52 miles

We did Sherman Pass today. The mountain climbs are feeling easier now. I am feeling stronger overall, but also getting tired. We made it to the town of Colville. Danielle found a warmshowers host for tonight, and it has been the most wonderfully surreal, unexpected part of the trip so far. 

Our host is a lady named Angie, who lives on a farm a few miles north of Colville. She offered to pick us up in town, so we met her at a Safeway and strapped our stuff onto her flatbed farm truck. I don’t know what I was expecting, but her place is an absolute menagerie. 

When we arrived, she walked us around the property and introduced us to: ducks, geese, chickens, Guinea hens, bantams, emus, peacocks, pheasants, a vulture she “rescued” and has been rehabilitating, her four dogs, numerous goats, sheep, a calf from one of her many Jersey cows, some horses, a llama named Maggie, and an alpaca. I’ve never touched so many different animal species in the span of 20 minutes. There are also guinea pigs, and actual pigs, too. If you whistle, all the peacocks whistle back to tell you where they are. It’s chaos, and it’s amazing.

She made us a fantastic dinner – burgers from her very own cows, with home made fries, veggies, pickles, and sauteed morels that she foraged, and we shared some marionberry pie that Danielle and I had brought, which she topped with fresh whipped cream, also from her cows. I think it was the best goddamn meal I’ve ever had in my life. We’re thinking it might be wise to spend a rest day here tomorrow. 

At some point during our dinner, Angie popped up suddenly and exclaimed “Oh! I have to go make sure my rattlesnake didn’t get out!” One very suspenseful minute later, she came back into the house carrying a plastic garbage can, which was issuing an unmistakable rattling. Apparently, she had found the snake just before we arrived. She explained that when she finds one around the house, she traps and relocates it somewhere up on the nearby mountain so that it doesn’t pose as much threat to her animals, and she doesn’t have to kill it. She showed us the snake, explaining that when it’s cold, it gets all weak and slow, and she picked it up by its tail to prove it to us. It was an incredible thing to witness someone do in the middle of their kitchen.