July 19 - Drive to Coeur d'Alene and Volksmarch in Lewiston, Idaho

Although I hated to leave Leavenworth without doing some more walks and the bicycle event, we felt it was time to start edging our way back east. We got off very early, about 7:30, and arrived at our campsite in Coeur d'Alene about 5 hours later. Once again the landscape shifted dramatically as we drove through what appeared to be very different climatological and ecological zones. As we departed the mountains around Leavenworth, the landscape became immediately very dry. There was extensive agriculture but all due to irrigation, and places that were not irrigated had only hardy sagebrush and some scraggly type of prairie grass. As we turned south to join Interstate 90 at Quincy, someone had labeled each field as to what crop was growing, and we found that terribly interesting, which perhaps just indicates that we don't get out very much! Seriously, it was nice to see corn, wheat, alfalfa, radishes, and potato fields all labeled so we could try to learn to identify crops by their appearance as we travel around.

As we drove east on Interstate 90 the extent of irrigated agriculture gradually declined. The soil looked thinner and the main activity was grazing livestock from what we could see. But as we gained altitude on the other side of the intermountain basin suddenly we started seeing trees, pines to be exact, and it soon turned into almost a solid cover of them as we reached Spokane. I wasn't sure if these were Ponderosa Pines or not, but they seemed much larger and bushier than the lodge pole pines of Yellowstone and were certainly thriving in a rather dry climate. As we topped a rise on the outskirts of Spokane, the city appeared spread out in the valley below us almost as if we were seeing it from an airplane. We turned off to find a campground in Spokane but rejected it because it was right beside Interstate 90 and we knew from experience how hard it was to get a decent night's sleep with the trucks roaring by.

Continuing on to the east, we found a campground in Coeur d'Alene that was a couple of miles off the interstate, which we thought would be great, but they only had 2 sites available at a rate of $38.00! For a gravel slot and an electrical hookup? I was seeing hotel rooms for that price in the area. Not fancy hotels, of course, but decent ones, and the thought of parking the rig in a hotel parking lot and just sleeping in their beds for the night flitted across my mind. Since we were that early, we decided to only take the campsite for one night and drive down to Lewiston, Idaho, and do the walk there the same afternoon.

>What was so special about the Lewiston Volksmarch that we would drive over 100 miles out of our way on two lane highways to do the walk? The answer is that it was the last walk needed to complete our Lewis and Clark book of Volksmarches (1 VM in every state traversed by Lewis & Clark), and we really wanted to finish it and get our patch. As I think Napoleon remarked about medals for his soldiers, it is amazing what people will do for a bit of ribbon or a patch to put on their coat, and we are no exception. So we unhooked the trailer and drove south on US 95 to Lewiston. We had expected this neck of Idaho to be mainly mountains and were very surprised to see it was mostly rolling farmland. With our newfound crop identification skills, we saw hayfields and wheat fields, plus maybe some alfalfa being grown. Some of the fields had remarkably pretty striated designs on them from the stalks left by the harvesting; they gleamed like pure gold in the afternoon sun. Fascinating.

Along the way we had lunch at an A&W, and I had once more some draft root beer with ice cream. Oh bliss! It took me straight back to those days of yore when the very best thing in the world was a root beer float. It doesn't take much to make kids happy, does it? We arrived at last at the Sacagawea Hotel in Lewiston around 3:30 (their rooms were $42) where we found the start box and signed up for the walk.

The route for the Lewiston walk started off with a segment street down Main Street that gave us a good look at the central business district. There we found a somewhat atypical set of stores for a small city. We saw no restaurants, bookshops, liquor stores, or bars, which are what we normally would expect. Instead we saw a hand-rolled cigar store, a guns and ammo store, a bridal shop, a tuxedo rental, a stained glass store, an antique store, and a discount fabric shop. The latter was just what I had been looking for, so I hustled in and bought a yard of khaki colored nylon fabric for patching my zip pants ($3.60) and stuffed that in my back pocket for the rest of the walk. At pretty much the end of main street we turned north to use a pedestrian walkway to cross over to a hiker biker path built on top of the levee protecting Lewiston from flooding.

We took this path first to the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake rivers and then doubled back to walk over a mile upstream along the Clearwater. Along the way we found two outdoor kiosks built by the Corps of Engineers, one with historical information on Lewis and Clark's brief stay here, and the other with current use of the waterway from Lewiston down the Snake and the Columbia to the ocean. I had not realized that each one of the 8 dams along the Columbia and the Snake had locks built into them so that barges and other river traffic could pass all the way up to Lewiston. The main downstream commodity being shipped was grain from the extensive fields we had seen in eastern Washington and Idaho, and the main upstream commodities were oil and containerized cargo. But there was even a cruise ship that started in Portland, I think, and went all the way upstream to Lewiston. Now wouldn't that be a fun way to retrace much of Lewis and Clark's journey!

The final segment of our walk was an out and back across the bridge that carried the Route 12 traffic across the Clearwater. We had very nice upstream and downstream views from the bridge, but we were walking near rush hour and the constant stream of traffic and especially the big trucks made that part of the walk much less pleasant. However, as if to make up for that, the final block of the route back to the hotel crossed through a very nice pocket park with a quite unusual steam engine and caboose. Old number 92 had steam pistons stuck out in a big "V" shape from the sides of the engine, and the crankshaft seemed to be geared down and running through two driveshafts to the forward truck and rear truck of driving wheels. I hadn't seen anything like that before and I was really curious why they set it up that way, but I couldn't find any explanatory plaque so it remained a mystery.

After checking back into the hotel to drop off our start cards and payment, we hopped back in the truck for the drive back north to our campground. After a light snack for dinner we each worked on our computers for a while and then retired to read for the rest of the evening. Fortunately the book had a decent ending; not totally happy, of course, but at least with hope for the future, which is nice. But when we tried to get to sleep, we both found that the intermittent clanging and banging from the sawmill across from the campground was keeping us awake. So there's yet another Fatal Flaw for assessing campgrounds: don't camp next to a sawmill that has an overnight shift operating! Finally in desperation we closed the windows and turned on the fan so that the white noise would mask the sawmill sounds. That worked to some extent although not completely, and we got a fair but not great night's sleep.