Castlegar

For the second time this summer, I'm heading east to Minnesota in the new (but increasingly less so) Subaru.  This time, M is along and D will be with us for the first half of the trip. We will leave him and his bike and his stuff in Minnesota in a week.  The first trip, in late May and early June, is documented in 24 posts at  RoadTrip2012.

M and D claim to enjoy these expeditions, and even support longer variations, but are pretty much useless when I ask for input on routes or places of interest.  Which is okay, since it lets me pursue quirky destinations that would be difficult to make a convincing public argument for.  Like wanting to see the Columbia River north of the border, the big coal mines on the west side of the Crows Nest Pass, the railroad trestle in Lethbridge, the Cypress Hills, and the north shore of Lake Superior.

Saturday we drove over the North Cascades Highway on a beautiful day and worked our way across Route 20 to Omak and Republic and (almost) to Kettle Falls.  We drove up the Columbia, past the junction with the Evans Cutoff from Colville, where I spent a night sleeping in a pasture amidst cow pies on my month-long pre-college walkabout in August 1976.

Castlegar is where the Kootenai (sometimes Kootenay) River joins the Columbia. It's easy to forget that the Columbia and its Canadian tributaries drain much of the west side of the Canadian Rockies, not just the interior northwest of the U.S.  Early Sunday morning, I tried different ways of getting down to the water's edge at the confluence - succeeding below Selkirk College on the east side and at Zuckerberg Island on the west (the island is on the Castlegar side and is not named after Mark Z of Facebook fame).

The river flows freely here, but dams are everywhere up and down stream and flood control has left its mark in the form of cobble banks now heavily overgrown with trees.

AERIAL VIEW