My friend Charleen grew up on a farm near a town in the Palouse called Dusty. We didn’t get a chance to visit Dusty on this trip but I think I can see how it got its name. The Palouse is a rich farming region and crops are rotated throughout the growing seasons so there are always tractors plowing and discing tracts in preparation for planting. The fields are dry so tractor treads and wheels kick up voluminous clouds of dust. The early evening we visited Steptoe Butte, farmers were still plowing their fields as long as there was light and the dust clouds wafted across the fields beneath us. The tractor kicking up the dust in this photograph is somewhere to the right out of sight. The tree and shrub in the lower right appear at a road intersection. With very rare exceptions like these, the rolling hills are bare of trees.
