Sunday, August 10, 2008

Aug 10 - Pend Oreille River and Wheat

We are still planning on picking up the truck & camper tomorrow early afternoon (hoping is more like it) and hitting the road. If all goes as planned we hope to make St Regis, MT by tomorrow evening on our way to Glacier National Park.
In the meantime, we took a quick trip up Hwy 2 to the Pend Oreille River (pronounced pond-er-ay) near Newport, WA. Unfortunately, we headed over Hwy 20 thinking it followed the river closely - look at a map, it does look like you'd be able to see it but... you really couldn't see much of the river. We should have kept straight on Hwy 2 and crossed it just north of Newport, I guess.

We did get some rain on the trip - just some heavy sprinkles but has kept the day cool.


Ranch near the Pend Oreille River


Looking back at Baker Lake along SR 211


Davis Lake along SR 211

Wheat - Wheat is the king of crops here in Eastern Washington. We've certainly seen lots of "amber waves of grain". It's actually quite beautiful to see the rolling hills covered in golden wheat. Washington is #6 in US wheat production - growing five classes of wheat: common, club, & Pacific NW soft white, hard white and hard red. Soft white is most commonly used in pastries, pancakes, cookies, cakes, & cereals while the hard white is used for asian noodles, yeast breads, hard rolls & tortillas and hard red is used for breads and all-purpose flour. There's lots of information on actual wheat production, exporting & importing wheat, etc on the web. What I couldn't find a lot on was how to grow wheat - when to plant the spring wheat vs winter wheat etc. Lots of scientific jargon but nothing I could distill down and make sense of.


Below are some photos of the wheat fields just north of Spokane along Argonne/Bruce Rd.





Here's Bear's favorite position after a hard day of riding around and sightseeing.


No comments: