The Palouse: Grassland Country

Finally the long awaited first post from my great North American Adventure. Since we are driving an RV all around the continent, we decided that it makes sense to spend most of our time in the east since that is the hardest for us to return to in the RV. While most of the national parks in the USA are in the west, those are places we can get to in a matter of days and we will certainly swing by there on our way home next spring. So we are going to head to the east coast fairly quickly to spend the summer in the Maritimes.

Leaving from Vancouver Island, we crossed the border and spent our first night boon-docking in a Walmart parking lot. It doesn’t sound glamorous I know, but it was perfect. There were only a handful of RV’s there giving us lots of space and it was a free and safe place to catch a few hours of sleep. We got up at 2am to drive through Seattle before the traffic and made it all the way to eastern Washington to our first destination: The Palouse.

The Palouse hills are Washington’s most fertile agricultural region. The windblown hills were named Le Pelouse (meaning grassland) by French-Canadian explorers and fur traders. Today the hills are covered with wheat as far as the eye can see.

It has everything a photographer wants: colour, light, shape and texture. It is hard to believe it is real: green textured hills, old red barn, baby blue sky, and white puffy clouds.

I am going to try to do things a little differently on the blog and upload only one or two photos more frequently rather than upload a whole series once a week. I am not going to promise every day quite yet until I can get a bit ahead of myself since I am not confident I will have wifi.

Now we are on our way to Glacier National Park, but over the next week or so I will have more images from The Palouse coming your way.