Family business called my wife and I to the eastern purlieu of North Cascades National Park last week, where, after lunch along the way at Howard‘s On The River in Pateros, Washington, and dinner at Arrowleaf Bistro in Winthrop, Washington, we took up residence at Sun Mountain Lodge, found in the heart of the Methow Valley, and had a furlough from traffic and housekeeping. I was immediately charmed to learn that carvings in the furnishings of the lodge were done by Richard Beyer, the artist who created Waiting for the Interurban, a work of public art in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle that is among those most dear to me for its wit and approachability. Beyer relocated his foundry to Pateros in the early 1980s, to which he later moved, with his wife, from Seattle. Several of his pieces are also included in the public collection of the city we call home today.

The Methow Valley (mətxʷu) is a down‐dropped block of sedimentary rock that lies between igneous terranes; large crustal blocks of rock that have moved from a place of origin to be faulted into the place where we find them now. That rock is exotic to the land in which it is found.¹ A 2008 doctoral thesis by Methow native Ian Miller identified approximately 145 plant species in the geologic Winthrop Formation, supporting prior scholarship that concluded the Methow Valley terranes originated on the Pacific coast of Baja California.² The type of downward movement of a section of rock that formed the Methow Valley is called a graben, which is a German word for grave. The valley has been inhabited for 13,000 years; the Euro-Americans who began arriving in numbers in the late nineteenth century struggled to cope with the remoteness of the region from centers of trade, which had the effect that the first highway built by the State of Washington was the Methow Valley road, though it remained unpaved until 1938. The valley is also where smokejumping was invented.³ The North Cascades Smokejumper Base in Winthrop is dedicated to smokejumping operations and training.

The valley in the morning light was as if the Okanogan country had organized a vernissage for those patrons of natural beauty sensible enough to have turned their attention toward it; no audience gathered; no poet mounted a dais to equate beauty with truth; no orchestral horns rang out the chords of Sonnenaufgang; the sun rose, and the day began without apparent notice taken of the ancient witnesses to the evanescent beams that pierced the stirring land. Wrote Cicero, Things grow familiar to men’s minds by being often seen; so that they neither admire nor are they inquisitive about things they daily see.⁴

We began a drive up Frazer Creek toward Loup Loup Creek with a hot beverage from Blue Star Coffee Roasters in Twisp, Washington, and spent the day exploring in the vicinity of Omak, Washington, home of the Omak Stampede rodeo and its world‐famous suicide race, a horse‐riding competition featuring great derring‐do. The rodeo grounds may be seen from the highway, and seeing the arena immediately made me nostalgic for horses, despite my having spent fewer than eight hours in a saddle over the span of my entire life. I blame Cormac McCarthy. While I have made several trips through Omak on my motorcycle, this was our first journey together so far north into Central Washington, and we categorically enjoyed the drive into the foothills of the Okanogan Highlands, an extension of the Rocky Mountains, with a landscape dominated by Ponderosa pines, and populations of moose, elk, bear, and mountain lions. In a montane ecosystem such as that of the Highlands, the change in climate by moving up 100 meters on a mountain is roughly equivalent to moving 80 kilometers (45 miles or 0.75° of latitude) towards the nearest pole,⁵ so crisscrossing these hills was to see a natural phantasmagoria in an afternoon of joyriding.

Eventually and reluctantly, our business completed, we returned home to the routine sights of brake lights and dust bunnies.