Roll On, Columbia!

After driving north through the desert for a few hours, we crossed the wide Columbia River at Biggs Junction, leaving Oregon and heading into Washington.

Crossing the Columbia at Biggs Junction

The first stop we made in Washington was at a point of interest I had discovered on a map—a full-size replica of Stonehenge. The monument was built by a man named Sam Hill. I can’t find any proof of it, but I like to think that when he was building it, people were so bewildered that they asked him what in Sam Hill he was doing.

A replica of Stonehenge, in concrete,
located high on a hill in Maryhill, Washington

In truth, Sam Hill was a Quaker and one of the leading citizens of Klikitat County, Washington. He had traveled to England toward the end of World War I, and had seen the original Stonehenge, which his tour guides told him (incorrectly) that the place had been used for human sacrifice eons before. Sam Hill was a pacifist, and he decided that a place allegedly built for human sacrifice would make a good monument to the two dozen or so soldiers and sailors from Klikitat County who had been killed during the war. He first attempted to build the monument from stone, but that proved unmanageable, so he used concrete. Also, the reconstruction is Stonehenge as it originally stood, without any of the menhirs or lintels missing. It is quite a sight to see on a hill high above the Columbia.

Unlike the Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, England,
the menhirs and lintels are all intact in Washington

After we wandered around Stonehenge for awhile, we continued east on U.S. 14 to an island in the Columbia, where we camped at a park called Crow Butte. The land is an island now because it is a butte—it used to be part of the mainland, but one of the many dams along the Columbia flooded the low-lying land around the butte and created an island. It was a lovely campground, and because it was very hot, I went down to the sort-of beach and had a dip in the Columbia River.

The view from Crowe Butte Park

Because of the topography of the banks of the river, the road we were traveling on petered out across from Umatilla, Oregon, so we crossed a bridge to that town and picked up another road that followed the southern bank of the Columbia back into Washington state. We continued on through Walla Walla, Washington (one of my favorite town names, and also the center of Washington state wine country), to the twin towns of Clarkston, Washington, and Lewiston, Idaho. The two cities, aptly named for the explorers who came through in 1805, are separated by the Snake River, which we crossed to camp at Hell’s Gate State Park. It is so named because it is the gateway to Hell’s Canyon, which bills itself as the deepest river canyon in America. (I wonder about that, because isn’t there a river at the bottom of the Grand Canyon?)

An impressive basalt rock formation called the Swallow’s Nest towers over the scenery across the river. from Hell’s Gate. Hell’s Canyon actually begins about 30 miles upstream from the park. Hell’s Gate is a nice state park, despite its name, and we were lucky to have a very shady spot to camp. I wandered down to the beach and had a swim to cool off in the middle of the afternoon. And we did go back over to Clarkston for dinner, because it was blessed hot and we remembered that we knew of a nice restaurant called Roosters on the banks of the Snake River, which seemed like a much cooler solution than cooking dinner.

Swallow’s Nest rock, across the Snake River
from Hell’s Gate State Park in Lewiston, Idaho

We had been to the grocery store in Clarkston that we knew from past visits, an Albertson’s on the main drag, to resupply for our drive across the mountains; we have the Rocky Mountains to cross, and no wide, flat pass like South Pass on the Oregon Trail. We are planning to take U.S. 12 through the Bitterroot range from Idaho into Montana. Back to the groceries, though—I don’t know if Clarkston is a big tourist town (with two rivers, Hell’s Canyon, and the mountains nearby, it probably is)—but the prices at the grocery were out of sight. And I had gotten used to the higher prices on the coast. But things were sky-high in Clarkston. Nonetheless, we got some things that would keep while we were camping at Forest Service campgrounds, where we can’t depend on our refrigerator having electricity.

The route through the mountains is every bit as pretty as I remembered, at first clinging to the banks of the Clearwater River, and then after a few small towns with names like Orofino and Kooskia, turning to follow the beautiful Lochsa River, a mountain stream popular with fishermen. We were looking for a campground we had stayed at before; we knew it was past halfway through the mountains, but it was still a little farther than we expected, so we stopped at another campground for lunch before heading onward, hoping that the campground we were looking for was still open.

A beautiful vista along the Clearwater River
in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho

The campground, Wilderness Gateway, happily was still open, and we had a nice campsite, then the next day moved to an even nicer campsite and stayed two more nights right along the Lochsa River. You could scramble down rocks straight from our camp to the water, and I did that every day to cool off in the water. We set up our solar panel to take advantage of the sunny days and continue to run our little refrigerator.

The Lochsa River from our campsite

Although there were some noisy fellow campers (that happens especially on weekends, when we were there), it was still a pleasant stop, and at night the sky was absolutely filled with stars. The Bitterroot Range is still my favorite part of the Rockies.

On Sunday, we drove up to Lolo Pass, and then down into the Bitterroot Valley and on to Missoula, and from there to Helena. It was raining and we thought a hotel night might be good, so we checked in and discovered we were just a block or so from the Montana capitol building. It’s that pointy dome in the background of the cityscape under those beautiful pink clouds at sunset.

Sunset in Helena, Montana

Unfortunately, a bout of sciatica Mike had been battling really took a turn for the worse while we were in Helena, but as luck would have it, there was a chiropractor located right across the street from our hotel. So Mike went over and got a walk-in appointment in the morning, which helped a lot. After his chiropractor visit, we took off to continue the long haul across Montana.