Central & Eastern Washington - Washington, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest - page 387

8am-5pm Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm Sat & Sun) , which exhibits costumes, baskets, beads and audio-
visual displays, and includes a gift shop, library, restaurant and heritage theater (with oc-
casional tribal dances).
An interesting historical curiosity is contained in an old fort complex preserved in the
200-acre Fort Simcoe State Park (5150 Fort Simcoe Rd; interpretive center 9am-4:30pm
Wed-Sun Apr-Oct) , an oasis of green in the midst of scorched desert hills. It was built in
1855 but served as a fort for only three years until the creation of the Yakama Reserva-
tion in 1859. Listed on the National Register of Historical Places, the park now acts as an
interpretive center with a handful of original buildings still intact.
SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON
Parched, remote, and barely served by public transportation, southeastern Washington is
the state's loneliest corner and is characterized by the dry volcanic plateaus and denuded
lava flows of the inhospitable 'Scablands' region, exposed by the Missoula floods at the
end of the last ice age. Tourism - and its attendant attractions - was on a backburner here
until the early 1990s, when wine growers in and around Walla Walla began to realize the
town's potential as a new Sonoma, and wine connoisseurs started arriving from around
the globe. For many, the region's fortunes turned full circle.
Established as one of Washington's first permanent settlements in 1836 when Marcus
Whitman rolled off the Oregon Trail and founded a mission in the foothills of the Blue
Mountains, the southeast was once a hive of commercial activity that sat on the cusp of
Washington's burgeoning frontier. But as the settlers pushed west in the late 19th century,
the Columbia River Basin slipped into a self-imposed coma, made all the more terminal
when the US government opened up the Hanford nuclear complex near Richland in
1942. Not surprisingly, the stigma of secret bomb-making factories and contaminated
waste sites has been hard to dislodge, but delicious wines are overshadowing everything
nowadays.
TOP OF CHAPTER
Tri-Cities
POP 188,981
Three cities (Pasco, Kennewick and Richland) situated at the confluence of three rivers
(the Snake, Columbia and Yakima) sounds like a promising proposition, but while the
Tri-Cities can offer plenty in the way of wine quaffing and water sports they rarely fea-
ture in the front line of Washington's tourist push. Part of the reason is that, historically,