This month, grand and graceful art fills Twisp’s Confluence Gallery for its annual holiday gift show, “Wings of Winter.” Of course, few things are as sleek and evocative as a wing flexed  in flight, but this show — well curated — goes beyond the standard bird image to challenge us with all sorts of fowl/flight/frost/flake imaginings.

Let’s start with the photography, which may be the exhibit’s strongest category (rare for a juried show in North Central Washington). Exceptional wildlife shots by Tom Reichner and Dennis O’Callaghan are bracketed nicely by gorgeous, manipulated works that hover between photo and painting, realistic and surreal. Prime examples: two “Swoop” photos by Ann Osin, Winthrop, of stylized wings in a winter forest, and “Ice,” a haunting female nude study by Riverside master Ken Smith.

Stand-outs in brushwork include Mary Lou McCollum’s oils of a magpie and hawk,  Tina Reeve Tharp’s large watercolor of a quail flock, Jenn Stoll’s stark watercolor rendering of isolated feathers, and impressionist acrylics by the always popular Kathy Meyers of Winthrop.

The show’s 3-D and mixed media pieces run from the amusing (Dan Brown’s cocky metal raven in “Waiting for the Mail) to the amazing (Yuko Ishii’s framed, mixed media assemblages depicting birds, berries, plants). In between are notable works by Jody Olson (remarkable paper mache pheasants), Shannon Fharnham (bronze quail), and an unnamed Zimbabwe sculptor (birds touching beaks).

And it’s not just high art with huge prices. The gallery is also filled with lots of classy stuff packaged as lower-priced gifts — cards, toys, jewelry and artful doodads — for those creative types on your holiday shopping list.

Details: The Confluence Gallery & Art Center, 104 Glover St., in Twisp, is open 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Saturday. “Wings in Winter” ends Jan. 3.

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(Photo above: Teepee picnic site at the Trinidad Trading Post. Photo at right: Signpost.)

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We don’t often get to share food with a hungry hawk. But there it was at eye level, slowly soaring on updrafts from the canyon below, casting sidelong looks at my spicy, crispy, breakfast stick. If the darn bird could have drooled, it would have. (Can hawks salivate?)

This all happened last weekend at one of my favorite picnic spots in North Central Washington — under the fake teepee that’s standing in the parking lot of the Trading Post in Trinidad.  Sure, spectacular picnic sites aren’t in short supply around here, and some folks would say this one pales when compared to, say, Pangborn-Herndon Memorial Park in East Wenatchee or the foredeck of Chelan’s Lady of the Lake charter boat. And those folks might be right.

But there’s something special about this covered concrete pad hanging right at the lip of Wolf Canyon. Maybe it’s the teepee itself, which is kind of like a fort that kids would play in.  Or maybe it’s the view — straight down to a slow-moving creek, or straight ahead to a V-shaped canyon mouth that frames a high-falutin’ housing development at Crescent Bar.

One very special attribute of this particular picnic site is proximity to a deep fat fryer. (Is that the Wenatchee World’s newsroom roaring their approval?) About 20 steps away in the Trading Post’s convenience store, a hungry traveler can buy golden corn dogs, chimichangas, pizza stix, pizza pockets, several kinds of burritos, chicken strips, chicken nuggets, just plain chicken and, of course, the aforementioned breakfast chimi-stix-pocket-burrito. It blossomed with cheese, scrambled egg and spicy sausage — and smelled terrific. (Can hawks smell?)

The Trading Post also sports NCW’s only half-torso ashtray. It’s the life-size lower half of a cowboy — complete with boots, tight jeans and fancy belt —  with an ashtray sitting inside the waistband, where his guts would be. And the place has one of those multi-arrowed signposts that gives the direction and mileage to places like the Dominican West Indies (4316 miles), Paris, France (5312), and Moscow, Idaho (235). I love those things.

That darned hawk wasn’t going to give up, so I threw a piece of my breakfast stick over the edge and watched it plummet. The hawk nose-dived, but I couldn’t tell if he made the catch. Doesn’t matter. The food, the hawk, the canyon, the rising sun, the fake teepee … it all adds up to a nice place for a picnic.

Details:  For the most part, the Trinidad Trading Post (509-787-3083) is downtown Trinidad. It sits at the corner of SR 28 and Crescent Bar Road and combines a gas station, convenience store, small RV park and picnic spot into the community’s most bustling business. More shops and restaurants are located down the road in Sunserra and Crescent Bar.

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 Last nights game pitting the Wenatchee Wild against the Fairbanks Ice Dogs was much closer than the 3-1 score dictated. The atmosphere in the Big Dipper Arena was also much different from its “biker bar” meets frat house reputation. In fact, the only negative attention I received the entire night was after a mind-blowing save by Mathieu Dugas. My enthusiastic cheer “NICE WORK DOOOOOOGIE!” was met by a darting glare from a woman below, softening into a smile once she saw where we were from in our Wild jerseys.

We arrived at the arena just after 6pm and waited in the foyer, packed like sardines, for the main doors to open. We overheard folks talking about their limited edition jerseys they’d just purchased at auction. The woman directly in front of us not at all bashful about telling anyone within earshot that she just paid $800 for the jersey she was wearing tonight, and that she had to bail out on another one that went for $2400. These were jerseys from the boys we were going to see on the ice tonight. If their jerseys fetch that kind of price in this kind of economy, those kids must be good! I know these folks get a check from ol’ Sarah each year just for living up here but that’s some heavy duty disposable income to drop on a jersey. Casi and I took this as the perfect opportunity to don our Wenatchee Wild jerseys. There were enough women and children around to keep the crowd from getting unruly and mutual appreciation for hockey jerseys may save us. So we took 2 of our 3 jackets off and proudly pulled over our heads what were soon complimented as “gorgeous” jerseys by those around us. Their awe of our attendance at the game was only matched by our dismay that people were wandering into the arena with nothing but a sweatshirt or a jersey and a baseball cap. It’s -5 outside! One scraggly bearded (evidently part of the dress code up here) guy even said, “Too bad we couldn’t have got ya some cold weather fer yer trip.”.

Many times throughout the night we were welcomed and thanked for being at the game. When I thought I’d received a bump on the shoulder in the beer line, it was just someone patting me on the back asking me how we liked it up here. We were even greeted by the food and beverage manager of the rink and invited out to Karaoke after the game.

Sadly, our boys Zack and Kyle sat out this game but we were able to see their routine when not playing. The boys are as involved in the game as anyone feverishly writing down stats like turnovers and scoring chances. Each sat diligently throughout the 3 periods keeping track of things in each play I often don’t even notice once in the entire game.

The arena is all general admission with a few reserved seats designated by big stickers. We took our place at their brand new luxury stools which have not only a great view but a bar to set your beverage on and write. Although not quite a luxury box at the Town Toyota Center, these were great seats. From here we were able to keep friends at home informed about the game by updating our Facebook status and uploading a few pictures.

Rob Proffitt, “Proff” by most everyone who knows him, put on a great show. He is truly a hands on general manager, putting on a wireless headset and wandering out on the ice inciting the crowd with thrown t-shirts and ice cream, yes, ice cream is pretty popular in a -10 below climate! Rob even had us over to talk to our friends at home watching the game online.

Now for the game, a real fans game again. Unfortunately this one came out better for the fans in Fairbanks. However, it looked for a long while as if the Wild could pull it off. The Ice Dogs scored first but Wenatchee quickly answered with one of their own. The Ice Dogs scored again, both goals not in anyway blamable on Wenatchee’s superstar goalie Mathieu Dugas, whom in typical fashion made the most difficult saves look effortless. Doogie doesn’t showboat like many goalies do, wildly swinging their gloves through the air to embellish their saves. Nope, Doogie just simply and efficiently keeps the Wild in each and every game he plays. After one save last night, a large scrum erupted in front of the goal, Doogie skated quietly from his crease to the corner with the puck still in his catcher to let the situation sort itself out, calm and cool under pressure; a real veteran. Finally, in a brave move near the end of the last period with the Wild trailing by one point, Doogie was pulled off the ice to give Wenatchee an extra player to possibly tie things up, but the Ice Dogs got a lucky bounce in which they capitalized on our empty net to win the game 3-1.

Close but not close enough. A great game in a fun facility a long way from home, but surrounded by friendly folks. Tonight, another game, followed by the “red eye” flight back home. Different from last night however, Zack and Kyle will be on the ice!

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♦ Top photo: Despite overcast skies and wet footing, visitors edge onto a fenced viewpoint at Dry Falls. Bottom photo: Its own island, a bush glows with autumn colors in the basin below the rim.

Here comes a big white poodle with green feet. He has thick, dripping algae socks after wading into Dry Falls Lake and now stinks like rotting fish. The lake’s gummy bottom, the scum’s awful odor — that’s one happy dog.

Me too. Stinky poodle aside, few of this region’s natural spectacles are grander than ancient Dry Falls. The rocky rim, a 3.5-mile curve standing 400 feet high, wraps around a basin gouged by history’s most enormous flood — a ferocious event that has joined with volcanoes and glaciers as the primary sculptors of our surrounding terrain. Heck, many of us drive to work each day through land shaped by fire, ice, and torrential flooding, and never think twice about it. We’re lucky, of course, because nothing slows the commute from, say, Coulee City to Wenatchee like a major geologic cataclysm.

This huge watery event — known as the Missoula Floods — burst from behind a glacial dam about 15,000 years ago and scoured a lot of North Central Washington down to bare rock. All kinds of giant ripples, giant sand bars, and giant pebble deposits still exist around the region because the water itself — a giant surging river — was hundreds of feet deep. At one point, Portland, Ore., was under 400 feet of water and, quite frankly, is still a bit clammy.

Whip into the Dry Falls parking lot (right off SR 17) and you’ll find yourself at the edge of a stunning abyss that scientists claim was a waterfall ten times the size of Niagara. A palette of marvelous colors — greens, blues, yellows, reds — carpets the basin’s lake-filled floor and shifts according to season, cloud cover, and sun position. Don’t skip the visitors center, which has the area’s most detailed explanation of the floods, displays on local native peoples and some good info on ice age plants and wildlife.

I’d never seen the Dry Falls rim from waaaay below, so we tooled through Sun Lakes State Park (two miles south of the visitors center) to find a web of dirt fishing roads beneath dramatic basalt cliffs. While the poodle greened-up in the lake, we hiked — well, it was more like scrambling — up loose debris slopes to shady viewpoints. It was easy to imagine we were at the bottom of an ancient watercourse because the river banks — sheer cliffs 400 feet high — funneled south, stretching as far as we could see.

Magnificent.

Details: Dry Falls and its excellent visitors center are about 58 miles east of Wenatchee, just south of Hwy. 2 on SR 17. The parking lot is open year-round, but call the visitors center (509-632-5214) to make sure a staff member is on hand before you make the trip. Access to the basin floor is through Sun Lakes State Park and the adjoining Sun Lakes Resort. 

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(Photo: A visitor inspects a turbine blade’s cross-section at the Wild Horse visitor center.)

Whoa … the world is spinning, all topsy-turvy, a blurred spiral of crazy towers and humming whirligigs, spinning, spinning …

“Did you sign our guest book?” asks the nice lady from the welcome desk. She’s strolled over to the arrowhead display to check on me, gazing a bit woozily past the flint chips to the giant turbines lining the arid ridges of the Wild Horse Wind & Solar Facility. The slowly rotating blades are hypnotic.

This is one of the better Sunday drives from Wenatchee, and I highly recommend it before the snow flies. Otherwise, its breezy perch on Whiskey Dick Mountain can be dastardly frigid.

The wind farm, about 75 miles south of Rocky Reach Dam (another fluid-powered generator), is located on the back road between Vantage and Ellensburg. It has 127 giant pinwheels, each producing enough electricity to power 540 houses for a year, and one old-style windmill that seems to spin desperately, embarrassed, not powering a darn thing.

One of the site’s big treats is the visitor center, a post-and-beam structure patterned after a Dutch barn. No nails, apparently, just pegs in holes — which might lead a devoted nail man to question the structure’s sturdiness, but not its beauty.  Scattered throughout are well-designed displays on the area’s early residents, a history of the Missoula floods, how solar panels work, and just what the heck we’re looking at outside the huge windows.

We’re looking at this: 9,000 acres of undeveloped shrub-steppe, dry as Saltine crackers, dotted with turbines 351-feet tall from base to blade-tip, each prop blade weighing 7 tons and capable of reaching 156 mph at the very tip, all standing there shooting the breeze, which in dire times can reach 120 miles per hour.

In other places, anti-wind folks have argued that the blades make too much noise, slice birds, and ruin views.  But in this desolate spot above the Columbia River, the spinning turbines approach high-art as they swing their arms to make Seattle’s toast, light the back steps, and warm water for the baby’s bath.

Details: The visitor center at the Wild Horse Wind & Solar Facility, owned by Puget Sound Energy, is open daily from 9 am to 5:30 pm, April 1 through Nov. 30. If it’s snowing, you’d better check that they’re open (509-964-7815) before making the drive. You can lengthen your adventure with stops at two other notable attractions: “Grandfather Cuts Loose the Ponies,” a fantastic metal sculpture just off I-90 north of the Vantage bridge, and the Gingko Petrified Forest State Park, which has a museum in Vantage and interpretive trails a little further down the road.

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