A friend asked recently how I choose my road trip routes. Sometimes it's just little more than a gamble and a complete departure from the route I'd planned in great detail. It's best to have the route planned well enough that I can say 'no' to really tempting things in order to find the main objective. Sometimes I just miss the mark, take time at the wrong spot, and absolutely regret it later when I come across something much more exciting and wish I'd just gone there instead.
One of my bigger regrets from the last year might have been taking time at Banks Lake in central Washington state (which in itself was pretty awesome) when I would rather have hung out at Dry Falls.
Banks Lake was carved by a massive glacier and on each side of the lake were sheer rock walls made up of lava tubes from rapidly cooling lava.
You can kind of get a sense of scale with the road and headlights just left of center of this pic. It was incredible. On the upper right you can see some of the lava tubes.
It was kind of eerie (to have almost no idea where you are on the earth) but one of the really more unique things I've ever seen.
Unfortunately, spending too much time at Banks Lake made me miss out on Dry Falls which at one time was the largest waterfall ever known to exist on earth. It was 3.5 miles wide, up to 400 feet tall, and had 10x the flow of Niagara Falls. It was in a fairly remote area of central Washington, I had absolutely no idea at the time where I was, the wind was howling, I had no cell phone reception, and all my faith was in my GPS. It was much darker than the pics indicate. It's not easy to photograph something so massive in scale. In the second pic you can see the visitor center in the upper right but that still doesn't do justice to how the earth just falls away where that river used to run.
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