US 395, Part 29: Stevens County (Old US 395/WA 292/WA 231 in Loon Lake, Springdale, Valley; Chewelah; Colville)

     "What's wrong, Officer?"
     "Well, sir," said the deputy, "I got the strangest call about you. Seems there was someone following you a while back and noticed you kept pulling over and sticking something out the car window." (The camera.) "He wondered if you were sick or something."
     Distantly I remembered this gold car that always seemed to pull over when I did over the last five miles or so and laughed inwardly.
     "Hang on and let me show you," I said.
     So I showed him what pictures were on the Nikon that morning (basically everything from the Budget Inn in Spokane north), and he was suitably impressed. "Do you have a sponsor?" he asked.
     "No," I said, "just doing it because I always wanted to see the end."
     "Ah," he said, getting it, "and you'll always be able to travel it in photographs."
     I nodded and smiled. "That's it, exactly."

I forgot to write down his name, but I've got an address for the county sheriff's office to drop them a line. I'm sure he'll remember.

Looking back at the US 395/WA 292 junction.

On the other hand, fishing for juveniles just doesn't seem legal in most jurisdictions.

Back to Loon Lake, where we continue on the modern eastern bypass routing with this distance signage at Mile 191. Compared with WA 231, this is a much straighter, less interesting highway.

At this point, we come to the first of our two bypassed sections of US 395 which are relatively short and are very old sections of road that have been quite well preserved, so we will go for these. (There is another possible old alignment south of this on McLean Rd, but I don't have enough evidence for it on my map data.) We turn off the highway.

Kind of a waste to call two photographs a fork, but this is the parallel alignment north of the view of the modern highway we took showing the northern junction of the old bypassed alignment.

Turning right onto Old Arden Highway.

There's not much to tell about the later straightened alignment except that, well, it's straighter.

Kettle Falls is named for a certain falls (now lost underwater) along the Kettle River, which appears to derive its name from the falls. Early French Canadian explorers in the area remarked that the deep indentations in the rocky bottom of the fall looked like cauldrons, caused by fast-falling rocks and the constant scraping action of the merciless water. The falls, which the voyageurs dubbed "La Chaudière" (The Kettle), was also important to the local Indian tribes long before its discovery by Canadian explorer David Thompson in 1811. As many as fourteen tribes came to the falls annually to set up fishing baskets and apparatuses in a carefully organized "fishing season," administered by a consensus figure known as the Chief of the Waters who decided when the season started, where baskets could be situated, and how the catch was to be divided. Indeed, the system rivaled many of the fish and game networks we use today and was based on thoroughly researched observations of the fish and their habits so as not to deplete the resource ignorantly. The falls were astoundingly rich in salmon, sometimes yielding nearly 3,000 fish a day. Once settlers found out about it, canneries descended on the region and the river mouth starting in the 1860s and with the Indian's carefully constructed conservation system gone to pot, the falls' fish output plummeted within a few decades.

The modern town is actually old Meyers Falls, where the several hundred former residents of the old Kettle Falls fled as the waters backed up behind the construction of Coulee Dam; the town changed its name soon afterwards. Click the thumbnail at right for a 63K view showing the region before and after Lake Roosevelt formed; the left side, from 1938, shows both Meyers Falls and Kettle Falls with a jog in US 395 to the south to service both communities and then back north. By 1941, as the dam neared completion and the waters proceeded back, only "new" Kettle Falls remained with US 395 rerouted to the north over the Lake. Despite the change in names, the main drag is still called Meyers St, shown here; modern US 395 largely bypasses the town.

Continue to Part 30