Places We Go : The Beauty of Klickitat, WA

1 hour ago
4 min read

If you're like me, you've visited the Columbia River Gorge but Klickitat, Washington? I've heard about this town for a couple of decades so I was very excited to be invited. Last week, I spent an extended weekend in Klickitat, population 320. The 20-acre property is on the Klickatat River as you can see above. Friends Connie & fisherman Andy have owned their vacation home for twenty years. The two-hour drive from Portland was more than scenic, almost all of it was along the Columbia River. Let's take a look.

Washington and Oregon are seperated by the Columbiar River. You can drive east from Portland or Vancouver along the Columbia on the Oregon or Washington side. We went east on the Washington side because Connie planned a fun stop for us - the Pendleton Woolen Mills - founded in 1876 in Pendleton, OR. This outlet store is at their Washougal, WA mill which was founded in 1912.

Connie scored a Pendleton's classic wool Outback Hat. Perfect!

You might know Pendleton from their plaid shirts. When living in Oregon, there wasn't a man in my life who didn't own a few.

Back on the road, we traveled east on SR 12 which follows the Columbia River on the Washington side.

Eventually, we turned off the highway, driving about 9 miles north to Klickatat. Arriving on their property was breathtaking. It's truly a little piece of heaven.

Once we arrived, Connie hung her prairie flags on the wide porch. She made the flags from vintage fabric given to her from friend Alice.

The guest room provided a surprise - a pillow I designed, embroidered and sewed in another lifetime - in the 1970's. It was fun to see again.

I loved the room's vintage pieces, white walls and small oil paintings.

The adjoining bathroom proved no less charming.

The view from the deck as the river flows past their property.

That night we ate at one of the two restaurants in town.

We ate steak&blue cheese salads and the best huckleberry cheesecake made by the restaurant owner. I will dream about that cheesecake.

On this map, Klickitat is in the yellow zone, north of The Dalles - almost at the top edge of the map. The next day, Andy drove us in a big loop - a 4-hour drive, east on SR14 to the Maryville Museum, then northwest back to Klickitat. But before reaching the museum, we stopped at the Horse Thief Lake area of Columbia Hills State Park.

The park contains Native American pictographs (paintings) and petroglyphs (carvings). The basalt rock resulted from a series of lava flows which emerged from cracks in the earth's crust and blanketed the entire eastern Washington/Oregon region long before the coming of ice-age floods.

The Klickitat have been in the area for over 10,000 years. In 1805, they were encountered by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Lewis and Clark found them wintering on the Yakima and Klickitat Rivers and estimated their number at about 700. The name "Klickitat" stems from a Chinookan word meaning "beyond the mountains." The Klickitats were noted to trade salmon, roots, and berries and to have two chiefs within the tribe who welcomed Lewis and Clark in their arrival.

We could see (but not smell) smoke from Oregon fires.

We then toured Maryhill Museum. If you're interested in how a world-class museum came to be on a hill over looking the gorge in the middle of nowhere, I've inclued a link at the end of this post. It's a wild tale involving Sam Hill selling shares of an American railroad to European royals. He meeting new friends - the Queen of Romania, Loïe Fuller (a pioneer of modern dance living in Paris), Alma de Bretteville Spreckels (the wife of San Francisco sugar magnate Adolf Spreckels) and French sculptor Auguste Rodin - and how they came together to help create the museum.

Seen in her coronation photograph at the museum, Queen Maria of Romania dedicated the museum in 1926. She was the granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria.

Inside, Romanian furniture was donated by Queen Marie.

There's more than 80 works by French sculptor Auguste Rodin on display, including one model of his most popular work, The Thinker.

The Indigenous Peoples collection includes more than 3,500 objects. The largest portion is from the Columbia River Plateau region including fine bead work pieces. While many displays are more eye-catching, I was especially intrigued by the basket that served as a woman's hat or bowl (top middle). That shape was interchangeable.

We fell in love with an unexpected permanent display of Théâtre de la Mode post-World War II French haute couture fashions on one-third-life-size human mannequins. When it appeared at Louvre’s Museum of Decorative Arts in 1945, the Théâtre de la Mode opening drew 100,000 visitors.

The charming exhibition toured Europe and the United States in 1946, before languishing in the basement of San Francisco’s City of Paris department store. The sets were lost, but the mannequins were saved through the efforts of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, who championed their transfer to Maryhill Museum of Art.

In the more modern glass box space (opened 2012), we could see more Oregon smoke. We headed north and west back to Klickitat. Because Connie and Andy's home has no WIFI or cell phone access, we spent the evening watching a movie on a CD. So fun to go old school, although we all wanted to review the sound track for 1996 movie we saw - Basquiat.

The next afternoon, we crossed the 1926 Bridge of the Gods to head to the Portland airport via the Oregon side. The toll was just $3.

Back at PDX, I loved this kid ride - shoes optional. Oregon's Tillamook also has a food stand, complete with grilled cheese sandwhiches and their beloved ice cream. Chocolate with Peanut Butter wasn't on the board - good thing as it is my favorite. Hope you'll do some ice cream eating today. Happy Sunday!