By Steve Ulvi, Journal contributor
Small islands naturally attract visitors. Offshore communities are oddities (more than visitors know!) and the scale of things comforting. Riding in thrumming ferries, passengers relieved of the steering wheel can relax in the non-ordinary experience.
Our time-worn, small-town doings and bucolic surroundings are surely pleasing for harried suburbanites. But I suspect that an interest in the great earthly forces creating prominent landforms is beyond the ken of most visitors. Certainly not a part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
In fairness to those who do not contextualize a place with its earth processes, today’s sea level drowns and obscures the great cliffs and ice-gouged canyons below us while we stand on land imperceptibly rebounding from the weight of a mile-thick glacier parked here for an eternity.
I am happy to escape the confines of the islands for exploration on two wheels, tracing old blue highways. Especially motoring eastward in the cooler days of autumn, ignoring the frenzied suction of I-5, to ascend the sparkling, aquamarine Skagit River.
Long reservoirs, fire-scarred slopes, powerlines and slabbed grey peaks break the sylvan monotony along the twisting climb to the stunning gateway to a fascinating arid, big sky region: Washington Pass.
The northeast quadrant of our state – encompassing perhaps 13,000 square miles – is an interesting patchwork of landforms containing a web of older roads winding through ranchlands, rumpled forested uplands, lava grasslands, reservoir shores and strange mega-boulders perched along dry coulees.
Once, the incomparable “River of the West” writhing south from today’s Canada, was the regional artery, a living force with seasonal personas, now reduced to a string of predictably boring, warming pools of hoarded meltwater in service of metastasizing modernity.
As a rider, it is all about the twisty two-laners climbing small drainages to low passes, 25 mph sidewinders, then steadily dropping through increasing radius curves to throttle up along contours leading to a pleasing valley floor; ramshackle farmsteads, tired fencing and broke-back barns. Accelerating along a valley edge at midday is sun-blotched then cool shade, again and again, flickering on my helmet visor like an old 16 mm film.
I much prefer solo travel. I motor through the two bovine tourist traps. Unfolding the Butler motorcycle map seems to invite local interaction. But asking directions to obscure back roads is always iffy.
The vast Colville Reservation has some favorite roads, pleasing landscape diversity and countless private collections of decommissioned RVs and vehicles saved on parcels as though native owners are counting coup on the auto industry.
Epochal events of some 12,000 years ago and later, as continental ice retreated, obliterated ancient landforms to create signature monuments in the mid-Columbia River basin. The dreadful outflow was repeated many times when the massive Lake Missoula, glacially blocked, broke out to scour away loess deposits and gouge out ancient layered basalt to leave the Channeled Scablands.
Dry and Palouse Falls State Parks memorialize the appalling torrents that could have been seen from space. A flash flood many hundreds of feet deep, rampaged in wide channels carrying everything away at an estimated 50 mph wreaking a thundering Old Testament cleansing of life, perhaps even early human inhabitants, downstream to the Pacific Ocean. I stare and imagine these immense floods and the terrible, dank silence that would have followed.
