Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains are built almost entirely of lava. Around sixteen and a half million years ago, immense floods of molten basalt, part of the Columbia River Basalt Group, poured across the region in sheet after sheet, stacking up thousands of feet thick. The sheer weight of all that rock flexed the crust, and over the last fifteen million years or so the plateau slowly arched upward into a range, while rivers cut the deep, steep canyons that define it today.

That geology is why the country changes so fast as you climb. The lower foothills and the Palouse beyond them are treeless and golden, blanketed in wheat, while the higher basalt catches more weather and grows a dark forest of Douglas fir, grand fir, and Engelmann spruce. From a distance the two blur into that signature blue haze, a forested island floating above the farmland. Four rivers, the Walla Walla, the Touchet, the Tucannon, and the Wenaha, all rise in these mountains and run down toward the valley and the Columbia.

The classic way into the high country is the Kendall Skyline Road, a primitive ridgeline drive named for a Forest Service supervisor who organized its building back in 1928. From Dayton a loop of some twenty-eight miles climbs to the crest and runs along the narrow spine that divides the Mill Creek watershed, the source of Walla Walla's drinking water, from the wilderness on the other side, passing an old fire lookout and a Depression-era guard station on the way. It is a slow, rough, spectacular road, best in late summer, with canyons falling away on both sides.

Off that crest lies the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness, more than a hundred and seventy thousand acres of rugged basalt ridges and deep canyons set aside by Congress in 1978. It ranges from around two thousand feet on the Wild and Scenic Wenaha River up to Oregon Butte at 6,401 feet, the highest point in the Washington Blues, and holds over two hundred miles of trail. This is genuine backcountry, home to Rocky Mountain elk, bighorn sheep, black bear, and cougar, where fall elk hunting on horseback is a deep local tradition and summer brings backpackers and anglers to the high springs and streams.

These mountains carry a lot of human story on one horizon. They lie within the long-used homeland of the Nez Perce, the Nimiipuu, and Lewis and Clark passed through the greater Walla Walla country on their return journey in 1806, helped along by Nez Perce hospitality. A generation later the Blue Mountains stood as one of the last great obstacles on the Oregon Trail, a heavily forested barrier that emigrants had to haul their wagons over near the end of an exhausting journey. One traveler in 1844, staring down the brutal descent, called it simply the worst road yet.

The mountains save their best show for autumn. Mixed through the evergreens grows the western larch, or tamarack, a conifer that turns bright gold and drops its needles each fall, so whole hillsides glow amber against the dark forest before winter. Down in the foothills the range rises straight out of the Walla Walla Valley's celebrated wheat and wine country, so a trip up the mountain and a day in the valley below make an easy pairing.

However you take them, the Blue Mountains reward slowing down: a cool escape above the summer heat, a dark sky at night, and a forested crest that has watched over this corner of the Northwest for a very long time.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.