Gauntlet...

The day is ours... our friends are riding 75 miles, from Richland to Benton City and back again, and we're exploring the back roads near our old home in West Richland. A dirt road along the Yakima River took me back to the years I helped with an endurance ride, and floating the river on hot summer days. On the other side of the river is Red Mountain, an amazing wine region that didn't exist when we lived here.



One of our neighbors (and co-worker) went steelhead fishing on the Yakima most mornings in season, and he would have had some competition today. When we drove down to Horn Rapids where there's a flood control dam, I was amazed to see pelicans there.


















There were no pelicans here in the early 1980s, so I did some digging. The white pelicans began nesting on Badger Island (in the McNary National Wildlife Refuge) in 1997. Since then, the colony has grown to more than 1600 breeding pairs. Horn Rapids is just a quick flight from there, and the Yakima is full of fish and frogs. I wish they'd been around when we lived here; I was glad to learn that the population of white pelicans in Washington has rebounded enough that in 2016, their status was changed from endangered to threatened.

They are now a familiar sight in the Mid-Columbia region.