RV7 Flight: Kamiah, Idaho

Hubbie and I spent most of the day on Saturday doing outdoor house maintenance. He finished painting the trim around the two north-facing windows and then got the big wheel tractor and ripped a burning bush out of the back yard that was half dead. It was a shame, because the bush was so big and beautiful in the fall. Something got to it, and so it had to go.

I cleaned out the garage and readied three whisky barrels for planting with freesia, carnations, marigolds and petunias.

Around 6:30 pm, hubbie wondered if I'd like to fly with him over to Kamiah, Idaho. It's about 80 nautical miles from us, or 100 miles to drive. In the airplane, it's about a 30 minute flight.

A little historic town, Kamiah (pronounced Kam--ee--ii), it's nestled in the mountains of Northern Idaho along one of the forks of the Clearwater River. Click the link, and you can read a couple paragraphs about it. It was the winter home of the Nez Perce Indian tribe. Lewis and Clark also camped there in 1806. Now it's a recreational area surrounded by campgrounds where you can hike and fish.

Town is within walking distance from the 3000 foot (that's long) nicely groomed grass runway. You do need to make a corkscrew turn, and descend rapidly into the canyon, which made my ears super plugged up when we landed. Jim, a pilot we met, said there's some great restaurants in town. We needed to get home before the sun set, so it was mostly a "check it out, we'll be back again soon" situation.

The pictures are in chronological order. In the two pictures at the left, we're still quite a ways away, but they show off the Palouse hills in June quite beautifully. The landscape looks like God threw a green velvet blanket over the hillsides.

Here we're approaching the town.

Here, we're flying right over it.

Here, we're descending toward the runway, however, I don't see the runway!

This picture was taken after leaving Kamiah. It's a rapeseed field in bloom. Food-grade quality of rapeseed is used in making Canola oil. We used to grow it, but it's pretty hard for us to make any money off of it, due to a variety of factors. We switched to growing garbanzo beans, also a spring crop. Now with Americans waking up to the deliciousness of hummus, garbs are more a more lucrative crop for us. 

We eat hummus all the time. Instead of cookies and frosting, for us, it's non-gluten crackers and Sabra hummus, in a variety of flavors. Sabra makes hummus from Palouse grown garbanzo beans. 

The last picture highlights a little town nestled in the Palouse hills. Unfortunately, I don't remember which one this is--I think it's probably Albion. Many little towns such as this, with a population of 200-1200 dot the Palouse.