Weird day trips from Spokane
The strangest Spokane finds are often a short drive out. These 11 day trips — Sierra Silver Mine Tour, Bird Aviation Museum & Invention Center, Artisans at the Dahmen Barn (Fence of 1,000 Wheels) and more — are each hand-vetted and sourced: ghost towns, hot-spring soaks, roadside oddities, and odd small-town museums worth the gas. A weird day trip is its own kind of date.
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Sierra Silver Mine Tour
About 80 miles east of Spokane off I-90, Wallace sits in the richest silver district on earth, and this tour…
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Bird Aviation Museum & Invention Center
Founded by Dr. Forrest Bird, a lifelong aviator who soloed a plane at 14 and went on to invent the first mass…
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Artisans at the Dahmen Barn (Fence of 1,000 Wheels)
A 1935 dairy barn in the rolling Palouse is ringed by a hand-built fence of more than a thousand salvaged whe…
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Sandpoint's Statue of Liberty (Lady Liberty of the Lake)
A roughly human-sized Statue of Liberty stands alone at the end of a short concrete pier jutting into Lake Pe…
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Steptoe Butte State Park
Steptoe Butte is a freak of deep time: a 400-million-year-old quartzite island poking up through the much you…
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Palouse Falls State Park
A 198-foot waterfall thunders into a deep plunge pool ringed by columnar basalt cliffs, the last surviving re…
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Spokane Astronomical Society Star Parties at Fishtrap
One of the oldest astronomy clubs in the United States hauls its telescopes out to a stretch of BLM scabland…
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Elberton Ghost Town
Roughly an hour south of Spokane in the rolling Palouse, Elberton was a busy timber and fruit town until decl…
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Gardner Cave at Crawford State Park
In the far northeast corner of Washington, almost on the Canadian border, Gardner Cave is the longest limesto…
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Dry Falls
Dry Falls is the ghost of the largest waterfall that ever existed: a 3.5-mile-wide, 400-foot cliff carved by…
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Steptoe Butte
A 3,612-foot quartzite knob jutting nearly a thousand feet above the otherwise rolling Palouse, Steptoe Butte…