To say I was excited or even happy to be done with the toughest stretches of the Palouse to Cascades Trail would be a mischaracterization. In a word, I was relieved. The endless pounding of the uneven trail surface had taken a toll on the bike, the trailer, Zilla, myself, and even my equipment so it was great to feel the stress melt away as barely a quarter mile beyond the granary, the unimproved rail trail changed and became a fairly decent dirt and gravel road. Almost instantly, our speeds doubled from 3-4 miles an hour to 7-8. It was marvelous to be rolling so fast and over such a relatively smooth surface. Not only that, but we also encountered something we hadn’t seen since the Columbia River, water! Now to be fair, the trail had been paralleling Rock Creek for the last couple miles, but it was at a distance of probably a half mile or more. But now, we were close enough to actually see the water’s current and at times, we were close enough that I could have easily thrown a rock into it. It was then that I realized, we were finally coming out of the desert and about to enter eastern Washington’s Palouse region! We still had 10 or so miles before we really made it to the Palouse, but it was getting close.

(click photos to enlarge and see descriptions)

It was almost sensory overload to be moving so fast, to have water near me, and as a result, some of the vegetation was actually green! It was bliss! We rolled through this novel landscape along the smooth dirt/gravel trail and soaked it all in. Then just as we got through a rock cut through the hillside, I saw movement to the side and saw something I never expected to see here, a yellow-bellied marmot! I’d seen lots of marmots while living in Glacier National Park, but had never seen them outside of a mountain setting, so to see one on the cusp between the desert and rolling hills at an elevation of probably only 2,000 ft or so was quite unexpected. I don’t think he was expecting to see us either because the second he saw us, he leaped into action, quite literally, and ran for cover. Over the next couple hundred yards, we saw about a half dozen marmots in total and they were all gone before I was able to get a great picture of any of them, but it was still incredible to see our first wild mammals in the last 50 miles or so.

The trail continued a ways as a protected, pedestrian only, thoroughfare before coming to gate where it became apparent that the trail was now more of a several mile long driveway of sorts to few houses and farms. This doesn’t mean that there was a lot of traffic, we didn’t see a single vehicle, but it was interesting to see all the different forms that the trail takes on over the course of its run (paved, unpaved, no motor vehicles, horses allowed, ATV’s allowed, etc). It really brought into play that most epically long trails are a patchwork of different smaller trail networks and different land use agreements which create an extremely diverse trail system.

At the end of the “driveway”, we joined on to Texas Lake Rd to begin a long stretch of around 30 miles of road riding, mostly along quiet, desolate dirt and gravel roads. I was looking forward to a little reprieve from the pounding of the unimproved rail bed and Zilla would be happier too. The only real downside to roads is that it’s harder to let Zilla out of the trailer, but I was guessing most of the roads we were heading down would be devoid of any traffic. As expected, the next couple miles went by with us seeing only 2 cars. That was about to change though as we got to the end of dirt and were joining up with Highway 23, a paved road with 55 mph speed limits and little to no shoulders. By most standards, 23 is still a quiet country road, but this would be the busiest thing we’d seen since Othello so I did my best to time it so that we’d be riding it early in the morning on a Sunday when hopefully all the good people of eastern Washington would be sleeping or in church. This tactic paid off well as we only saw about 1 car per mile and each of those was very respectful and pulled into the other lane before passing us at very safe speeds.

It was so nice to be rolling on a paved surface again and hit double digit speeds, especially in the relative safety of a low traffic road. Part of me wanted to get through it quickly though rather than press our luck on how long the local residents would be worshiping for. This didn’t stop us though from taking a few pictures along the way as the scenery was quite pretty. We were now at the very first hills of Palouse and I couldn’t wait to see what lie in store for us.

As we approached the tiny town of Ewan, we caught a few fading glimpses of the scablands before crossing over Rock Creek. We stopped for a moment to take in the sounds of a flowing stream and watch a few birds do bird things. We also spied a couple more marmots, but again, they darted off before I could even start to pull my camera out. After our quick break, we climbed a small hill and rolled into Ewan, made up of about a dozen houses, a granary, and a church. This would be the last stop before we entered the rolling hills of the Palouse. When we got to the far side of town, I glanced at one of the nearby houses as I thought I saw a dog in the yard but to my delight, I was wrong. Instead, it was a…..