With the arrival of spring, kayakers remove boats and equipment from storage and turn their thoughts to lakes. Which lake is best for the inaugural run? As a general rule of thumb, lakes to the west and south of Spokane are good early in the season, and those to the north and east later on. Water temperatures in the former are not so cold, and air temperatures can soar dangerously high in the peak of summer. But even in the southern/western region, there are dozens of lakes from which to choose. In my five years of kayaking in the Inland Northwest, I have started the season at Fishtrap Lake three times, and Clear Lake twice. Which is best? Keep reading.

Fishtrap Lake

Fishtrap Lake

To reach Fishtrap, get on I-90 west and take the first exit after the pine trees disappear and grassy scabland predominates (exit 254), less than an hour’s drive from most anywhere in Spokane. Three more miles and you reach the lake and a cluster of trailers and buildings at the Fishtrap Lake Resort. A large dilapidated building here was a dance hall in the early 1900s. For a fee you can park at the resort, or with a Discover Pass at the public boat launch.

Southern end of Fishtrap Lake

The lake slithers in the shape of a snake for four miles through classic scabland. It is one of nature’s miracles – cool blue water glistening in a desert-like landscape of clumped rocks, perpindicular cliffs, dusty pines, and brown grasses brightened by occasional sprigs of wildflowers in the spring. Kayakers pass a rock slide on one side and a scallop of mini bays before the sides press in at The Narrows, approximately halfway down the lake. Beyond is a rock in the shape of a mini Gibraltar, and then it’s a slog to a gathering of lilies that mark the end of the lake. Most impressive are the columnar cliffs. Their reflections shimmer in the water on calm sunny days, and thousands of swallows build mud nests in the walls, from which they swoop in great agitation at the passing of a kayak. Best to avoid this outing if the winds are up.

Clear Lake

Clear Lake

Clear Lake is slightly closer to Spokane, set in flat land surrounded by pine forest. At exit 254 off I-90, make a quick right onto Clear Lake Road. Both times I’ve been here, I’ve missed the hard-to-spot sign on the left for the public boat launch and have had to turn around at the U.S. military’s lovely, spacious, and well-equipped Clear Lake Recreation Area and return to the more spartan launch, where a Discover Pass is required.

Though not as long as Fishtrap, the lake proper is wider and less attractive for someone like me on an inflatable kayak. The great beauty of Clear Lake are the inlets, channels, and small ponds to the left of the launch on the southern border. The inlets lead to a couple of pondlike bays that make you feel you are an explorer discovering a new world, in spite of the homes set back from the water. Beyond, a small channel, hard to spot until you are on top of it, leads through water grasses and around beautiful water lilies with their strange yellow flowers to a few more intimate, isolated ponds where the only sounds can be the trills of birds. Wildlife is abundant here: my favorite sightings were a moose and a yellow-shouldered blackbird.

And the winner is …

Lilies on Clear Lake

The years I visited Fishtrap first, I didn’t have the stamina, and perhaps the confidence, to make it to the far end of the lake. This year I went to Clear Lake first, got in a bit of practice, then went on to Fishtrap and – finally – made it the entire way. So Clear Lake is my recommendation for the season’s first lake. Next year.

Yellow-shouldered blackbird

The first winery I visited in Spokane was Arbor Crest, a site known for spectacular views and whimsical historic structures as well as fine wines, located east of downtown in Spokane Valley. Seen from a distance, its Italianate house perches on a basalt cliff that rises over 400 feet on the north side of the Spokane River. A two-lane road wends its way up to the top. From the large parking area, visitors can fan out onto a couple acres of vineyards, forested gardens, stone patios, and the tasting room, all formerly part of the eccentric Royal Newton Riblet estate.

View from a patio

Who was Royal Newton Riblet?

Born in Iowa in 1871, Riblets long held an interest in mechanical devices and inventions. He moved to the Northwest and worked for a time with his brother Byron, who owned the Riblet Tramway Company, producer of the first ski lifts. Royal’s first wife died young, leaving him with three children. The search for a new wife took him through five marriages and divorces until the seventh marriage took hold, lasting until his death in 1960. In 1925, he built his eccentric estate atop a cliff known as Myrtle’s Peak because a native woman of the same name apparently jumped off it rather than go through with an unwanted marriage.

The estate:

Riblet designed the storied estate, where he lived out his final decades. In addition to the cliff house, he built a workshop, gazebo, and gate house out of basalt rocks as well as a swimming pool carved from the rock, a 16-square-foot checkerboard, a croquet court / ice rink, and a tram going from the cliffs down to the river. The tram was demolished decades ago, but the other features remain, and there is also an example of a square-wheeled tractor, one of Riblet’s numerous inventions. Inspiring views extend across the valley to downtown Spokane, Mica Peak, and Idaho to the east.

The winery:

Back in 1982, Harold and Marcia Mielke established Arbor Crest Wine Cellars as one of Washington’s first wineries. Two years later they moved up to the Riblet estate, which by then had been designated a national historic landmark and was up for sale. Today, their daughter Kristina and son-in-law Jim van Löben Sels run the winery. Although some grapes are grown on the property, most are acquired from vineyards in the Walla Walla / Tri Cities region. A broad spectrum of wines—whites, reds, rosés—can be sampled in the tasting room or carried to the many outdoor seating areas. The Arbor Crest brand, very popular locally, is also distributed in stores and restaurants in far-flung places.

The events:

In a win-win situation, Arbor Crest opens its gates for a number of events throughout the year. There are arts and crafts displays and weekly music concerts — outdoors Thursdays and Sundays in summer and around a fire in the tasting room in the winter.  In August, the Spokane Symphony Orchestra holds two open-air concerts here. Crowds drive up to enjoy the music, sample the wines, and look out on the spectacular views. This is also a great place for weddings and other private activities.

P.S. For those so inclined, there is an interesting article by William E. Barr about Riblet and his on-going battle with a neighboring cement plant.

Courtesy of the National Lentil Festival

Every August (this year, the 16^th and 17^th), thousands of visitors flock to Reaney Park in Pullman, Washington for the annual National Lentil Festival. While there, they stroll through the garbanzo garden, buy from marketplace vendors, sample the world’s largest bowl of lentil chile, and watch live lentil cooking demos. Performers entertain on the main stage, adults sample local beverages at the beer and wine garden, and children play in the lentil land kid’s area. There’s more — the Tase T. Lentil 5K Fun Run, a lentil pancake breakfast, and the famous lentil cook-off. Past winning cook-off recipes include cinnamon lentil mini-pies, lentil empanadas, and caramel lentil cheesecake.

A lentil festival?

Yes. Pullman has been hosting this festival since 1989. The city is in the heart of the farm-rich Palouse, and the Palouse has long been known as a major producer of lentils. In fact, one-quarter of all U.S. lentils are grown here. Today lentils are just one of a rising number of pulse foods grown in the region.

Pulse foods?

Pulse foods have nothing to do with throbbing arteries or bursts of sound. They are actually members of the legume family, a special legume sub-group. Legumes themselves are plants whose ‘fruit’ grows in a pod. Well known legumes include alfalfa, fresh peas, soybeans and peanuts. Legumes are good for the soil because they convert nitrogen in the air into nutrients available to plants, thus improving the soil and reducing the need for nitrogen fertilizers.

Pulses are the dried edible seeds of the legumes. The most common are lentils, chickpeas (garbanzos), dry peas, and dry beans. The word comes from the Latin puls, which means ‘thick soup.’ In contrast to some legumes, pulses have extraordinary health benefits – low in fat, very high in protein and fiber, and high in a variety of minerals. They are also gluten-free and easy on the pocketbook.

Good for the body, good for the soil. Small wonder these strangely named foods have been gaining in popularity in recent years.

To wheat and beyond:

Wheat remains the most important crop on the Palouse, but the fields suffer if wheat is planted year after year. In the past, pulse crops were planted primarily as a rotation crop to replenish the soil, but today farmers, to their great pleasure, find that pulses have also become a cash crop in their own right. With the growing interest in healthy, earth-friendly foods, pulses are included in many innovative recipes. Perhaps best known is hummus, a Mediterranean dip made from mashed garbanzos, tahini (sesame seed paste), and olive oil. Rising to the demand for garbanzos, the Palouse has become the nation’s leading producer. Another popular pulse recipe, perfect on a cold winter day, is split-pea soup. In addition, pulses today are found in everything from breads to breakfast cereals.

A year in the pulse fields:

In 2017, The Spokesman-Review newspaper ran a series of articles on farming in Washington State. Though quite interesting, the articles were long. I’d often start one, set it aside, then forget to finish it. So I was pleased to learn the newspaper was publishing the articles in book format, and even more pleased to find the book under the tree on Christmas morning. Titled A Year in the Fields: The State of the Washington Farmer, it – of course – has a chapter about “Pulses on the Palouse,” written by Chad Sokol.

Courtesy of The Spokesman-Review

Driving through the Palouse is as relaxing as sitting a hot tub, jets turned off. I first experienced the ride when my husband and I spent a couple of days in Walla Walla. On the way to the city of vineyards and wineries, we turned south off I-90 at Ritzville, passing Palouse Falls and other spectacular examples of the channeled scablands. For the return trip, at the small town of Dayton north of Walla Walla we decided to take byways heading northeast in the direction of Colfax. Without warning, we found ourselves in farmland. Rounded hills and concave hollows rose and fell ever so gently in no particular pattern. Dark asphalt ribboned the terrain. It was early summer, and the square fields displayed multi hues – pale green, deep green, chartreuse, tan. Occasional copses of trees or tidy houses and barns broke the lulling uniformity of the landscape. It resembled a toddler’s roller coaster.

From Steptoe Butte

What’s in a name?

I thought of the age-old puzzle — which came first, the chicken or the egg – when I read about the origins of the word ‘palouse.’ Perhaps early French-Canadians who entered the region in search of furs heard the name of the local indigenous tribe, the Palus, and fine-tuned that into pelouse, which in French happens to mean ‘lawn’ or ‘short grass.’ Later, the spelling would be changed to Palouse. Conversely, perhaps those early traders used pelouse to refer to the region’s grassy hills, and the local inhabitants became known by the same name. [Of similar origins is the Appaloosa horse, but that’s another story.]

How was it formed?

During glacial periods, when temperatures drop and glaciers expand, the ice grinds rock into a dust known as glacier flour. When temperatures warm, flooding occurs, creating lakes on an immense scale. Over time, many of the lakes drain, creating vast amounts of silt. Then the winds come, lifting the dust and silt into the air and transporting it elsewhere. This sediment is called loess. Theory has it that loess from a dried lake in the Tri-Cities area lifted and eventually settled over southeastern Washington. The loess fell in a series of layers separated by narrow bands of rocky deposits. Over time, the terrain came to resemble giant sand dunes more than 200 feet deep in places.

How was it farmed?

In the mid-1800s, farmers began to settle the region and recognized the richness of the loess soil for growing crops. The indigenous peoples were displaced, native grasses plowed under, and crops planted. Wheat became the region’s most important crop, soon producing more wheat per acre than any other region of its size. Towns and farming communities sprang up, making it one of the most populous regions in the state of Washington.

At first, farmers used horse-drawn combines to harvest the wheat. Man invented, and soon tractors replaced the horses. However, some of the hills, though gentle to the eye, are so steep that the tractors would topple over. Again, man invented, and self-leveling machines solved the problem.

Today, in addition to wheat, rapeseed is planted in the Palouse. Pressed into canola oil, it flowers in a distinctive chartreuse yellow along the hills. Legumes are also planted, and in season, the Palouse fields turn into a checkerboard of greens, yellows, and browns. In recent years, some of the land in the southern Palouse has been converted into vineyards for the growing wine industry. The original prairie habitat has almost completely disappeared.

Highlights of the region:

Courtesy Palouse Scenic Byway

The Palouse extends three-thousand-plus square miles south of Spokane, north of Walla Walla, and east to the western edge of Idaho. The largest towns in the region are Colfax and Palouse – historic farming towns – and Pullman and Moscow, homes to two well-known universities. All are worth a visit. Two rivers – the Snake and the Palouse – wind along the valleys. Two buttes – Steptoe and Kodiak – tower over rippled hills, providing spectacular views of the surrounding farmland. I’ll visit several of these sites in future blogs. The Palouse Scenic Byway website offers a good map of the region and information about its places and activities.

Author Barb Bentler Ullman lists ten native tree species inhabiting eastern Washington: the ponderosa, lodgepole, and western white pines; interior Douglas fir; western larch and quacking aspen; the netleaf hackberry, water birch, black cottonwood, and Oregon white oak. Ten species, and the three pines look uncommonly similar. Contrast that with Puerto Rico’s best-known rain forest, El Yunque, where 240 tree species crowd onto a scant 28,000 acres. To me, the forests of eastern Washington and northern Idaho take on a rather monotonous uniformity, and yet one species, the Ponderosa pine, has risen above the others to become Spokane’s official tree.

A bit of history:

In 1826, a Scottish botanist named David Douglas [yes, the namesake of the Douglas fir] was exploring near today’s Spokane in eastern Washington. Here he came upon a tree species he later identified as Pinus ponderosa, ‘ponderosa’ for the tree’s heavy wood. [Douglas’s short illustrious life ended in Hawaii when he fell into a pit trap, a bizarre death that may have been accident … or murder.] Widely distributed throughout British Columbia and the western U.S., the ponderosa pine has several other common names, including bull pine, blackjack pine, and western yellow pine. In 1949, it was named the official tree of Montana, and in 2014 the city council designated it Spokane’s official tree.

A few facts:

Spirit Lake

Ponderosa pine is an evergreen tree that produces cones. It is tall: specimens over 150 feet are not uncommon. It is distinguished by a straight trunk, long bright-green needles, and broad plates of bark that fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The thick bark makes the tree resistant to wildfires; it is also drought-resistant. However, if the root system isn’t deeply established (as in yards where a lot of watering is done and the tree gets lazy about setting its roots deep, a landscaper explained to me), it can topple under high winds. This has happened in several neighborhoods in Spokane since I moved here.

(U.S. Forest Service)

According to The Gymnosperm Database, the ponderosa pine is the most commercially important western pine, used for everything from furniture to log cabins to fuel. Indian tribes scraped the inner bark and wood for sustenance when food was scarce. In addition, seeds were roasted or ground into flour; the sap was used as a salve for a variety of ailments; and the wood could be hewn into dugout canoes.

Welcome home:

On the return trip of a car ride to central or western Washington, traveling along I-90, I view the gentle arid hills populated with a scattering of scrubs and grasses where the land hasn’t been irrigated for farming. To my right is long Sprague Lake, and I think about what it would be like to kayak there on a calm day. Suddenly, the landscape changes: gone are the farms and rolling hills, replaced by rocky scabs and towering, slightly scraggly evergreens. Ponderosa pine. I am getting close to home.

Along the Spokane River

Downhill skiing and snowboarding are not the only winter sports atop Mt. Spokane. Two of the others I have tried – snow tubing and snowshoeing. The third, cross-country skiing, I have not.

Snowshoeing view

Snow tubing:

The first Christmas our two daughters visited after my husband and I moved from Puerto Rico to Spokane, I feared they would be homesick for the tropical island Christmas. It seemed important to show them the beauty of a northern winter. They were interested in skiing, but I was not (see my previous post), so we compromised on something we could all do – snow tubing.

After a bit of research, we drove halfway up Mt. Spokane Road to the Bear Creek Lodge, just below the boundary of Mt. Spokane State Park. The large brown-wood chalet sits on one side of the road while the snow tubing takes place on a hill across the way. For a couple of hours we—one mature woman and her two adult daughters, not a child among us—had a great time grabbing the rope tow up to the launch area, sitting or sprawling on a sturdy tube, and swooping some 800 feet to the bottom of the hill. We finished off the outing with hot cocoa and beer.

Another option for snow tubing on Mt. Spokane is the Children’s Choice Tubing Hill at the Ski & Snowboard Park.

Snowshoeing:

When we arrived in Spokane, snowshoeing seemed the best way for my husband and I to enjoy the snow, so we outfitted ourselves with shoes and poles at REI and signed up for a City of Spokane Parks andRecreation snowshoeing tour on Mt. Spokane. Actually, two. The first time we went by day through forest and up a steep climb to Bald Knob Picnic Area. The second time we opted for an evening moonlit tour across the mountains to an area where skiers descend by day. After that, we decided to strike out on our own. Several times my husband has ascended to the Vista House on the summit of Mt. Spokane, and I have headed in the general direction of (but never reaching) a CCC cabin on Beauty Mountain. On a good day, you trek through an unspoiled winter wonderland — the snow dry and glinting with a billion points of light, evergreens packed deep with snow, and the views to Spokane and beyond, breathtaking.

Cross-country skiing:

In the winter, snow piles up on many of the trails used for summer hiking, creating a white-frosting landscape for cross-country skiers. In the Mt. Spokane Cross-Country Ski Park, more than 35 miles of trails bordered by snow-laden evergreens crisscross the slopes. Trail maps indicate the degree of difficulty of the trails, from easy to difficult. Most Nordic skiers park at a large lot around the corner from the starting-off point, the Selkirk Lodge, equipped with indoor plumbing, water, and tables. In addition, there are two warming huts at far-flung points along the loops. There are also opportunities for skijoring, in which harnessed dogs work with skiers to cover the trails. It looks like fun, but I do wonder if the dogs’ feet get cold. Booties, maybe?

If none of the above appeals to you, there are also bike and snowmobile trails.

Winter is the time to enjoy indoor activities, for me at least. When I think indoor activities, I think museums. And when I think museums here in Spokane, I think of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, informally known as the MAC. The Inland Northwest’s best-known museum, it was the first one I visited when I began to explore the city.

Courtesy Northwest Museum

Browne’s Addition:

The museum is located in a historic district known as Browne’s Addition, on the south side of the Spokane River. Browne’s Addition was Spokane’s first residential neighborhood. Beautiful mansions rose up around the spacious Coeur d’Alene Park in the late 1800s, but by the 1930s many of the homes were sub-divided into low-cost rentals for downtown workers. Starting in the 1980s, the neighborhood reversed a decades-long trend toward blight, and has become a historic district and a lovely, tree-lined neighborhood with many of the mansions renovated to their former glory.

Arts, culture, and history:

Campbell House

In certain respects, the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture should add the word ‘history’ to the name, particularly so if you look at its origins. The MAC started in 1916 as the Spokane Historical Society. A decade later, the society, its named changed to the Eastern Washington State Historical Society, moved into the Campbell house, one of the lovely mansions in Browne’s Addition. Built by a mining magnate, the house was gifted to the society by the miner’s daughter. The society amassed local relics, curios, artifacts, and other objects of the early pioneers. During the 1930s it expanded into collecting art. In 1960, a new museum – the Cheney Cowles Memorial Museum — opened adjacent to the Campbell house, and the house itself was restored to its historical elegance. The museum soon began to acquire extensive collections of Native American culture. By the turn of the century, a new building rose up adjacent to what is now known as the Cowles Center to house exhibition galleries, a store, café, and outdoor amphitheater. The entire complex became known as the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, accredited by the Alliance of American Museums and affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution.

Exhibits and activities:

Wooly mammoth exhibit

In spite of the relatively small size of the MAC, it has produced a number of outstanding exhibitions in the years I’ve been here. I experienced the opulent journey and disastrous sinking of the Titanic ocean liner; watched a collage of photographs that transported me from present-day downtown Spokane to the era when the wooly mammoth roamed the region; took in photographer Edward S. Curtis’s view of Native American Indians of the Northwest; and (currently) admired the photographs of Ansel Adams and other innovative photographers of the mid-20^th century. In addition to the major exhibition, the museum at the same time also displays smaller exhibits, such as the current centennial commemoration of World War I and how it impacted the Inland Northwest. The exhibit rooms are arranged in a loop that is easy to follow.

The MAC also schedules talks related to exhibits in the Cowles Center auditorium, art classes, and walking tours through the elegant Campbell mansion. If you’re so inspired, you can rent a piece of local art to display in your own home for several months through the MAC Art Source program. The modern lines of the museum café overlook the outdoor amphitheater and northern Spokane in the distance, and the store offers a tasteful collection of gifts, often exhibit-related.

Upcoming events:

Glass by Chihuly

2019 will be a very good year for the MAC. It will start out with Inuit art, paintings and films of the Canadian north, and an exhibit I can’t wait to see — Dale Chihuly and the Studio Glass movement, opening February 23.

For more information, go to the Northwest Museum website.

Holiday hiatus:

Due to the delightful demands of the holiday season and other distractions, this blog will take a brief hiatus, returning at the end of the season (which for me continues to be after Three Kings’ Day on January 6). May your transition from the old year to the new one be merry and bright.

Lake Coeur d’Alene sprawls across the mountains of northern Idaho, resembling (with a bit of imagination) an arthritic seahorse – spindly and stooped and marked by knobby bays and inlets. It stretches twenty-five miles from end to end, with over a hundred miles of shoreline. Since I’d decided to use the lake as a setting for part of my first novel, I felt a need to get a feel for it. So, one day in late spring, after all threat of snow had passed, I started out on a road trip around the lake.

Lake Coeur d’Alene

No lake:

I headed east on I-90, then south on Highway 95 along the lake’s western side. Although the road is fast and well maintained, being the main road to Moscow and Lewiston, it provides almost no lake views. To see it up close here, you have to take side roads to Kidd Island, Mica, and other bays. I took a couple of those roads on subsequent visits. They lead to networks of lovely lakeside homes and a public dock or two. That day I continued south, into the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation, past the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort and Hotel to the small town of Plummer. At this point, the need arose for a rest room. In front of me loomed the Warpath Smoke Shop and Trading Post. I entered. Though the façade is a bit tacky – a buffalo statue greeted me at the door – the store has an impressive selection of high-quality Indian merchandise, from blankets to beads.

Many lakes:

From the trading post, I followed State Route 5, and got my first roadside panoramic views of Lake Coeur d’Alene. Except that what I saw isn’t Lake Coeur d’Alene, I found out after the careful study of a map. These waters go by a variety of names – Chatcolet next to the popular Heyburn State Park, Benewah to the east, Hidden and Round lakes slightly to the north. In the midst of them flows the St. Joe River, highest navigable river in the world, where logs are still pulled to lumber mills. Two strips of land border the river as it empties into the lake, bisecting the water and, I assume, giving rise to the different names. Route 5 continues to the small timber and mining town of St. Maries, set in a picturesque valley next to the St. Joe River. Here I turned north on Route 3, following the St. Joe before it merges with the lakes. At about this point, the roads become confusing, a triangle of routes 3 and 97 and O’Gara Road. Where to go? The choices: stay on Route 3 past a chain of lakes nestled along the Coeur d’Alene River before connecting with I-90 some 25 miles east of Coeur d’Alene. Or head north on 97 along the eastern side of Lake Coeur d’Alene. Each route is known as a scenic byway. I kept to my original plan and headed north on 97.

Here’s to Harrison:

Harrison

Approximately a third of the way up the lake, Route 97 loops into the historic community of Harrison, in times past the largest town along Lake Coeur d’Alene. Once a stop for steamboats plying the waters of the lake and adjacent rivers and for a railway leading to the coast, Harrison served the region’s booming lumber and mining industries. A frontier town, it boasted buildings tumbling down the hillside onto pilings in the water, stores, newspapers, churches, hotels, even an opera house. Today the town, with scarcely several hundred residents, serves the pleasure boats that crisscross the lake in summer months. There is a lakefront beach and several marinas, restaurants, and ice cream shop, all of which reminded me of beachside communities on smaller islands in the Caribbean. In addition, the popular Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes passes through Harrison. For more information, start at the Visit North Idaho website.

Time’s up:

After lingering for a while in the historic town, I realized I faced a long journey back to Spokane. Focusing more on driving than sightseeing, I vowed to return soon and complete the journey in leisurely fashion. That will be my next blog.

On a map, the Little Spokane River looks like the doodles of a pre-schooler, all curves and curlicues. From the road, it can scarcely be seen, an occasional flash of water in lovely forested foothills. For kayakers, this is Spokane’s most popular waterway, and with good reason.

Some 35 miles long, the Little Spokane starts out in two places — just west of the Idaho/Washington border and Eloika Lake. The branches merge and the river empties into the larger Spokane River near Nine Mile Falls.

Put-in at St. George’s

This part of the Little Spokane is in Riverside State Park, which means a Discovery Pass is needed to park. It is open to kayaks, canoes, and rafts (no inner tubes or air mattresses). For the full seven-mile, three-hour journey, the put-in is off St. George’s School Road north of Spokane. At least once a year I make the journey, pumping up my inflatable kayak, tossing in the necessary gear (life vests required), easing onto the seat, and angling the paddle. Immediately, I’m in a world of free-flowing water, marshland and forest, looking up at ragged pine-dotted hillsides. Although the river is a mere half-hour from downtown, it has a wilderness feel, with scarcely any homes or other signs of human life along the way.

The most common of the grasses along the river is tule, which the Spokane Indians wove into baskets, roofs, and other essentials of daily life. Wildflowers provide ever-changing bursts of color. An introduced species known as water iris is especially common, its bright-yellow flowers seen in bunches along the banks. Feathery arcs of willow trees bow over water. The water and the forest provide habitat for a great variety of creatures. Fish can easily be spotted in the clear water, and families of ducks glide in zigzag fashion near the banks. Viewing other creatures — osprey, great blue herons, deer, otter, and moose — is a question of  patience, a good eye, some knowledge, and luck.

Traveling the Little Spokane involves little skill and effort, but there are obstacles to be avoided. In places, you must figure out which side of the river will carry you along and which will ground you on a sand bar. Without quick paddling in other places, the water lures you into fallen logs and tree branches known as sweepers. Erosion, a major factor in changing the course of the river, can add a steeper curve to navigate.

Near the junction of the Little Spokane and Spokane rivers

Halfway along the journey is a second put-in/put-out known as Indian Painted Rocks for pictographs found nearby. At about this point, the kayakers who have been lolling along, enjoying the views, the solitude, and the placid water, realize they may need to pick up their pace to get to the take-out off Highway 291 in the estimated three hours. After rounding many curves, and passing a barn or two, a bridge, and a couple of riverfront homes, the take-out appears on the left, next to concrete remnants of an irrigation system. Just beyond, rapids bubble over some sort of drop, giving a sense of urgency to get the landing right the first time.

If you don’t have two cars or a partner who will drop you off at the put-in and wait for you at the end, there are two options. In the summer, the City of Spokane Parks and Recreation offers weekend shuttle service. Or you can paddle upriver back to your car. I have seen this done — kayakers in sleek crafts with sinewy arms and a no-nonsense concentration — but don’t recommend it.

For more information, visit the Riverside State Park website.

The largest waterfall in the world spans an arid region devoid of all but lichens and the hardiest shrubs. Over three and a half miles long and four hundred feet high, it is roughly three times the size of New York’s Niagara Falls. So why isn’t it a top travel destination? Well, perhaps because the water that plunged down the falls dried up more than 10,000 years ago.

[Wikipedia Commons]

My family and I first visited here while taking a detour on a road trip across Washington State from the Seattle airport to the northeastern town of Northport.  The falls are located in central Washington off Highway 2. From Coulee City, we skirted the lower end of Banks Lake, a reservoir created as part of the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, then turned left onto Route 17 for a mile or so. A parking lot and visitor center sit at the edge of a wide, deep trough known as the Grand Coulee. Brown basalt table-top cliffs descend in layers for hundreds of feet, encircling an amoeba-shaped collection of lakes that seem misplaced in the dry landscape. The cliffs on the upper end fan out for more than three and a half miles in gigantic scallops. They are the Dry Falls.

Here’s how it happened:

Deep Lake

In a colder and distant past, perhaps some 15,000 years ago, a lip of the southern edge of the continental ice sheet dammed the Clark Fork River, forming the 200-mile-long Glacial Missoula Lake. When water from the lake breeched the dam, torrents of water hundreds of feet high and moving at the speed of a car on a highway flooded the region, scouring a network of channels along the way. [See more about that in my previous post.] When the water reached cliffs near Soap Lake, off Interstate 90 north of Moses Lake, it plunged over them, forming a waterfall on an immense scale. The cliffs eroded in the face of such a battering of water, ice, rock, and other debris. At the end of the Ice Age, they had eroded some fifteen miles upriver, to the site of the present-day Dry Falls.

Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park:

If you have trouble imaging the immensity of the water that once descended the Dry Falls, stop at the visitor center next to the parking lot. There you’ll find all sorts of maps, books, and scale models, and a documentary film that recreates the time of the Ice Age Floods.

Deep Lake

The Dry Falls are the main attraction of the lovely Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park, but once there you should also tour the rest of the park. Well paved roads lead to several plunge pools formed as a result of the floods, a swimming area and boat launch on the larger Park Lake, several trails that wind through sage vegetation to cliff-side panoramas, an improbable nine-hole golf course, and Deep Lake. This has become one of my favorite kayaking destinations. The water is surrounded by table-top cliffs exposing adjoining basalt pillars, shallow caves, and gravel slides. The site has a comfortable put-in area, shaded picnic tables, and paths bordering sections of the lake. Sun Lakes Park is an important stop on the newly formed Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail, first such trail in the U.S.

To learn more about the park, visit its website at Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park.