May, 2022
Earlier this week, my friend and I drove south of the earth dam to see lava tubes and pothole lakes. Then the other day we drove north of the earth dam to see birds at the north end of the reservoir. Today, we’re going south again … but we’re going to drive straight through most of the pothole area and then into sagebrush country. I don’t know much about sagebrush except what I saw as a kid when my brother and I watched TV shows in the 1950s starring Hopalong Cassidy and the Cisco Kid and Gene Autry and Red Ryder and Roy Rogers and eventually (what took them so long!) a TV series about Annie Oakley.
So come on along with me into sagebrush country. Here … right here in the State of Washington is real sagebrush. In fact, this area is one of the few remaining original sagebrush areas in North America. Let’s go. Saddle up! 🙂
We found a small parking area just off the paved road. And we found this nicely maintained trail that led out into the sagebrush. There are Western Rattlesnakes here; they are poisonous. We were happy to have a trail to walk where we could easily see where we were stepping.
On the other hand, those rattlesnakes rarely bite. If you step on one, you’ll likely get bit but otherwise they tend to avoid humans.
We found ourselves fascinated with the sagebrush, the grasses, and all manner of other plants here. So we got off-path a bit, but we were very careful, believe me!
The smell of sagebrush was interesting. It was oily and sort of spicy and sort of sweet/bitter all at once, all at the same time. Not something I would want in my home necessarily, but I bet if one was raised around it, then it might be a well-loved fragrance.
Eventually, we remembered to look up and look back at the truck to make sure we knew where we were.
We spent a couple of hours here. I found that when I took a really good close look at the land, the plants, and smelled how it all smelled, and noticed the sky … and the distant pothole lakes still to be seen … it was fascinating. Some people call this land barren. It’s rich!
When we returned to the truck, I then noticed some signs near that small parking area ……
Here is a very short video I took of the area.
As mentioned, we spent a couple of hours here. It would have been easy to spend a lot more time here and to hike out into the terrain much further. But we were also on our way to take a relatively quick drive through thousands of acres of fruit trees just to the west of us. Eastern Washington has bazillions of acres of fruit trees, and hops, and sugar beets … many areas that my friend and I had each seen on other trips each of us had taken, so our focus wasn’t on those fruit trees for this trip. And so we didn’t take many photos of them. But tomorrow we WILL return to the northern wetland edge of the reservoir, in search of maybe just a few more wonderful birds.