Did you know that Washington has high desert plains? It has plateaus and mountains, rivers and lakes, snowy peaks and great big canyons? I always thought of Washington as the green state- eternally covered from top to bottom in green plants. There is a lot more to Washington than I thought.
I had planned on visiting Gardner cave so I left Sandpoint, Idaho and headed towards Metaline Falls, WA in the afternoon. It turns out that Gardner Cave, one of the few limestone caves of the state, is closed on Tuesday and Wednesday. Since it was a Wednesday I was unable to see the cave. I decided to pull out the hand atlas, unwilling to give the GPS another go at control quite yet, and found something labeled as the Lenore Lake Caves and I started heading in that direction.
On the way south I ran into the Grand Coulee. This giant steep-walled canyon was carved by massive amounts of melting glacial waters as the Ice Age came to the end. It was once a waterfall even grander in scale than that of Niagara Falls. It was a 3.5 mile long, 350 foot tall water fall that rushed along carving the landscape into what it is today. The water that remains here today helps the desert wildlife thrive, and it is in this large canyon where the Lenore Lake Caves were carved out of the solid flood basalts.
Technically these “caves” aren’t large enough to be considered a true cave. They never transition past a twilight zone, but they do hold some historical significance. About 5000 years ago the natives used these “caves” as shelters. The native people resided here during the spring and summer to collect plants and herbs that were used in religious ceremonies.
I hiked up the cliffs (in flip flops…I’m a bit of a rebel like that….) and visited the inside of the shelters. They would have been fairly comfortable, keeping everyone dry while still allowing for a great view of the canyon in front of them. Looking down to the parking area my Jeep looked dwarfed. The trail up to the shelters was dotted with several different flowering plants.
So far my visit to Washington had not met a single preconceived notion. I had been in the typical mountain terrain, I had taken in the views of waterfalls both ancient and current, and watched as this terrain turned from a high desert plain, sparsely vegetated, to a fertile land of farm land enriched by the Columbia river. When I arrived in Wenatchee, WA I finally saw the first thing that truely told me I was in Washington State: Cherry orchards.
As I learned back in the winter of 2009-2010, states are only bounded politically, not geologically or by climate. Washington State has a little bit of everything as I have learned today. Soon I would be in Seattle, experiencing the mighty Pacific Ocean. When I visited Northern Arizona in January 2010 I saw that Arizona was more than desert- it had snowy, vegetated mountain terrain. Today I visited Washington and discovered it wasn’t all cool and green- but it also had desert terrain. Arizona and Washington have more in common than I thought!
-Nicole
