The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

With the summer heat still baking the brown and brittle landscape, dog work would need to be restricted to the precious early morning hours of refuge. Fortunately, we were blessed with an overcast sky; one of the first to come of the early fall season. But the transition to autumn was in full swing, presenting a soothing canvas of large pines towering dark above the reddening of the Oregon grape and snowberry, and the fading yellow of elderberry leaves accented by their rich, black berry clusters.

The remains of an old road wound its way along a tributary of the Tucannon. The native shrubbery...