Return to Expedition 2000 homeDanae
May 9, 2000
11T0372345
5202871
The temperature is about 60 degrees at 1300 feet.
There is tons of sage around. To the south there is farmland - so it's more green. There is also pasture land - so, it's more flat. We seem to be descending as we head toward the Columbia.
11T0366992
5198253
The temperature is about 70 degrees at 1300 feet.
We are in between two foothills right now and paralleling the railroad tracks still. Trains keep coming by about every hour. We're in the Lind cooli.
Craziness. I swear something new happens everyday. Today we came up to a gate in the trail and on the other side were cows with horns and half of them had calves and were being very upidy about us being there. Thankfully the farmers that owned the ranch were there and they said they'd give us a ride. Apparently if we had gone through and especially with Brandy - the cows would have thought she was a coyote and probably killed her and charged us. It was so amusing to watch everyone interact with these cowboys.
They were really interesting. I couldn't believe how much they knew about the area and the plants. They were talking to me about the "hippy band" that I had - (that crown made of local grasses and flowers). The guy was telling me about the mustard plants and how to make mustard that was really spicy or in his words "And you think that oriental mustard is spicy." He was also talking about the grasses that I used. That the grass was new - from the last couple of years - that it started sprouting up because of the ash. Apparently the white ground I just assumed was a powdery silt is the ash from Mt. Saint Helens. He said because it is like a potted soil (or something like that) that some crops really suffered. The potatoes seemed to love it but the - either parsley or asparagus - was bad for a couple years because the ash does strange things to the moisture of the ground. I talked before about the ground where we camped being "crunchy" - that's the ash. It gets wet and then as it dries it fluffs up. I couldn't believe the ash could travel so far.
As we were driving through the ranch, a huge rainstorm just hit all of a sudden and it started hailing (it really hurt) I actually had a pool of water in my shoes.
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