The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

I always get a feeling of Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies Smiling At Me" when I see the beautiful Blue Mountains, spotting them as I drive back and forth to Walla Walla.

This feeling is felt many times by many people over the years. Many people tell me so.

The poet Joaquin Miller, operating the Mossman Express between Walla Walla and Lewiston in 1861, was so impressed with their evanescing hues that he declared 'The Blue Mountains are the most beautiful in the world.' But one must look at them every day to really see them.

Undoubtedly, an expedition of David Thompson (1811) Thompson's French-Canadian boatmen were the first to gaze across country at what Lewis and Clark called the Southeast Mountains -- Professor W.D. Lyman described in his "History of Old Walla Walla County" these mountains:

While most mountains are blue, these are blue blue. They are all shades of blue, indigo, aquamarine, violet, purple, amethyst, lapis lazuli, everything that one can think of to denote variations of blueness.

To this might be added slate, sapphire, turquoise, powder Alice (color of her dress in Alice In Wonderland), azure and delphinium in the long list of changing hues.

Another characteristic feature of these mountains is the fact that they do not so much constitute a range or chain, like the long, narrow, regular Cascade Mountain Range, as a huge mass with prongs radiating from something like a central axis, which might be considered the great granite and limestone knot of peaks about Wallowa Lake, of which Eagle Cap is the loftiest, over 9,000 feet in elevation.

The value of the Blue Mountains is in the condensation n the atmosphere that drops upon the plains below in rain and snow. Without this vast reservoir of salvation to aid growing, this Inland Empire would be a desert. It couldn't even be irrigated because in the absence of the Blue Mountains there would be no available stream for distribution.

We are all so blessed to live around such beauty, but know we "can't live just on scenery alone."