2007/06 BC trip - Yaak Falls |
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Monday July 23rd
It was already in the 80s at breakfast and soon climbed nearly to 100. We were going to take the most direct route across Washington and Idaho. This would keep us off the freeways and out of the big cities like Spokane, but at the price of crossing rows of mountain ranges and a sequence of big rivers and lakes, like the Columbia River and Lake Pend Oreille. Great scenery, but lots of ups and downs. Pend Oreille lake had a big display related to ancient Lake Missoula. Back in the Ice Ages, the glaciers would dam the rivers and create massive Lake Missoula, and then global warming would cause the ice dam to fail and dump the whole lake in one gigantic flush into Washington’s “scablands”. This apparently happened a number of times and created the enormous Dry Falls, another of our favourite stops.
We crossed into Montana, looking for a campsite in the Kootenai national forest (Kootenay in Canada). Most of these campgrounds are free, so the ones with boat ramps are full of vacationing fishermen, but we managed to find an empty campground at Yaak Falls. The rock formations there are all angled at 45 degrees, so it look likes the Yaak River (Yahk in Canada!) is rushing down a dam slipway.