Day 34: God's Country

It is a dream. It is what people who have come here from the beginning of time have dreamed. It's a dream landscape. To the Native American, it's full of sacred realities, powerful things. It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.

N. Scott Momaday -

On this Independence Day, a hard ride was made worthwhile by the vistas on display in this corner of the West. One of the cyclists I met a couple days back memorably labeled this land - the West - God's country, and its expansiveness and splendor were on full display today. My photographs hardly capture the feeling one gets cycling in the West - of being immersed and lost in forest, canyon and prairie.

Wheat fields in the Weippe Prairie

At daybreak, I started out from the banks of the Clearwater River and climbed into the steep hills up to the Weippe Prairie. With the roads nearly empty on this holiday morning, the sun cast strange shadows about the canyons as I embarked on an 10 mile, 2000 foot climb to the Columbia Plateau. At the top, I thought I was back in the Dakotas with rolling prairies of wheat and mustard fields as far as the eye could see - no sign of the landscape as seen from the valley below. This unique landscape comes from rivers that have cut steep valleys in this high plateau formed from lava fields over hundreds of thousands of years.

The steep hillsides leading up to the Columbia Plateau

These productive lands lie within the Nez Perce Indian Reservation, though little of the land is owned by Native Americans since the land was opened up to white settlers in 1895. Friends of the Lewis and Clark Expedition as they stumbled out of the mountains, the Nez Perce vainly resisted their forced relocation in the 1870s. The reservation offered few signs of the Nez Perce people outside the small tribal town of Lapwai, ID.

Mustard fields on the Weippe Prairie

The displacement and decline of the Nez Perce is the sad counterpoint to what the West represents in the American ethos - a place of opportunity and hope. In a letter to his wife, on the eve of Independence in 1796, John Adams presciently declared that this day "ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade . . . from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more." Even before the colonies had gained their independence, Adams, like Jefferson and many of the Founders, envisioned a nation stretching from one ocean to the other. For them and for so many subsequent generations, in the West lies the future. To cycle through this land is to experience ever so briefly that landscape of dreams.

STAGE SUMMARY:

Starting Point - Kamiah, ID

Ending Point - Lewiston, ID

Distance - 81.0 miles

Cumulative Distance - 2842.4 miles

Vertical Elevation - 5226 feet

Counties - Idaho, Lewis, Nez Perce, ID

Wind - variable crosswind