Green rolling hills of the Palouse with a planting of yellow canola

The Palouse is almost spiritual.  You can ride for miles among the rolling hills carpeted with the greatest expanse of wheat and grains in the U. S., taking note of a horizon that seems to move fluidly toward clear blue skies of puffy clouds.  Or you may be awed with the expanse of sky — gray ceilings filled with impending storminess.

Palouse sky

Sometimes you wonder why anyone would live here with farmhouses so far apart.  We drove for miles before we sighted men on harvesters or sheep grazing behind tattered barns.  It didn’t matter.  We were drawn to the quiet and the mesmerizing flow of the topography. We crested hills only to spill into valleys of flowing farms and colorful crops — a place for solace, production, and scenic beauty like no other place in America.

Landscape of the Palouse

Located south of Spokane, Washington, the Palouse extends through eastern Washington, western Idaho, and parts of eastern Oregon with about 3,000 square miles of crops planted in swirling patterns. With questionable derivation, the name “Palouse” may have evolved from the French word pelouse meaning “lawn,” but to us, the land means so much more.  The Palouse is productive, “greening up” in the spring, pushing out grains and legumes in summer, then yielding to the harvest in its golden state.  The fields and their holdings remind us of Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”: Nature’s first green is gold/ Her hardest hue to hold. And even though it was our third trip, we were seeing spring for the first time. If you ask which view we prefer — autumn harvest, winter snow, or spring green — we won’t be able to tell you.  In this odd land of silt dunes formed during the Ice Age, all seasons greet you differently but in ways you won’t forget.

Colors touch each other as curved fields offer complementary form and function.

Occasionally, a barn or abandoned building or farmhouse interrupted the landscape, and we grabbed our cameras in an effort to capture life as it is on the Palouse — sometimes vibrant, sometimes fading as time takes its toll in its own unhurried way. Spring has a newness about it as colors touch colors: the pure green of wheat, lime green of garbanzo, and brilliant yellows of canola. A symphony of new growth.

We make note of animals, too — an occasional magpie on a fence or big-horned sheep in a field or an Arabian horse carrying a solitary rider home for the night. The sighting of an Appaloosa reminds us of who was here before — Palouse Indians who lent their name to the beautiful spotted creatures we point to on the landscape.

You can see the Palouse driving I-95 between Coeur d’Alene to Moscow, Idaho, but we prefer the not-so-beaten path. We begin in Lewiston, Idaho, and drive north on Hwy. 195 through Uniontown, Colton, and Pullman. Then we head up Hwy. 27 to Palouse, west to Colfax on Hwy. 272, and north to Rosalia on 195.  Besides enjoying the coffee shops and vintage goods in the small towns, you can walk a forest path at Kamiak Butte near Palouse or take the winding road to the top of Steptoe Butte off 195 near Steptoe. No two trips are the same. Varied crop plantings and ever-changing shadows at sunrise and sunset create new pictures with each journey.

In “Natural Wonders: Singing the Praises of the Palouse,” Eric Sorensen, a Seattle Times science reporter, let Utah native and organic farmer MaryJane Butters share her thoughts on living in the Palouse, a place she’s made her own: “Landscape has a personality, it has a weight that you feel about it, and it affects your behavior even. . . The Palouse is very pastoral to me. It makes you want to have a milk cow.  It makes you want to grow food.”

Perfect spring day on the Palouse

And for us who are only passing through — it makes us want to come again.  At any season.

For more information:

Maps of the Palouse Scenic Byway: http://www.palousescenicbyway.org/maps/

Sorensen, Eric. “Natural Wonders: Singing the Praises of the Palouse.” Seattle Times. Retrieved from http://www.maryjanesfarm.org/about/articlesawards/palouse100702.asp

MaryJanesFarm website: http://www.maryjanesfarm.com/About/

For a previous post on the Palouse entitled The Palouse, Amber Waves of Grain, click here.

To see more of our posts on the Inland Northwest, click the Inland Northwest page at the top of this blog.

Make it to the top of Steptoe Butte in Whitman County, Washington, and you’ll be rewarded with fields of grains forming undulating patterns — waving and rippling and laying out curvy lines for miles into the distance.

View from Steptoe Butte, Washington

This week’s Word a Week Photo Challenge: Undulate reminded us of our trip through The Palouse in eastern Washington where we first spotted snake-like lines of amber fields from our airplane.  But when we found (quite by accident) Steptoe Butte State Park and drove the spiral route to the top of this quartzite island, we knew we were in for a breathtaking panorama of America’s wheatland.

Steptoe Butte stands tall among the Palouse hills.

Rippled land ebbs and flows with the curvature of the land and uneven, meandering boundaries of crops.

Rippled landscape of The Palouse

The Palouse — just one of those Inland Northwest memorable finds with the best scenery from “up top” at Steptoe Butte.

For more entries to this week’s challenge, click here.

For more posts on our travels through the Inland Northwest, check out the page at the top of this blog.  Thanks for traveling with us!

The Palouse as seen from Steptoe Butte

Traveling from Moscow, Idaho, I drove west through Pullman and then headed north on Highway 195 to Rosalia, Washington, passing through an area of unparalleled scenery — undulating hills, painted barns, and amber fields of wheat and lentils and quinoa. It’s a peaceful place of a little more than 200 miles once traversed by wagon trains and railways years ago. The Palouse now boasts the greatest concentration of wheat in America and over 30% of the world’s lentils.

I fell in love with the quiet, the occasional glimpses of tractors at work, and the landscape of curved, contrasting patches of light brown and dark brown, with waving grains in some areas, stubble left by the harvest in others, and a full sky complemented by puffy clouds and the occasional spinning blades of a wind farm on the horizon. May you, too, enjoy the journey as I saw it that day in The Palouse!

For more on the Inland Northwest, click on the Page at the top of this post.

This post is #18 for National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) 2013.

Stacked and Ready — Idaho Logs

Cows on The Palouse — near Lewiston, Idaho

Lone Farmhouse in Freshly Tilled Field

For more brownness, check out Where’s My Backpack:  Travel theme: Brown.

The Palouse is a major agricultural area spanning parts of Washington state and Idaho. With its rolling landscape planted with wheat, barley, quinoa, hay, and legumes, the land beckons us to view it as art: contoured beds of rich golden colors overlapping swirls of freshly tilled rich soil.  Occasionally, weathered red barns nestle into the folds.  And green harvesters roll along pulling their forked metal fingers through the land.

October sky meets the infinite fields of The Palouse

From the top of Steptoe Butte: yellows, tans, and browns of The Palouse roll into the horizon.

Wind farm stretching its arms into the sky while watching over The Palouse

Weekly Photo Challenge: Infinite