20 June 2014 A Final Day at Priest Lake

We were flying home tomorrow and needed to spend the night on west side of Spokane so we could make a very early flight home. That schedule gave us a little time for more exploring in the Priest Lake region before we turned back toward Washington. It was time to toast our visit to Idaho. There's no better way to do that than Huckleberry soda.

We stopped for a cache along the water at Priest Lake before taking a detour to see a section of the Berlin Wall. We had seen a larger section of the wall in front of the LA Museum of Art, but any chance to see a piece of this structure that was an imposing part of the 19th Century political landscape is worth a visit. This section still had it's markings from when the wall came down including a rear shot of someone in jeans and and a not so perfect image of what appears to be Donald Duck. It seems odd this section sits in someone's front yard. Overall our journey here was a little strange. The homes around this wall were infested with deer. They were everywhere. They were so comfortable, they had bedded down in front yards.

We stopped for a cache at a bison ranch. We've seen bison in Pennsylvania and in western Washington, but this is a larger herd. They are magnificent animals to view. The mother and calf was a new site for us. They are very skittish and soon moved away from us despite our care.

Our Priest Lake area finds ended at this point. Ali had picked out a couple caches in what appeared to be a good location, but we were met with heavy logging equipment as we got near the first cache. We tried in vain to make an approach from a different direction. We went for one more cache in the higher altitudes, but reached a point where the road pitched across the width of the vehicle and the path over the side was straight down. The roads were wet in an area where I would have been concerned with one of our trusted geomobiles. I finally gave up and backed the geo-rental down a good portion of the mountain.

That's some serious logging equipment ahead blocking the road.

We made a last visit to a cache with a nice view of Brodie Mountain. It gave us an opportunity to once again view a number of wildflowers including twinned mariposa tulips. After that we made our way back to Spokane, dinner, and the hotel with a few short cache stops on the way. It was tough to leave the area and end our vacation just as the beautiful northwest weather I was accustomed to was returning, but there were so many great sights this week. Maybe there can be a return for more exploring and a visit to Granite Falls. Certainly the geocaching is worthy of a second visit.