An Urban's Rural View Blog

Check out lists of the world's most beautiful agricultural landscapes and you'll be treated to some lovely photos of some lovely places. I have seen some of these places first-hand, including the terraced rice fields in Banaue in the Philippines and the tulip fields in the Netherlands.

But one magnificent agricultural landscape has somehow been omitted from the lists I've come across: the Palouse. Pity, because the Palouse is, in my humble opinion, the most beautiful of them all.

The Palouse is a 19,000-square-mile region of rolling hills in southeastern Washington and north-central Idaho. Palouse farmers grow a lot of wheat, a goodly amount of lentils and a bit of barley, canola and chickpeas. Now and then you may even see a small vineyard amid the wheat fields.

For the traveler, though, eye candy is the principal crop. I drove recently from Walla Walla to Spokane on back roads through the epicenter of the Palouse, Washington state's Whitman County. Thankfully there was almost no traffic, for I was having a hard time staying focused on the road.

Oh, what a feast for the eye are these hills. They swirl, roller-coaster-like, around the viewer. They burst with color. Depending on the season, a single hill may be dressed in a patchwork quilt with fields of greens and browns and golds, sometimes even reds or yellows, lying side by side.

Paul Cezanne, the great French post-Impressionist painter known for his patches of color, would have been in heaven in the Palouse. (It was probably French-Canadian fur traders who gave these hills their name. The French word "pelouse" means lawn or grass.)

I know corn-and-beans farmers in Iowa and Nebraska who like to talk about their hills. Compared to midwestern hills, those in the Palouse are veritable mountains. They can extend as much as 300 feet from base to crest and stretch from a mile or 2 to 3 or 4. And they start high: Much of the Palouse is more than 2,000 feet above sea level. (https://www.jstor.org/…)

They were harvesting wheat when I drove through and I saw combines working the contours of slopes. Some leaned so far that a combine driver with acrophobia would have been terrified. While many slopes average 10 degrees or less, some are as steep as 30 degrees or more.

Indeed, combines have been known to tip over and roll sideways down hills in the Palouse, in some instances killing farmers. Over the years special equipment has been designed for the area to minimize this risk.

All in all, though, it's a great place to farm. The loess soil -- the product of thousands of years of winds blowing sediment off dried-up glacial lakes -- is fertile and deep. It's loess all the way down to more than 200 feet in some places.

The climate is Mediterranean -- relatively warm and wet winters, hot and dry summers. The soil retains moisture well, allowing non-irrigated farming even though the area gets only 15 to 30 inches of rain each winter.

You don't have to farm here to love the Palouse, however. Just drive the roads and enjoy the dazzling view. Or join one of the many photography groups that hold workshops in the Palouse.

"Most beautiful" is admittedly a subjective judgment. No doubt there are readers who consider their own farms incomparably beautiful. I won't argue with them.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as the saying goes, I still wonder: Could there exist a pair of eyes that has seen the Palouse and not thought them beautiful?

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanize@gmail.com

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