Even though in our household the motorcycles are listed in the Expensive Toy category for budgeting purposes, it is true that I like to play with my toys as much as possible*, and as winter gives way to spring, the number of days the weather cooperates with taking them outside to do so increases.
Highway 20 through North Cascades National Park opened April 3, which was a few weeks earlier this year than last, and yesterday clouds gave way to sunshine.
My brother John and I decided it was time to go make sure the mountains were where we had last seen them.
The geography of our region owes much to continental glaciers. Among the prominent features of the terrain in the eastern part of Washington State are coulees, many of which were carved by cataclysmic flooding as 500 cubic miles of water from Lake Missoula burst forth dozens of times during a two‐ to three‐thousand‐ year period. The Grand Coulee was formed by other water forced from its channel by the ice, and in 1933 required 11,975,521 cubic yards of concrete poured 550 feet high and spanning 5,223 feet to dam. We who live here are familiar with how the layers of sand, gravel, and silt left behind by the repeated scouring and pulverizing of the surface by the Pleistocene glaciers can slip free from a hillside, usually once rain has lubricated some unseen joint in the ground that needed just a bit of help to come unstuck from the clay below. It is common during winter months for Amtrak Cascades to frequently suspend service along the shore of Puget Sound because yet another slide has covered the railroad tracks.
The western boundary of our state is the Pacific Ocean, which itself is a remorseless agent of change to the shape of the land we inhabit. Significant effects can occur over such brief periods that they register during single human generations; for example, prompting the community to name one feature of the coastline Washaway Beach.
Erosion is a phenomenon in which we are interested, not because it occurred back when Jesus was riding dinosaurs but because it changes our landscape as we watch.
Thirteen months ago, a landslide near the town of Oso,
Washington,
killed 43 people as an estimated ten million
cubic meters of mud and debris were set loose. Our route on this day included the reconstructed section of State Route 530 that had been destroyed by the slide, and I was
very curious to see the extent of the ruin of the surrounding landscape. I read at the time that the slide covered an area equivalent to that of downtown Seattle, which
struck me as awful in its scale. Yet despite having lived in downtown Seattle for many years and wandering it from end to end countless times, still I was dumbfounded
by the scene at Oso.
We continued up the Stillaguamish River valley past Darrington, then followed the Sauk River to Highway 20 at Rockport, where the Sauk joins the Skagit River, and a right turn is the correct turn. The highway traces the Skagit River for miles; in many places, rip rap is all that keeps the river from consuming the shoulder of the pavement (there’s that erosion again), and each time I pass through this area, I shake my head while recalling that the lower river is a designated National Wild and Scenic River, whereas just a few miles upstream from the boundary established by that legislative act, the river occasionally runs dry as its water is diverted to power the generators at Gorge Dam, which is one of three dams built on the river in the 1920s–30s to produce electricity for the City of Seattle. I don’t begrudge the dams, but I do marvel that in less than one lifetime after their construction began, attitudes about the use of our rivers changed so radically. If William Shatner manages to accumulate his $30 billion for a pipeline and hires a survey crew, the citizens of Washington would probably, as Marc Reisner once imagined about similar fantasies emanating from California, line the Columbia River with tanks and bazookas to greet them.¹
Once in Winthrop, it was time to stop at our customary place along the Methow River to eat lunch and enjoy the sunshine. We used some of the break to amuse ourselves sending road‐trip
photos to those in our address books likely to be at work, and so free to appreciate that we had taken a moment to demonstrate via photographic evidence that we were not.
A representative response? You suck.
Day‐trips into this part of the state get split pretty evenly between reversing course toward home from Winthrop or heading south to Highway 2 and Stevens Pass. We decided on this occasion to do the loop, so after lunch made our way down the Methow and Columbia Rivers to Wenatchee. (Little‐known fact: jazz saxophonist Don Lanphere was born in Wenatchee.)
The first apple trees were planted in the Wenatchee area in 1872, and in 1901 the first boxcar full of apples was shipped from Wenatchee to Seattle via Stevens Pass and the Great Northern Railway, which had completed the route in 1893. By 1925, the masthead of the
Wenatchee Daily World would read Apple Capital of the World
,²
and it continues to do so today.
There are more than 170,000 acres of apple orchards
in these eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains, and they feature prominently in the landscape as the road curls its way along the river from which much of the water is drawn to irrigate them. It is easy to see at a glance that growing apples entails a great
deal of work, but from the saddle of a motorcycle on a spring day when the hour is unimportant and long days of labor have been set aside, the orchards are a postcard suggesting crickets, cold milk, and the aroma of warm dessert.
The thermometer on my bike said the afternoon temperature was 84° as we drove out of Wenatchee toward Leavenworth, where we put the kickstands down at Good Mood Food
for a break.
From there, our heading returned us to the mountains, and much to our liking there was little traffic as we rode up and over the pass. We managed to find rush hour congestion as we neared the end of the journey, but we had spent an entire day separated from the usual
cares, playing with our toys, and so did not mind the reminder that the time had come to put them away until another day.
* Hauling myself to work and back is a chore, not recreation.
Update February 1, 2023
I cited Washaway Beach as an example of how quickly the landscape can change.
This Washington experiment could rebuild eroding coastlines
by Sarah Trent and published January 27, 2023, at
High Country News
makes plain that human determination continues to bend the environment to its liking when nature directs otherwise.