I visited the Yakima Canyon area in May 2004 as the desert began to bloom. While Washington is more known for its forests and volcanoes, Central Washington features some nice desert steppe terrain. Across the Cascade Crest the annual rainfall drops dramatically and so you have some shrubbrush desert areas. A lot of the agricultural land in this area was originally desert but has now been irrigated. Unfortunately I did not see much in the way of wildlife on this trip, except for huge numbers of birds. I do not have those slides scanned though and my digital does not have a strong enough zoom to get bird photos usually. Still, I think I got a few nice pictures on this spring hike: