Our travels through Washington this year on the Great Train Adventure easily divides into two parts: Getting to Seattle and getting back out which is not intended to sound negative but was the whole excuse for the trip..
Crossing from Oregon into Washington at Vancouver we had been on the Coast Starlight over 24 hours and it was less than 2 hours more to our goal of Seattle.
Here are two views of the third Tacoma Narrows Bridge replacing the one that collapsed in 1940 remaining the largest and most famous non-fatal engineering disaster in the United States and still taught in engineering schools. Yes, we have dared to cross the new one which is much better designed
The grey ship looks like a ferry of which there are still several crossing Puget Sound. Incidentially I did identify the old rusty tramp freighter as the Prem Poorva, a bulk carrier built in 1994 and registered in India at the time. This was it's third name and was renamed twice more before the internet seems to have lost track of it after 2017.
And then there was the two weeks visiting Seattle, the Seattle Aquarium, the Botanic Garden, the Japanese Garden, and the Woodland Park Zoo before we departed from Edmonds for the northern return to St Louis, Missouri where we had left the truck and trailer.
No, the orange engine is not ours but a freight like we frequently have to pull over and wait to pass. Obviously the one on the wall is going noplace fast. This is the Amtrak Cascades running from Eugene, Oregon to Vancouver, BC.
Finally the Amtrak Empire Builder arrives over two hours late and we can catch a few glimpses of the sunset over Puget Sound before darkness decends until Idaho. In what will now become a frequent refrain the drought has broken and rainfall is trying to catch up several years shortage all at once. We were told the train was delayed so they could lift the tracks out of the water and reopen the line. I understand this northern route was closed most of April and again most of May due to the returning water swelling the soil and distorting the tracks so we were lucky to make it at all even if we were late most of the time.
In 2008 we drove to Washington and then flew to Columbus, Ohio to see doctors in the summer, This year we were in Columbus, Ohio and flew to Seattle in November primarily to see the grandkids again. No pictures but we did make a quick trip back to Lori's hometown of Sandpoint, Idaho to see one of her friends.
This time after visiting Lori's sister in Clarkston we continued to follow US-12 through Kennewick where the Snake River joins the Columbia River and then through Yakima to pickup WA-123 and then WA-410 through the Mount Rainier National Park and on up to north of Seattle to see the grandkids and especially the new grandson. A little over six weeks later which includes a just over two week plane trip to see doctors in Columbus, Ohio we joined US-2 northeast of Seattle and followed it all the way to Minnesota.
After visiting Lori's sister in Clarkston, Washington we moved on to visit another friend in Moses Lake, Washington which is in the southern part of coulee country. They took us on an exploration of this fascinating geology including Summer Falls here at Clapp Lake. The falls are an overflow outlet from the Banks Lake hydroelectric plant that is just barely visible to the right of the falls.
Thanks to the efforts of J Harlan Bretz supported by J.T Pardee and reported in some detail by David Alt, the very unusual geology of this area was finally explained as huge floods from Lake Missoula as the glaciers retreated some 15 to 20,000 years ago. It was extremely hard for mainstream science to accept that this scoured desert was shaped by an ice dam across northern Idaho backing up over a half million cubic miles of water from the melting glaciers. When the dam broke, not once but dozens of times, this water surged down the Columbia River basin carving the landscape and leaving behind pebbles bigger than houses.
The Washington saga continues on the Seattle page here.