1 June: East to Spokane

Sunday I woke up feeling fine, and quickly started packing to leave. The sky was threatening rain, and I wanted to get moving before the clouds unloaded. I walked through the neighboring resort to warm my legs up a bit before starting uphill (from the road to the state park was about a mile, much of it uphill), and then headed out. In the meantime, the sky cleared up, and with the sun came the heat. The first two and a half miles of the day was a steady uphill. The first two miles were pretty gentle, the last half mile, not so. After that the road was very gently sloped upward for a long time. The scenery was spectacular, looking down into the canyons I had just left.







Four miles or so into the day, just when I was needing a rest from the constant climbing, I came upon the Dry Falls Interpretive Center. Bryan's father in Ephrata had mentioned this place as a worthwhile stop, so I decided to give it a look. I was happy I had stopped, it was beautiful. Something like 13,000 years, during the last Ice Age, this was the biggest waterfall the world had ever seen, about ten times the size of Niagara Falls. It was an amazing sight, and I enjoyed taking it in, knowing I was probably not going to make it to Grand Coulee.






Shortly after leaving Dry Falls I got picked up by Sandra, a DirecTV installer driving one of their little pickup trucks. She drove me two miles or so to Coulee City and dropped me off at an abandoned, out-of-business filling station. There I watched a red fox trot around for a bit. He pretended to ignore me.

I walked east out of town, having returned now to US-2. My plan was to walk the ten miles or so to Hartline, and if I could find a spot by the creek my map showed there, camp for the night. The next day I'd walk for a few miles and then hitchhike the remainder of the distance to Spokane.

About six miles east of Coulee City, I decided it was lunch time. I sat down in a driveway near a big grain elevator and took in my surroundings while I ate. The clouds had moved in again, and in the distance to the north and west I could see rain falling. I didn't really want to get wet (or set my tent up while it was raining), so I decided to start hitchhiking and maybe get to Davenport tonight. The eastbound traffic, however, was next to non-existent, so I decided to walk and hitchhike at the same time so I'd eventually reach Hartline, regardless. It worked pretty well -- I'd walk until I heard a car approaching from the west, and that was just about the perfect timing for me to turn around and stick my thumb in the air. It took about 45 minutes to get picked up, by a small pick-up that passed me by and then turned around to come back and talk to me a bit before giving me a ride. Kevin and his wife were in the cab, so I rode in the back. When I told him I was going to Davenport, he asked if I'd rather just go all the way to Spokane, and I decided not to pass up the chance.

The ride passed without anything notable happening, and they dropped me off in downtown Spokane. They invited me to attend an arts festival with them, but I was a little more concerned about setting my pack down somewhere for the night, so I declined and thanked them again for the ride.