With all the wet weather on our side of the Cascade Mountains, we decided to head east until we found sunshine. About 100 miles is all it took.
Make the jump for more pictures and story.
The Wild Horse Wind Facility is on the North side of Interstate 90 just East of Ellensburg, WA. When you drive from Ellensburg to Vantage the windmills are everywhere on either side of you. What we didn't know until just the day before was that you can go up and visit them through their visitor center and then travel through the land where the windmills are built.
After having driven past them many times while headed to Eastern Washington to visit family, it was fun to get a chance to actually visit these monstrous machines up close.
Even in the desert, flowers bloom when the conditions are right. There were many places along the bare mountainsides which were covered in a sheet of purple and white. When the windmills were built, Puget Sound Energy took extra precautions to preserve the native plant life in the area. Anything that was in a construction area that was deemed an important plant, rather than bulldozed, it was transplanted elsewhere.
It really is astonishing how large the windmills are. Against the mountainside they don't look very large. But once you are standing next to just a single blade that is 1/2 the length of a football field your perspective changes a bit.
Here is a shot of the Jeeps parked at the base of one for a bit more size comparison.
Just a few of the windmills that can't be seen from the freeway.
As we headed out the back of the facility we were greeted with a gate that read "Please Close Gate Behind You." which is a very rare site when driving back roads in Jeeps. Usually a gate means "Keep Out". But in this case it is simple there to keep cattle out of the facility and inside the range area. We did see cows. Quite a number of them in fact.
If you have never heard of "Concrete Arrows" I suggest you do some reading up on it. It can make for a fun activity to find them if you happen to be in range of one. This is not an concrete arrow, but it is the former location of an Air Mail beacon and is on many of the concrete arrow maps.
They were used by the air mail pilots to navigate from one point to the next. We didn't find any artifacts like you would at many sites, but the configuration of the concrete pad match that described in all we've read about the beacons and arrows..
After leaving the air mail beacon, we headed down into a canyon with a two track trail which criss-crossed a creek all the way down until we reached this meadow. This looks like a great camping spot to be returned to at a later date.
Of course, we can't stop near water without Emma jumping in.
Down in this canyon there were a few pine trees. Not many, but the few that were there looked to be a couple hundred years old. Very thick in the trunk with very large branches but not very tall. My guess is the sub zero temps in the winter with the +100 temps in summer make it hard on these trees. The few that do survive are hardy as can be but take a long time to grow.
One last parting shot before heading home for the weekend. RubiRock has a few hundred miles added to the odometer and the shakedown run was great.
As always, we have a lot more pictures than we shared on this post.
Check out our
OneDrive folder for the rest of the pics.
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