despair's ass downhill, bulling thorough thickets, doing the stoic stomp onward and upward. This kind of trail-less traverse requires frequent stops, both to keep the heart from exploding and to eye out the best route, the least chance of ending up boxed in or broken. As I neared the top, getting close to the road according to the GPS, I took the luxury of being very picky, avoiding the thickest and thorniest of the roadside vegetation to find an animal trail through.

And just before popping out onto the gravel, I found myself in a thicket of bitter cherries, whose bark is used as the red decoration in baskets. I'd been on the lookout for this since spring, and even though it was a long shot, I made a little cut to see whether a harvest was possible. And it separated easily, the thin red papery layer peeling off with ease. Basketmakers will be happy with this material, and now I know that at 2000' on this mountain in August, you can get it.

The final chapter of the field is one of those bad news good news things. The plan was to continue down the northeast flank of the mountain, letting myself out onto Route 542 (see that other post) to visit the North Fork Beer Shrine (and Brewpub/Beer Musuem/Pizzeria/Wedding Chapel) and take them up on a couple or three of their services before continuing on to see Cracker in the hamlet of Glacier.

But of course the 'master' key I'd been issued did not work on the lock, and I was stuck decidgin between a vain wait there or hike down to a road where nobody else would have the key, or a vain drive back across the mountain with an empty gas tank, maybe missing the concert and spending a freezing night on the mountain. I vacillated, but finally decided that since the truck was nosed downhill steeply, that maybe there was actually enough gas to get to the other side. The gauge millimetered up as I turned around and made my way up and over. There could be no avoiding the 4wd and low-gear/high-rev descent that eats up gas, unfortunately, but the further I got, the better I felt and finally I made it out the other gate and into civilization, or at least waterfront houses.

So I gassed up and made it back to 542, headed up valley to the show. At which point Part II began.

Skate Creek

So, since last time, where have I been?

Trout Lake, pulling a John Henry as I tried screening as fast as a Bobcat with a 12" auger (and after falling further and further behind, finally snapping off a leg...screen's leg, not mine). I'd show you pictures, but it was a cloudy day and all I found was that the ash is thick downwind of Mt St Hellions.

Before that was east a ways on highway 12, near Randle and Packwood. Not too far from where the Cowlitz as a river gives way to manifold montain headwaters.



You're looking down Skate Creek here, not all that far from the Packwood megalopolis, but even closer to where one of the mountain chiefs kept house. He's most famous in print as the go-to guy for crazy white men who wanted to climb Rainier.

But you get out on the land, or even just peek at the GIS, you can get the bigger picture. The "Indian's Cabin" shown on an old survey map is by Skate Creek, which feeds the Cowlitz from headwaters near the upper Nisqually River, which flows in a completely different direction, down to the Puget Sound instead of the Columbia. Besides which, there are big meadows up there, so people and ponies can eat.



My humble tent is shown within a few hundred yards of Sluiskin's place, near the big boulder dividing the stream in the top photo. The one where you could stand and net or spear fish. Because yeah, it's nice to have a trail up-valley and all, but food is what's gonna make it worth having a house.

Spent a day and a night there, and even though the Indian's House was obliterated when somebody went ape-shit with a dozer, the place is still great. Just before the hills close in, not too far from the village, lots of strawberries, plenty of room to dry fish, elk trails everywhere, and tasty water.

Idaholy Cow!

This is that dogtooth mountain in Idaho. From far away. Maybe I'll edit in the haiku about it, but not right now.

On the cross-country trek, the day I entered Idaho was the most visually stunning. Crappy weather robbed Appalachia's beauty, and of course the Wyoming wind was embitter cold.

For one thing, the moment I spotted pahoehoe, elation fluttered around inside me and burst out in a laugh. And when the roads were clear and acceleration beyond 65 seemed less suicidal, having dozens of sections between you and the next vertical relief allows you to enjoy the view.

Winds were screaming down to Utah from the Northwest that day, but more so up high than at road level. There were immense, high level rollers and squalls blowing through underneath. But I-84 just follows the plains between mountains, low enough to have been too warm for the snow, and there was not much precipitation of any sort.

So you drive along and look at pahoehoe flows or potato fields, covering ground fast, and now and then you approach another range of mountains, easy passes even with snow. I'd really anticipated the Owhyhee mountains, but they were in cloud-shroud city. Instead there was that glowing white mountain southeast of Boise. No timber, so just pure white snow catching sun. Huge black storm behind, and scudding little light clouds just above. Mahalo akua for showing me that, even if Owhyhee mountains stay huna.



Leaving Idaho, same thing all over again. Up until Oregon got steep, it was easy driving, other than my mishandling chains. Beautiful country again, and nice weather until, as I say, Oregon inclined to snowy heights.


So anyway, Idaho is grand, and maybe photos shot from a pick-up don't do it justice, but now they're posted. And the view from an F150 is certainly an authentic American (made in Norfolk Virginia by-God) perch.
And 4WD with a few hundred pounds of cast iron and hardwood cider press (more authentic American hardware) sure makes it less worrisome driving up them icy mountains.