Westward Ho!
- CARAVAN HALEN
- Oct 7, 2019
- 7 min read
Howdy! It’s been a long time between drinks blog-wise, so we’re well behind. Close your eyes, pretend it’s about a month ago, and join us as we go west, featuring four National Parks, a novelty Bavarian-themed town, banana slugs, and a lot of driving.
After leaving Minneapolis we headed northwest towards Fargo, North Dakota. Fargo isn’t known for too many things, so good on it for embracing the main association everyone has, and displaying not one, but two, woodchippers at the visitors’ centre. The one inside even has a foot sticking out of it, and there’s some nice movie memorabilia, including the Coens’ original script. And as with Minnesota, everyone is genuinely very nice, although I was disappointed by the lack of really strong “ooh yah” accents. I would also like to go on record as saying that the Fargo Parks & Rec. Dept. does a particularly fine job: we visited two playgrounds in public parks, and both were top notch. Very good work, folks. Ooh yah.
Fargo was just a one-nighter on the drive west, as was the state capital Bismarck the next night. There’s rather a lot of North Dakota to drive through, and the eastern 90% of it doesn’t have a whole lot to capture the attention of the modern motorist. The scenery is rather Iowa-esque, with flat fields as far as the eye can see, and very little else. Then you hit the badlands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and it all changes: there are such things as hills, canyons, and plants taller than a metre.
The National Park is one of the least visited, on account of being in North Dakota, but it’s well worth the trek. Teddy, who was pretty awesome and made it onto Mt Rushmore despite only being the second best president in his extended family, spent time in ND working as a rancher, and later used it as a retreat after the death of his first wife. In his words, this place made him the man he was, and he would not have become president without it; it also led to his support for the creation of the National Park system. The Theodore Roosevelt National Park was opened in the late 70s, and includes part of the land he lived on, as well as a couple of other swathes of badlands.
The scenery is great, but what we enjoyed most about TRNP was how easy it was to see wildlife. Bison roam all over this land, and we saw tons of them, in herds or on their own just being massive, shaggy, and terrific. There are also a number of prairie dog ‘towns’; the day we visited was wet and windy, and most of the little critters were sensibly downstairs, but we saw a few hardy souls on lookout duty. We also saw deer, wild horses, and a comical flock of turkeys.
We had another couple of long driving days ahead of us after leaving North Dakota for Montana, although the scenery had a bit more going for it. Montana is called ‘Big Sky Country’, and there’s something about the terrain that does just make everything look much, much bigger. We zoomed along US2 in the north of the state, running parallel with and about 30 miles south of the Canadian border, heading for Glacier National Park in the northwest of the state. Glacier is big, and spreads over the border into a Canadian National Park called Waterton.
The centerpiece of Glacier is the Going-to-the-Sun Road, which is a mountain pass carved into the cliff-face, offering stunning views of the park. It has a reputation as a white-knuckle drive: it wasn’t an easy journey, but we’ve done a few hairier ones on this trip. There’s a lot more to see in the park than just the drive: it’s a little like Yosemite or Zion in that everywhere you turn there’s another cracking view. We spent a great couple of days exploring: our favourite part was the ‘Trail of the Cedars’ near Avalanche Creek, a really good family hike that the girls loved. After only taking her first steps in Arizona three or four months ago, Kitty is now punching out hour-long hikes like a pro. Mo's favourite bit was finding a choice hollow tree where she could conduct an elaborate wedding ceremony to marry herself to Kitty.
Both kids have inherited my klutziness genes, and Glacier seemed to feature the greatest number of fallings-over per hour of the whole trip. At times, Mo seemed to be modelling all of Elastoplast's fall catalogue at once.
Culinary delicacies in western Montana include pretty much everything you can possibly imagine involving huckleberries. We were here at the very end of the season, so all the huckleberry pie vendors had closed down, but we did partake in a rather tasty huckleberry shake.
Have I mentioned that there was a lot of driving in this part of the trip? After Glacier we had another few days (or, if you like, about 173 times through the Lion King soundtrack) in the car, with some great scenery through western Montana and Idaho, and into Washington state. We stopped for a couple of nights in the curious town of Leavenworth, which transformed itself in the 60s from a seldom-visited stopover to a Bavarian mountain village. They clearly did an authentic enough job, as a whole lot of German expats decided to move there, and now apparently make up about ¼ of the town’s population. The main street features some lovely Bavarian-style buildings set against the very picturesque Cascade Mountains, and there’s plenty of pretzels and bratwurst to be eaten, all washed down with lots of bier. Sure, it’s mighty cheesy, but you’d need to be quite the grinch to not have a good time.
After that odd little interlude we headed up into the mountains, to North Cascades National Park, a wonderfully atmospheric area just south of the Canadian border. It’s everything you expect from Pacific Northwest scenery: desolate, rugged mountains, and thick, wet forest, with low cloud and mist shrouding everything. The day we visited was cold and rainy, which put us off hiking, but added to the moody atmosphere. Our favourite part was Diablo Lake, coloured a chilly turquoise from the minerals from glacial runoff.
We overnighted near Seattle, which provided the chance for some donut worship. Afficionados rate Top Pot Donuts highly, and they didn't disappoint.
Next stop was the Olympic Peninsula, a left hand mitten sticking up next to Seattle. It's rather scenic, and also rather cold, wet, and remote. As well as being a hub of the logging industry, it's home to the lovely Olympic National Park, where we spent a few days. We stayed in the little town of Forks, best known as the setting for the Twilight books. If you’re a fan of bitey YA potboilers there’s some good photo opps, but we headed into the Park instead.
The most famous feature of the National Park is the Hoh Rainforest, now also designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s a wonderful area, and the guidebooks’ descriptions of it as ‘Tolkeinesque’ are apt: the rainforest is amazingly lush and green, with moss-draped branches everywhere, and a general sense of enchantment. There are two excellent family-friendly walks, the very busy “Hall of Mosses”, and the less-travelled “Spruce Trail”, both of which were great fun. The rainforest is also home to a huge number of banana slugs, one of the more unusual bits of fauna we’ve seen on the trip. There's also some pretty good lichen-spotting, if that's what you're into: we met an older couple who were endearingly and effusively thrilled with the rare specimens growing on the fenceposts on the trail.
The rainforest is in the main part of the the Park, a large tranch of forest in the middle of the peninsula, that also features a couple of gorgeous lakes. The Park also encompasses a narrow strip of land along the Pacific coast, with a number of spectacular beaches. We spent a fun afternoon wandering along wild, windswept Rialto Beach, lined with massive piles of bleached-out driftwood, and framed by a dense forest with an outline of burnt-out dead trees. It looks bloody cool. The similarly scenic beach next door, La Push, was apparently the backdrop for some vampiric brooding of note.
On our way out we passed through the not very enticing town of Aberdeen, birthplace of one Kurt Cobain. We got to admire the muddy banks of the Wishkah out the car window for about an hour after a collision between two logging trucks caused a big old traffic jam.
OK, now we’re only about a week and a half behind. Next blog out in a day or two: we're flooding the market before we head home. Next stop: state 50…
BEERWATCH: The NZ 4th place award this edition goes to Montana’s Red Lodge and their "Bent Nail" IPA, which tasted particularly good at the local saloon after a day’s driving in Teddy Roosevelt NP. 3rd heads to Leavenworth, WA’s Icicle Brewing and their Citra-heavy "Kickstand" Pale Ale, the sort of nicely balanced and lowish ABV beer that America could do with embracing more (and name-wise, as well as the well-worn craft beer association with cycling, I also like to think there’s a nod there to a deep cut by local musical luminaries Soundgarden). 2nd goes to a nice surprise: the tiny Old Schoolhouse Brewery in the tiny town of Winthrop in northern Washington, and their excellent "Hooligan" Stout, which was just the ticket after a cold and wet day in North Cascades National Park. The clear winner is a Pacific Northwest classic: Eugene, OR’s Ninkasi Brewing, and their "Total Domination" IPA, which is a good old-fashioned whack-me-round-the-head-with-a-sack-of-hops West Coast IPA, and is delish.
TUNEWATCH: We listen to the Lion King so much that Kitty, despite not yet being able to say “yes”, can do a pretty good rendition of the start of “The Circle of Life”. Mo has also developed some faves amongst the occasional bursts of grown-up music: as well as all-time number one “Jolene”, she is partial to early Beatles, “that one about wicked snakes” (“Harmony Hall” by Vampire Weekend), “Bang Bang Bang” by Mark Ronson, and, bizarrely, awesomely, “Lorena Bobbitt” by Aaradhna.
Been missing your fantastic posts!