From Seattle to the Grand Canyon
My family is planning a trip to the Grand Canyon this summer from Seattle. They are a bunch of nature-fanatic, road-tripping-city-slickers, who-need-to-get-out-of-the-city-to-keep-sanity type of people. They have asked me to find out if there is/are particular routes from Seattle to GC that are scenic and which will expose them to a lot of the natural beauty of the the great U.S. of A. They're not too crazy about driving on major highways nowadays. They just want alternate and/or least known routes. Any suggestions?
How much time is available to them?
It is a long ways, even by way of the interstates (which are still the fastest way to get between "A" and "B". Shortest possible distance would be ~ 1300 miles and take about 34 hours of driving time. Fastest reasonable time would be 2 long days of driving.
But if time is not an issue, by all means I would check out the the Hells Canyon Recreation area to the east of Pendleton, OR -- Plus the town of Enterprise has become one of the largest artist colonies of iron foundrys in the world. Wallowa lake is very cool -- plenty of semi-tame deer in the area.
One of my favorite drives is to pick up Hwy 71 and cross into Idaho and zing all the over to Idaho Springs to stay overnight at the Heise Hot Springs. (http://www.srv.net/~heise/heise.html) One of the old time hot springs resorts.
Zig-zagging back to the west -- they could stay over-night in refurbished airstream trailers at Summer Lake in the Oregon Outback. (http://www.roadtripamerica.com/places/hot.htm)
Continuing south, the Black Rock Desert is pretty awesome.
If they would enjoy a ride on a bonafide steam engine powered train stop by Ely (http://www.roadtripamerica.com/wheels/elyrr.htm)
Great Basin National Park to the east of Hwy 93 should not be missed. From there they could zig back into Utah on county road 21 and pick up Bryce, Cedar Breaks and Zion en route the Grand Canyon.
Such a round trip could easily take a month. So how long a road trip are you considering?
