I discovered the Great Divide Basin the year we delivered a few loads of hay to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. It’s an area roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park and is located just southeast of the park. It is a high plateau area with no rivers or streams leaving it, so all the rainfall either stays in the soil or drains into underground aquifers.
On one trip through the basin, it started to snow as we started up a substantial grade. Old Yellow started to spin out, and throwing in the tandem axle interlock didn’t seem to help. We stopped. I contemplated sliding backward down the hill, but we didn’t.
The snow was just barely covering the road. I gently let out the clutch as I moved my right foot from the brake pedal to the throttle and, in a miracle of all dark and stormy night miracles, we started moving. I feather-footed the throttle all the way to the top of that grade, and then the snow stopped. We proceeded without further incident.
There was no direct way into or out of the reservation, so I took an alternate route home. That’s when I discovered Hell’s Half-Acre, a store with food, drinks, ice cream, and some Old West and Native American items for sale. The landscape reminded me of the Craters of the Moon National Monument near Arco, Idaho. However, this terrain was made of red lava instead of the normal gray-black color.
We discovered the Devils Tower in eastern Wyoming the year we got married. It’s a lonesome mesa with a top the size of a football field. It’s close to 900 feet tall from the base and 1,300 feet above the surrounding landscape. Geologists claim it’s a basalt upheaval. It appears to be made of multiple basalt columns, with many of these collapsed at its base.
The Native American legend is much more interesting. It's said that some of their people were surrounded by giant bears, and the Great Spirit moved the ground under them 800-plus feet into the air. The striations were made as the bears tried to furiously claw to the top.
I don’t remember the legend's tale of how they got down. Sometime circa the Great Depression, a daredevil parachuted and purposely landed on the top. He nearly starved to death before a rescue party was able to make it to the summit.
When we discovered Devils Tower in the late '60s, it was right beside the main highway. Now it's a substantial side trip from the interstate highway to visit it.
Palouse Falls, a state park in east-central Washington state, is a hidden beauty worth the drive. Part of Washington’s “Little Grand Canyon,” it’s a nest of watery glory in the middle of a desert.
Much of eastern Washington state was shaped by ice age floods that repeatedly scoured the region, as the ice dam that contained ancient Lake Missoula in northwest Montana repeatedly failed, inundating the area with 400-foot-deep floodwaters. These floods carved the changing riverbeds of the Columbia River all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The power of these floods is shown by the house-sized boulders strewn in the Willamette Valley – located south of Portland – that came all the way from northeastern Washington state.
The Hole in the Ground is also part of the legacy of these ice age floods. It's a depression that's over 300 feet deep, with a flat bottom that grows hay and pasture grass. It even has a nice stream. While looking at his hay, Gary Belsby showed me a cabin on one side of the hole. “That’s where my wife lived as a little girl. My father bought the area from her dad. She came along later and had to marry me to get it back!” Gary said.
A decent gravel road crosses the depression, with many sharp turns going down and coming up. This chasm continues south to Rock Lake. Coming from the south, on Cherry Creek Road north from Winona (via Lancaster Road), there appears an “I gotta stop and see this” view as the gravel road crests a rise. The majesty of the “channeled scablands,” as the area is known, is seen from this high viewpoint, showing the continuation of the chasm to the north of Rock Lake and the Hole in the Ground. It has since fallen, but there was a huge barn in the shelter of the steep gully that was visible from the top. I may never know its history.
This is just a sampling of the awesome sites of nature I’ve been privileged to witness, just being in the hay business.
