May, 2019
A day out and about …
In my first blog post about this camping trip, I mentioned a crop called “hops”. They grow a lot of hops in the Yakima River Valley area … a LOT of hops! Several websites I found say that most of the commercial beer that’s made in the USA use hops that are grown in the Yakima area.
On this particular morning, I jumped into my big white truck and headed out away from the town of Yakima to see what I could see in the countryside. Hops! And more hops!
Here’s a wikipedia article about hops. Interestingly, this wikipedia article lists the Yakima Valley (in the State of Washington) right along with Germany and the Czech Republic as the largest hops growing regions in the world.
I was here fairly early in the spring, so the hops crops (hop crop?) were/was just starting out (above). If you look closely (or click on the photo), you can see the hops tendrils starting to climb the lines.
There were many different configurations of supports for hops. I could have spent hours taking photos, but I had places to go and things to see.
From Yakima, I drove down I-82, then turned south at the small town of Sunnyside onto state road 241, then jumped over to the Mabton-Bickleton Road. There were lots of crops (hops and other crops too) between Yakima and Mabton, but they began to peter out after Mabton.
The home and farm above is about 3 miles south of Mabton. It’s the first house south of Mabton. When I looked at this farm on Google Earth after I got home, it appeared to cover about 4,000 acres. The fields start up those hills in the far distance, but the fields stop before the land gets very steep.
What is the crop? At this time of year, early May, the plants were about a foot tall. What are they?
The Mabton-Bickleton Road continued on through land that held a lot of nothing, it seemed to me. Eventually the road wound up a steep grade and over that ridge of hills behind that farm above. I was on Glade Road, and had been seeing signs for Township Road. Wow, maybe some civilization. Maybe some things to see … or people to talk with.
Ok, here I was!
Township Road above. Hmmm, not much of a “township” there, eh?
I elected to stay on Glade Road and continued on … down a steep grade, then across a long valley, then up another steep grade, and down again. Every few miles there would be a home and farm, but again, the land seemed so empty to me. Not a tree in sight. And most of the land, by far most of the land, was not cultivated.
I was becoming complacent and a bit bored, but at one point I noticed some white dots off to the left out of the corner of my eye. I almost didn’t look, but then … whoa … look at this!
There was no shoulder on this road, none at all, anywhere, but there was also no traffic, so I simply stopped and started taking photos out my driver’s window.
While my truck was moving, these folks above paid no attention to me. As soon as the truck stopped, however, they moved away. They didn’t run, but they were serious about leaving me behind.
Once they got far enough away for their comfort, they stopped and looked back at me. And then I could zoom in and focus on them with the camera fairly well, though they were 300-400 feet away from me by then.
I believe they are Pronghorn, erroneously called antelopes. Pronghorn are the only surviving members of the Antilocapridae family, and have been in North America for more than one million years. I was so pleased they posed nicely for a photograph.
Eventually, they continued on up along the hillside.
And I continued on down the road.
My destination this morning was the VERY small town of Bickleton. I did get there, and had lunch there with some local folks in the only establishment that was open that prepared and sold meals. I was certainly made to feel welcome. I will tell you all about Bickleton in the next post.