Across Eastern Washington

Day 25, June 11, 2025

MILES: 4,124

We’ve camped in two wildly different campsites the last couple of nights. First, was the great one. Lush with Ponderosa Pines and wildflowers.

Deep in the enormous Bitterroot National Forest in Western Idaho. Down a short path through our private woods was the Selway River. No boat docks or really anything but trees and rushing clear water in sight. Truly idyllic.

Driving west into Washington was a different story. We were out of the lush woods. No National Forest wild camping. Just dry, very hot and almost exclusively farmed open plains.

Our next camping site could not have been more different. One hundred degrees when we pulled up to a small state park. Blazing sun everywhere. Trees, where they existed were small and offered little shade. The campsite was no more than a small pullout with a picnic table and fire pit. Did I mention the blazing sun? Oh, and the pit toilet. Let’s just say that it hadn’t had any maintenance for a very long time.

I suppose we could have chosen a far northern route and found peace and shade again but we were on a mission this time to bullet straight across Washington to suburban Seattle for another friend visit.

My image of Washington State is of coastal rainforest. Eastern Washington is not that. Vast grassland plains at the time of white settler conquest, the area is now vast farms of spring wheat. Summer brings the canola crop.

Where once a farm was a piece of land that a farmer and his family and maybe hired hands would be able to manage, now the farms are huge. Thousands of acres. Immense machinery; the farmers now managers and mechanics for mostly automated systems.

And the poor wretched towns. Towns so sad that it wouldn’t be fair to post a photo of them. Massive farms mean far less people to come to town. Main streets are empty, crumbling buildings. Not very many amenities. Nothing for kids to do. I’m sure there are folks who live in these towns who are proud of something. There are efforts to provide shady places to recreate. But big ag has destroyed these towns.

Today, we will enter coastal Washington and we’ll be back to more habitable spaces.

Jane

(Written in a room at the Quality Inn in Othello, WA where we are taking shelter from the merciless sun. Only the second motel room of the trip. The first, in Pennsylvania, was to take shelter from the merciless rain.)