We would have spent some time performing all kinds of admirable and necessary maintenance duties around the trailer if the weather would have been nice but it wasn’t. We instead hung around the Invader all morning watching western movies. The plots were quite predictable and the outcomes sweet.
After lunchtime we decided to go exploring anyway despite the rain sometimes giving way to drizzle. We started out by driving west or down the Skagit River to Hamilton. Hamilton is more a collection of houses than a town although they do have a city hall which doubles as the Hamilton Historical Museum. There is also a small restaurant, a tavern, several very nice houses but also many residences that appear to be moldy trailer houses surrounded by rusty and decaying junk.
Not far from Hamilton, we ran across a big pasture with a herd of about 30 healthy-looking and quite tubby bison grazing on the lush grass. From the bison, we headed back up the Skagit River, not by taking WA-20 but instead by following N. Skagit River Road that runs right along the north bank of the river passing many handsome estates along the way. We finally ran out of river road and had to revert to WA-20 eastbound. We had only traveled about 5 miles when we came across a small gravel parking lot built right next to a massive open field with a nifty sign indicating this was a place to observe wildlife. We initially saw nothing but we lingered for a bit and pretty soon an elk moseyed out into the pasture from the bordering woods. Another elk followed after a few minutes and by the time we had spent a quarter hour in the parking lot, we could see not less than six big elk cows and a few calves. The grass is so tall in the field that the elk almost appeared to be laying down but their movements informed us they were merely wading in a deep sea of grass. The animals we saw today were Rocky Mountain Elk moved here from a herd in Colorado. The rest of the elk in Washington are the local, indigenous Roosevelt Elk which can be spotted all over the Pacific Northwest. We have no idea what this imported species is doing here. The range of the imported herd is from the Skagit River Valley all the way to Mount Baker, closer to the Canadian border.
Reluctantly, we left the elk and continued up to the town of Concrete. We were almost at the turnoff to Concrete when we came across a wreck on WA-20 that had demolished some poor bozo’s travel trailer and flipped his not-very-late model Ford Blazer onto its side. No other vehicles were involved so we were at a loss to explain how a motorist had managed to wreck his trailer and his truck while driving down an arrow-straight section of road. There were some very Nazi-looking Washington State Patrol officers there grilling the locals so we skated on by and headed into Concrete for a once-through.
Concrete has a theater, a few restaurants, a bakery, a hardware store, a place for music lessons, a post office and a liquor store but very few other businesses. There are some nice tidy houses here and several churches. Across WA-20 is a high school built in such a way that the road runs beneath the second floor and there is a small airport and a nifty little air museum with a good collection of old biplanes and early single-wing airplanes when you come out the other side. Concrete used to have a big cement processing facility but it is defunct now. The railroad tracks that used to go to it have been pulled up and recycled. An enormous but unused group of cement silos separate Concrete from the highway although, technically, the place should have been called Cement. The surroundings are very beautiful with mountains on all sides and a gorgeous river valley filling up the middle.
There’s a couple of photos from around the area that you can see if you click here