Robert Frost finished his poem “The Road Not Taken” with this verse:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
As our President Gary Ford has stated before, one of the best things we do as chapters is bus tours. And what we get to do on our tours is take the road less traveled.
On this year’s fall bus tour, our chapter took a loop around the asymmetrical anticline Saddle Mountains of the Yakima folds in central Washington. It began with a run on the Ice Age Floods Geologic Trail through the Drumheller Channels but much of the trip was on the road less traveled. This included a narrow gravel road that took us to the base of the Corfu landslide complex, the ghost town of Corfu and down a section of the diverted Ice Age Columbia River valley before we got back to the main highway to pass through Sentinel Gap for our lunch and tour at the Gingko Forest Winery.
In the afternoon after passing around and on the Priest Rapid bar, viewing two more landslides on Umtanum Ridge, and a look at the historic “B” reactor on the Hanford Reservation, we once again took the wash boarded gravel road less traveled and climbed to the summit of the Saddle Mountains. This was the highlight of the trip for most of the forty adventurers as from there, we could look down upon most of the sights we had already traveled. On this tour, many of the “locals” were visiting areas in their backyard for the first time.
Yes, traveling the road less taken makes all the difference. There are other great flood sites in our area that are on roads that tour buses can’t negotiate. Our chapter will soon be addressing this issue to see how we can take people on these roads.
by Lloyd Stoess, President – Palouse Falls Chapter