Day 117 - Mt. Rainier to Potlach, ID

The Night Of A Thousand Mice

Okay, it was only six mice, but we were left wondering.

To pick up on yesterday's encounter... when we went to bed, we'd caught the two mice we had seen and assumed that was it, but we left the traps set. At about 4:45 this morning, I woke up when something ran across my feet. I quickly got up and checked the traps. They were both full and the mice in them were a bit stiff. Neither was what ran over my feet.

I dumped them and reset the traps. About a minute later one went off. Gotcha!...or so I thought. I disposed of the rodent, set the traps again and went back to bed. Soon there was more thumping. It was mouse number six. This was getting disturbing. Were we parked on some mouse expressway? By this time it was around 5:30, so we got up, reset the traps again, had coffee, moved Speedy to the day use parking area and went for a hike.

It was actually a pretty nice loop hike from the campground, along one side of the river to Silver Falls and back to the campground along the river. The trail went through a Douglas Fir forest and was fairly open with lots of tall trees, but not many birds. We saw exactly two, a Pacific Wren and a Steller's Jay in the course of a 3 mile walk...but the wren was a life bird. The falls were nice, too. Worth the walk.

On returning, we dumped our tanks and filled with fresh water and left Mt. Rainier National Park behind.

We were headed east. We've decided to take the more northern route and go back east over much the same route as our outgoing one in May. This will allow us to go back to Glacier National Park and spend some tome on the east side. It will also allow us to go over the Great Lakes and avoid much of the crowded highways of the Mid-west and East.

We are planning to take mostly back roads coming home and started today with secondary highways through Eastern Washington and into Idaho. It stated out slowly as we went south on WA 123 to  US 12 East to Yakima. This winds through the mountains and much of it was under construction. We had at least three long waits at construction sites and the traffic was bunched up. The closer we got to Yakima, the smokier it got. It was pretty dense as we passed through town. We stopped at a coffee hut on the way through and I asked the barista how long they had been affected by the smoke. It had been like this for over a month.

Leaving Yakima we passed through a long stretch of flatland with lots of fruit and vegetable farms and packing plants. It is apple and peach harvest and we also saw vineyards. A a fuel stop, there was lots of potato and onion trucks coming from the fields to nearby packers. One interesting note is that in this area the advertisements for workers and the primary language in the gas station was Spanish.

After the Yakima area fruit and vegetable farming area the land became dry rolling hills of wheat. It as a pretty striking landscape. We went through hundreds of miles of wheat fields, which had already been harvested. All that was left was either a tall stubble or nearly bare fields with tall stacks of very large bales of straw. This continued all the way into Idaho and to Potlatch, where we finally stopped at the Scenic 6 RV Park, which is a municipal campground. A bit pricey, but it had concrete pads, electricity, water and nice hot showers.