From booze to brothels
It was tempting to linger in the shadow of Rainier, but I needed to push on east. Leaving in the pink glow of dawn I picked up the main highway and began scanning road signs for points of interest. The first came at the turn off for Yakima. From the road it didn’t look much – just the obligatory Walmart and McDonald’s signs – but soon I found myself surrounded by countryside, and vineyards.
“Yakima is the Napa of the north,” said winemaker Tad Fewel as he poured me a glass. Tad owns a small winery called Cultura, producing 1,500 cases of red a year; he also still works on his family’s orchard, running a bio-diesel plant – which is used to power his vineyard equipment. His mother, Pepper, runs Cherry Wood B&B and offers agricultural tours to educate people on food provenance. Nearly all the horses on her farm (around 30) were rescued from slaughter – “were a country who doesn’t like old,’ she explained – and every penny from wine tours on horseback or wagon goes to fund the rescue programme. I left my mechanical pony under the watchful eye of a mule to check out the orchard.
After ambling among the apple trees I headed for the Yakama Nation Museum & Culture Centre in nearby Toppenish to learn about the Native Americans who called this valley home. “Most exhibits here were willed from Nipo Strongheart,” said museum program manager Miles Miller. “He was a Hollywood actor in the 1920s and collected books, pictures and artefacts from many tribes.”
The displays showed how resourceful the Yakama tribe was at living off the land and told of the devastation caused to them in 1957 when Celilo Falls, near the Oregon border – where their ancestors had fished and traded for centuries – was flooded and dammed to facilitate a hydropower plant. It was a dark moment for the Yakama, and one that stayed with me that night as I sat beside my teepee at Cherry Wood, watching the timeless stars dance overhead.
In the morning I continued east, crossing from Washington into Idaho. At Coeur d’Alene, a city that sits on the northern tip of the lake that shares its name, I took my Mustang to the water and temporarily swapped it for a kayak, paddling with Peter Petticolas from ROW Adventures. He told me that the area was once a favoured spot for the Coeur d’Alene tribe who would camp here over winter, ice-fishing on the lake, making tools from the trees, and sharing stories over the fire. Nowadays, the city’s streets are lined with coffee shops and restaurants, and it’s mainly retirees who call it home.
Next stop: Wallace, once the silver mining capital of the US. At its peak it had a population of nearly 4,000 people; today that number is just over 700 and tourism is its main source of income. Old West in theme, it’s a cluster of antique shops, boutiques, diners, pubs and the most unique museum on this road trip: the Oasis Bordello Museum was a brothel until 1988, when it was raided and shut down; it was locked up for years, left as a time-capsule of that night, until the new owner reopened it to the public.
