Heading east across Washington

Long day on the agenda today.  We headed south out of Seattle (glad we weren’t heading north, traffic looked pretty bad), aiming for Mt Ranier National Park.  As we’re headed down one of the roads towards the park, we pull off at a viewpoint that had a view down a valley, thinking the view looked kinda decent.  Someone else was at that view point, and he pointed out that you could see a bald eagle nest that had a fledgling bald eagle in it.  Cathy found him pretty quick with the binoculors, but as I’m searching, all I can find is what looks like an adult not sitting in a nest at all.  Turns out, while they were standing about 5 feet left of me, they could see the nest and not the adult, while I could see the adult and not the nest.  Sure enough, once I could see the nest, there was indeed an imature bald eagle in it, occasionally flapping its wings.

Continued on towards the park, but as we got closer, we starting seeing signs that part of the park road was closed on the east side, so you couldn’t connect to 123.  That was a bad sign, since we had planned on going through that way, since our ultimate destination was the east side of the state.  Driving through the park we made several stops at places where we could see the mountain or some of the waterfalls.  Kind of would have liked to do the hike to Comet falls, but we really didn’t have the time it would have taken, plus, the record high heat that has been plaguing the northwest was also affecting this area.  Heck, even the walk down to where you could see Narada falls was pretty tough (it’s a steep walk).

Visited the new visitor center in Paradise.  Nice place, but the whole area seemed to be having some issues, which meant they had not running water, so all the rest rooms in the area were out of service.  Great view of the mountain from here, but the clouds were starting to build up a little bit near the peak.  Ended up following the road all the way to the point where it was closed to check out the bridge over this deep gorge the stream had carved out.  Then we had to completely back track our way out of the park, and take a different road that runs a little further south than the park road.

From there, it was largely a lot of driving.  Turns out that the middle of Washington is a lot of farmland.  Fair variety of crops, I know we saw hops, apples, grapes, wheat and cherries.  The hops took a little bit to identify, but then I remembered an episode of Dirty Jobs that I watched where Mike was helping to harvest hops, and it was setup exactly the same.

Ended up skipping Palouse Falls, which had been on our plans, because we were running later than we planned.  Got into Pullman around 7:30 (about 12 hours after we started), just in time to pick Cathy’s aunt up to head over to Moscow, Idaho.  Cathy’s uncle was performing with his group at an alehouse there with open mic night at 8pm, we got there about 7:50.