Sunday, September 5, Ellensburg, WA

140 Miles

Another sunny warm day, the last few days have been so nice. First stop today was at the Grand Coulee Dam, somehow can remember studying it at school, but couldn’t remember much about it. Evidently the biggest hydro electric dam in USA. It was started in 1933 as a scheme to employ labour in the depression and was operating in the late 40’s.

It is part of a massive dam system on the Colombia River and its tributaries and the resulting lakes are a great recreational area.

We left town heading south and came into an area quite similar to the Badlands in Dakota although not the same orangey colours. Great rocky flat top mountains, sheer sides on one side and the lake on the other. Really stark scenery.

Finding it quite hard traveling through this area as don’t have a reference book with scenery and towns to look out for. After traveling for the past 2 ½ months with the Alaskan Milepost which has so much information it feels quite strange.

So when we saw a place called the Dry Falls, we didn’t expect much but were completely overawed by the huge canyon and rock wall, that had many thousands of years ago been a vast waterfall. The country through here reminded us a lot of Utah and Wyoming, not at all what we expected in Washington. 

Back down through cropping land, only made viable by the huge quantites of irrigation from the river system.

Decided to take the I90 for about 30 miles, this is the first time on this trip that we have used a freeway, but we survived!

It was 6pm when we arrived in the town of Ellensburg, and were most impressed, there seems to be quite an historic down town centre so look forward to having a good look around tomorrow, although being Labour Day holiday there won’t be much open.

Tonight we are parked in the carpark of the Fred Meyers store, they are much like Walmart and are quite happy for RV’s to overnight.