To the Hinterlands and Beyond

Last week was a tad more adventurous than usual.  First, I went to the McNary National Wildlife Refuge near Burbank (not that far, maybe a 20 minute drive) in search of a rare bird that visited the area for many days, and which everyone else saw except me.  It was a Leconte's Sparrow, and I went several times, to the exact spot where everyone else except me saw it at the same time that everyone else except me saw it, and the reason I didn't see it was because I was in the right place at the right time on the wrong day.  Oh, well.  So it goes.

On the plus side, on one of those ill-fated mornings, I encountered a group of bird banders at the Refuge.  I'd never seen banding before, and they invited me to watch.  At one point they even let me carry a bagged bird to the banding table:

Most of the birds were either Dark-eyed Juncos or White-crowned Sparrows.

This is a White-crowned Sparrow:

A female California Quail ran into the net, and they don't band quail, but they did let folks get up close looks while they checked her over before releasing her.

Even though I dipped out (birder slang!) on the Leconte's Sparrow, I did enjoy my visits to the Refuge.

Here are a couple of male California Quails I spotted there:

And a Downy Woodpecker, who managed to avoid the nets:

My bigger adventure for the week, though, was a trip to Palouse Falls.  Boy howdy, was that fun...mostly.  The Falls is 78 or so miles northeast of Richland, and I headed north up the nice four-lane divided freeway for 30 or so of those miles before turning east on two-lane Highway 260.  It was a well-maintained road but I quickly realized that it was also in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

I drove and I drove and I drove through low rolling hills for miles and miles and miles and didn't see anything.  Or anyone.  No signs of civilization at all.  Now, I enjoy being away from civilization, especially dense civilization.  However, this was a little disconcerting even for me.  I began to fret.  What if something happened to the car?  THERE IS NOTHING OUT HERE.

I also had the Hounds with me, which made me fret even more.  What if something happened and I had to leave the car where there wasn't even a shoulder and walk miles and miles to anywhere when there wasn't anywhere to walk to and how could I leave the dogs alone in the car and how could I take them with me without a shoulder to walk on and what if I couldn't get cell reception if I stayed in the car and what if no one could get to me for hours and hours and it would cost a bundle because I don't have a roadside assistance plan and OMG GET ME OUT OF HERE.

Eventually I passed a farm house.  One.  And then another car passed me from the other direction.  Once.  I tried focusing on how pretty it was, because it was really pretty, and how I'd just taken the car in for service and also had bought new tires a month ago and everything was fine, honest.  Then, after thirty-five miles of this, I spotted the sign for Palouse Falls Road.  HOORAH!

It was another eight miles to the Falls, the last two of which were unpaved and incredibly bumpy and involved driving at 2 miles an hour but I made it!  "This better be worth it," I said as I got the Hounds out of the car and walked over to the view point.

Okay, yeah.  It was worth it.  Mostly.  Here is a cool rock formation:

And here is another view:

And this is what you see when you look the opposite direction -- not bad!

The Hounds were unimpressed.

Then I drove back up the bumpy road and when I got to the junction for Highway 260, I decided not to return that way.  If I turned the other direction, Highway 261 would take me south through slightly more populated countryside (farm houses galore!) and then lead to Highway 12 which passed through actual towns.  Whew.

First, though, I stopped at a spot called Lyons Ferry Park, to let the Hounds have some grass to pee and poop upon.

And then I stopped at a fish hatchery parking lot to check out a big boat that I spotted.  It turned out to be the National Geographic Quest, which does adventure tours for small groups.  They were following the Lewis and Clark trail, more or less.

The drive back was lovely, full of rolling hills that were covered with colorful autumn trees, and quaint little towns full of historic buildings.  This is one -- Dayton -- and this is its courthouse:

I enjoyed the drive back immensely, and I don't ever want to visit the Palouse Falls again.

In art news for the week, the local art folks were all busy with an annual event called the Tour d'Arts.   The idea is that you get to visit artists' homes/studios and check out their work and eat snacks and chat and maybe buy something.  I visited several of my new friends' places, and wound up checking out their work and eating snacks and chatting and I even bought something!

This lovely portrait of a quail and butterfly was painted by my friend Gail Roadhouse, and it's BIG.  Here it is on my living room wall:

It is obvious that I now need to liven up the space around it with more colorful paintings, so I'll have to get cracking on that.

I also continued with the  InkTober challenge, and did at least one drawing with ink every day.  I even used one of the official prompts -- "Overgrown."  I found a photo of some ruins in Cambodia on the copyright-free site Unsplash:

Later I added watercolor, though I think I like the unadorned version above better.

The next day I returned to drawing whatever I wanted, which was the Downy Woodpecker that I spotted at McNary:

Another time when I was out at McNary looking for that rare sparrow that I never found, I decided to tootle a few more miles down the road to Ice Harbor Dam to do my daily drawing.  The dam turned out to be too complex so I stopped at the Native American Memorial rock above the dam and drew that instead. 

I wound up drawing it very quickly, on account of a bothersome bee.  But hey, it counts!

I spent quite a bit more time on this drawing:

And quite a bit of time on this one, which was from one of my photos of Yakutania Point in Skagway, Alaska:

For the next day, I chose one of my pics of a Snow Goose:

I was running out of ideas on what to draw when I found a book called Pen & Ink Sketching Step by Step (Frank Lohan) which has tons of good stuff to practice on, like this old door:

I'll be making good use of that book.

That's my report -- just one more thing to say for today, October 21: 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY SISTER LYNNE!