Monday's postcard, and a walk in the woods

October 9, 2023

The mountains, for a change…

Because my mother’s family was rooted in Pasco (annual precipitation, 9.4 inches, versus verdant Seattle’s 39.3 inches) a purpose of my 2022 Beautiful Wounds book was to at least re-frame the dryer reaches of eastern Washington. It is arid out there, no doubt, and by July it turns burlap-brown and crackles under the summer heat, often reaching over 100 degrees.

That said, when it was time for our families to go camping on summer vacation we would head for the mountains and the woods. And there are so many places in the forests to explore that it requires a serious commitment to visit most of them in a lifetime.

I’d been hearing about Granite Falls and the Roosevelt cedar groves northeast of Nordman, Idaho (about halfway up Priest Lake, on the western side) for years, usually with enthused admonitions to experience it. So this past Saturday became the day to do that, under cloudless blue skies, with a dear friend who was also visiting the spot for the first time.

Funny thing, it was my second trip this year where—to get to a remote location in eastern Washington—by far the easiest way to get there was to enter and return via Idaho. But that’s just a feature of the gnarly geology of our region, from the coastal collisions that push up the Olympics, the Cascade volcanoes, and the complicated domes and orogenies of the northern Rockies, including the Selkirks. Granite Creek, the watercourse featured in these photographs winds its way east and eventually enters Priest Lake near the Reeder Bay campground and Elkins Resort, about midway up the western shoreline of the lake.

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