Strangely paradoxical conjunction of words. Surely Falls Towell would be more appropriate - that's the order you use them in! 
I love the picture of your picnic, Bob, you are so obviously 'posing' the bun for the picture! What was the sandwich?
It was a chicken and cheese sandwich. Obviously when you are talking your own photos all your photos are posed. Set up the tripod with camera. Push the button. Run forward and assume a pose before the 10 seconds are over. It was a pretty tasty sandwich.
I haven't made the hike to Towell Falls. Maybe this week. Its going to be hot here.
The posts of US colleagues on TSNS and now here, especially yours, Bob if memory serves, refer sometimes to abandoned sites - the place in this report, railroads and other long dead infrastructure. It's amazing that abandonment seems to be an option when businesses end and infrastructure moves on and changes. Are abandoned built up sites a frequent feature all over the USA from ex-businesses etc.? Good fodder for naturist exploration as Bobs pics show. Do they ever get redeveloped?
There were 4 major railroads through eastern Washington State around 1910. Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Chicago Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, and Union Pacific . There were dozens of short line railroads extending railroad service to almost every community of a thousand people. Railroads were the infrastructure that moved farm products, tons of wheat to feed the big cities, herds of cattle. Refrigeration cars were created by 1920s to move west coast fruit 3,000 miles to market in New York city Loggers would even push a narrow guage railroad deep into mountains to haul out logs. It was huge infrastructure at the beginning of the 20th century.
But most of it was put out of business by airplanes and automobiles. Unused railroads began being sold for scrap iron during WWII. Many more were closed in the 1950s. In Washington State we now have one railroad, Burlington Northern. Its a merger of Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Burlington, and Santa Fe railroads. Pathetic passenger service paid for by government taxes is the only rail passenger service. It only stops here in Spokane at 3 AM, and the depot has no car parking for passengers. Some of the farm to market short lines were purchased by the State of Washington to save them from the scrap heap. They still move a lot of farm to market products.
Most of the short lines were abandoned too, beginning in the 1950s. This is an old steam engine that served several small towns in an area called "The Columbia Basin" in eastern Washington state near where I grew up. I was permanently parked in this spot and rail service to the towns abandoned in about 1954. I remember climbing on it at about age 10. They didn't have the fence then.
The state acquired two of the hundreds of miles long abandoned railroad "grades" for bicycle and hiking trails. They are kind of boring for hiking. Mile after mile of flat level crushed rock ballast. The one I crossed last week had a big red sigh that warned "NEXT WATER 100 MILES." And, "NEXT ROAD CROSSING 30 MILES." Some parts of Eastern Washington state are still very sparsely settled. Its a desert out here. Its really the northern end of the Great Western Desert that Jbee enjoys in Arizona.
There was another technology that killed many of the small farm towns in these parts. In the 1920s a horse drawn wheat harvester took 40 men and 40 horses to cut a 16 foot wide swath. In addition to the horse drawn combine there was a dozen horse drawn wagons taking wheat to storage.
When I worked in the wheat harvest in 1959 my uncle owned a gas powered combine. His operation had 3 men and no horses. Internal combustion engines had replaced over 90% of the muscle power. Farm communities no longer needed hundreds of farm hands. Jobs vanished. Towns vanished. Revere still has a functioning grain elevator. Farm trucks bring grain from the fields. Big Semi trucks instead of trains take it away. This one is at Lamont, WA, another mostly abandoned town in the same area.
In the UK whilst derelict or abandoned buildings are not unusual, they soon get bought up and demolished and new stuff built on top. Large swathes of the derelict infrastructure from the massive retraction in UK heavy industry and manufacturing in the 1980s are nowadays often the source for new build e.g. retail malls and housing developments on what we call 'brown field' sites (because they often are extremely polluted and have to be restored and detoxified for redevelopment).John
They do that here where there are people. The western US still has huge areas of mostly empty space. These abandoned towns lost their people when internal combustion replaced horse power and muscle power in the fields. It also became possible to live farther than walking distance from your work. In the 19th century farming areas in the US had a small town every 5 to 10 miles. Farmers had to walk to town, or their horse had to walk to town. By the middle of the 20th century they could drive 20 miles to a larger town, which meant larger towns could be 30 to 40 miles apart. My cousin's wife taught school in a one room school with kids from first to sixth grade. It was closed and replaced with a school buss that takes any remaining farm kids into a larger town.
The down side is that all the ranches have barbed wire fences on both sides of the roads with "No Trespassing" signs. We don't have "right to ramble" over farm areas here.
Bob
