We left Missoula, and with our visit to Glacier National Park completed, we headed once again west and south.  Over the next several months we will gradually make our way back south for the winter.  As we traveled through western Montana we marveled at all the open land with few houses in the distance.  We concluded that people must each own a lot of land since there was so much land and so few homes.  We continued to see cattle and horses on the dry, rocky farmland and little if any crops. It appeared it would take a lot of irrigation to grow much of anything.

I don’t know when, if ever, we have crossed through three states in one day, but we did today as we made our way through Montana, the north western tip of Idaho, and just over the border into Washington.

After one night stops in Spokane Valley and Kennewick where the daily temperatures approached 100 degrees, we headed west and south towards Oregon.  We had planned on staying two or more nights in Kennewick, but the campground was new and had absolutely no shade and we were cooking in the broiling sun.

As we headed west through Washington, we continued to marvel at the difference between eastern and western Washington.  Here in eastern Washington the grass was a golden brown surrounded by steep rocky cliffs.  Occasionally we would see some corn growing in areas where they had worked hard at irrigating the fields.  We saw many power lines, fields of wind turbines called wind farms, and long long trains racing beside us on tracks fairly close to the interstate.  While in Montana, Idaho and eastern Washington we often heard train whistles in the distance during the night.

Eventually we began to see the mighty Columbia River, an important passageway for Lewis and Clark.  This was the beginning of the magnificent Columbia River Gorge, and the reason we came to this area.  But much much more on that later!  As we approached the Oregon border we began to see vineyards appearing, though it appeared that irrigation was still a struggle, as well as field after field of wheat.  We saw the John Day Dam and Mt Adams in the

John Day Lock and Dam was completed in 1971. John Day Lock has the highest lift (110 feet) of any U.S. lock.

distance and we stopped at an overlook to take a break and snap some pictures.  Mt Adams, at 12,276 feet high is the second highest peak in the Northwest after Mt Rainier.

As we crossed the bridge between Washington and Oregon we caught the first whiff of smoke from the Oregon wildfires burning about thirty miles away.  As we approached our home for the next several days we saw some llamas in a field.

Welcome to Oregon

We are staying the next several days at a county park in Moro, Oregon.  For the low price of $25 a night we get full hookups with 50 AMP service, free WIFI and cable TV and they have laundry facilities.  Quite a deal!  The only drawback is there is no shade, but the temperatures were 10 to 15 degrees cooler than we left behind in Washington and there was a stiff breeze with gusts of 20 mph so we opened the windows and enjoyed Mother Nature’s air conditioning.  From our campground we can see Mt Hood and Mt Adams in the distance!  While the air appeared smoky in the distance, we could not smell smoke at the campground.  The super friendly camp host came by to greet us and spent about an hour filling us in on all the interesting places to visit in the Columbia River Gorge area.  Later Bill stepped outside and snapped some great sunset pictures which may had been enhanced by the smoke in the distance.

A zoomed view of Mount Hood from our campground just before sunset

Our first sunset over the wheat fields