Day One - Yakima River Canyon

My first day on the road to Tierra del Fuego was meant to be short and unadventurous.  The goal was just to get out of town.  There’s nothing worse than an ocean-bound clipper becalmed in the harbor after all the flag-waving farewells.  So I went for unromantic efficiency, taking the Miata onto the interstate out of Seattle and riding over the Cascades on boring old I-90.  It was raining; I was off to a late start; my plan was to go 90 to 82 and just get to Yakima.

But something happened at Ellensburg.  Well, a couple of things.  The sun came out.  The top went down.  And my eye caught a little squiggle on the map called Rt. 281.  Next thing I knew, the interstates had been forgotten.

I’ve lived in Washington State for almost two decades, but somehow I never knew about the Yakima River Canyon.  Perhaps I wasn’t meant to discover it until I could drive it in a Miata on a bright Spring afternoon, with each bend of the smooth two-lane blacktop unveiling new walls of lawn-green slope mounded against the sky, or sudden tumbles of pebbled gulches to the Yakima River on my right below.  The turns came fast and fierce, and the challenge of keeping my eye on the road instead of gawking to left or right was made harder by the Miata offering the third axis of epochal scenery above.  Good thing for its lynx-like reflexes on curves. 

Even so, I grew a tail of faster cars behind me and had to use the frequent turnouts, where the new challenge was not to stay for a while, enjoying the purling rush of the river and the dry, faintly sandy air playing a faint breeze over the grasses.

At Yakima it was back to the realities of Road Trip Day One.  The sky darkened ominously and a dusty gust whipped trees and flags throughout the low, prim little city.  I reached my campsite at the Yakima Sportsman State Park just as the thunder was rolling.  I was reminded of the scene in the movie “Wild” where hiker Reece Witherspoon struggles with her equipment on her first day out; by the time I got my tent set up and my several inefficient bags into it the rain was pouring down and both I and the tent were soaking wet.  I wriggled acrobatically into dry clothes, and the rain fly was nicely waterproof, but my pillow was the wrong height and gave me a crick in my neck overnight.  In the morning nothing that unrolled from a small bag would roll back into it.  Ah, Day One.

But I never expected the day to hold something like the drive through the Yakima River Canyon.  And when the campground dawn showed a line of RVs and trailers alongside my Miata, I wasn’t in the least envious.