Eastern Snohomish County Motorcycle Ride and Oso Update

As we get to the middle of September, we are grateful for every day we can still go for a motorcycle ride in the sunshine and return home in time for a swim in the lake.  Today we left Granite Falls around 10:30 a.m.  The temperature had already gotten to 70 degrees as we traveled Jordan Road toward Arlington.  We met about 200 motorcycles coming into Granite as we headed out.

I love barns and mountains and bodies of water - so this ride through Arlington, Oso, Darrington, Rockport, Lyman, Hamilton, Sedro Woolley, Clear Lake, Big Lake, Lake McMurray, and Bryant is one of my favorites.

We still had to follow a pilot car on a single lane through the slide area just beyond Oso, but they are making good progress on repairing Hwy 530, and we were on the main highway instead of the powerline road. 

Debris from the cars and structures destroyed by the slide has been removed.  The landscape has forever changed though.  Instead of undulating hills and valleys down to the river, it is pretty flat. 

It's interesting to look at the strata in the hillside that collapsed.  Sand levels are clearly visible in several places, which probably contributed to the instability of the hillside.

Just before Darrington, we had stunning views of the glaciers on Whitehorse Mountain.

Where the Sauk and Suattle Rivers come together, we could see the different colors of the water where the glacier water from the Suattle joins the bluer water of the Sauk.

We stopped in Sedro Woolley for a late lunch and then headed home on Highway 9, where we watched waterskiers on Big Lake and fishermen on Lake McMurray.  Yes, it's still summer in the Pacific Northwest!

Granite Falls and Mountain Loop Highway

The interesting places closest to home are the ones we often neglect.  However, when we have out of town guests, we are always asked "is there really a Granite Falls?"  The falls are a few miles east of the town of the same name.

Alongside the river and the falls, a fairly impressive fish ladder helps fish navigate the waterway.

 Ron and I standing on the fish ladder below the falls.

The falls are pretty impressive right now with the high water in the river.



The walkway has a grate where you can look down and see the waterway for the fish - which looks just as swiftly moving as the main river right now.

The views at the river make the steep stairs worth the effort!

One of the most popular hiking trails on the Mt Loop Highway is the one to the ice caves on Big 4 Mountain. 

We stopped at the trailhead and took some pictures and walked a ways on the boardwalk through the swamp.  We continued on Mt Loop Highway to Barlow Pass, and then over the gravel portion of the road along the river until we reached pavement just outside Darrington.

We stopped at the ranger station in Darrington where we ate our picnic lunch.

We caught sight of the Oso slide from the gravel powerline road that serves as the one way detour for part of the road between Darrington and Arlington.

 

The pictures we've seen in the media in no way prepared us for the actual site of the slide.  We saw the remains of cars crushed so small we could barely identify them as cars.  The debris extended from the other side of the river - many hundred yards at least - all the way to the power line where we traveled.  The power line road sits well above Highway 530, but the entire valley had been filled with debris, making it nearly level all the way from the slide to where we drove.  There really is no way to describe how horrifying the sights are.