After about six months, you start to lose track of the mountains on either side of you. The Coastals are the first to go, because they are shorter, and demand less of your attention. Then the Cascades in the east go, because it's just something you get use to. The ultra-high peaks are the last to go, and I still marvel at their size from time to time; still questioning to myself how such things with such size can exist in this world.
Green valleys tend towards the steep western slopes of the Cascades. Flat gravel rivers tend to be the norm because of the glacial erosion and volcanic forces that created the valleys. It makes for amazing farmland, fertile with nutrient rich ash infused soil.
As you climb, the fields and streams are replaced by lush evergreen forests and rushing rapids. The trees bristle with life, and you start to venture into National Forest lands, uninhabited by none but government sanctioned ranger and gas stations, resort lodges, and dry, snowless ski slopes.
You keep an eye on those volcanic giants the whole time, as they dip and dive behind the wooded hills.
As you crest the highest point on the road, within minutes the scenery starts to change. The trees become a paler shade of green, and droop. The soil goes from dense underbrush and roots, to open forest floors with a pine needle carpet. It doesn't rain here nearly as much, and so the forest had to adapt, and to separate its species for less water, and dustier soil.
There are more open plains: Places where the trees couldn't quite make it because of a lack of water. Soon the scene turns into solid rock that rises up into massive megaliths of dirt on the land. The grass is about the only thing that can survive these steep and treacherous hills. How does anything live out here? Who in their right mind would think to settle here?
Irrigation. It's the only thing that keeps this valley alive.
When driving into the Yakima Valley from the south, you come out of the desolate empty hills that make up the Yakima Indian Reservation onto this plain of Eden. The valley floor (around halfway up the picture) is just painted with green. Green fields, green orchards, green trees and towns. And brown hilltops. Desolate, isolated hilltops where agriculture does not work.
The Cascades serve much more than simply a barrier for rain. They symbolize a divide among the cultures of Washington and Oregon. To the West lay the lush, fertile forests and farmlands; home to the burgeoning tech giants and environmental firms of the Pacific Northwest. To the East there is dry, infertile desert land. Depressed towns with little to no reason for existing outside their irrigation. Impoverished families with no hope of upward mobility; stuck forever in their circumstance of where they were born.
Liberalism, and the populations that accompany it, drive the politics from the West. State capitals are in the West. Urban centers are in the West. Interstate corridors of prosperity are paved in the West.
Fading conservative bastions are in the East. The dry high desert demands the rugged individualism you find in people, along with the fear of change, and the fear of abandonment. The towns are smaller, the people more xenophobic, and the roads much dustier.
Yet in the East there is much, much more apparent diversity. So many privileged neighborhoods in the urban centers in the West are exclusive for one ethnicity, and one group of people, and those tend to subtly stereotype urban societies, neglecting the minorities that live within the exact same area.
In the small towns in the East, minority groups are visible. There are Mexican restaurants, Spanish advertisements, and decorative colored banners adorning many of the main roads around migrant settlements. Yet they do not hold power either. There is more of an outward racism and fear from leaders and citizens in the majority. There is positively no appreciation or embracing of the migrant populations, nor acceptance from the majority into the area.
Though their populations are different, there is much more that links these two sides of the Cascades besides Interstates and US Highways. But the mountain chain divides and separates in more ways than just weather.
What amazes me is how apparent and striking the change is. Within an hour through the Cascades you are in an entirely different world, one radically different, but still with hints of familiarity and similarity.
I believe that there is no such thing as "nowhere". Anywhere you can travel is "somewhere". You just need the will to look.
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