Wallowa Mountains and Enterprise Oregon
This is part 8 of our trip through eastern Oregon. If you would like to start at the beginning in the Alvord desert click here.
We made it across the entire state of eastern Oregon. We started in the desert and drove through rural ranch lands, volcanic landscapes and now we are in the Wallowa Mountains in the north eastern corner of the state. I have been wanting to come here for years. It has been called the Alps of Oregon.
We arrived in Enterprise Oregon, an ideal home base for exploring the area. Terminal Gravity Brewing invited us in for lunch. There is something special about Pacific Northwest Beer and the Pubs that are attached to their breweries. The beer in the PNW is big. Really big. Whether you are having a 100+ IBU IPA or a deep dark Russian stout or a sour beer the beers have become art. Complex, bold and often high in alcohol.
The Pubs in the breweries tend to follow the same theme, decadent. Most often there will be very large gooey messy burgers, salads topped with cheese and meat, deep fried anything, Mac n Cheese….. you get the idea.
I love pub grub, I love big beers and the Pacific Northwest. So Terminal Gravity Brewing did everything right. The video further down in this post will show a few of the dishes they served us.
Terminal Gravity Brewing 
Wedge Salad
After lunch it was time to find our next B&B. We contacted Barking Mad Farm, a country Bed and Breakfast surrounded by the Wallowa mountains. It was perfect.
Breakfast the next morning was delicious, as all the breakfasts have been on this trip. I do not have photos but you can see it quite well in the video below. There were some delicious pistachio pancakes and I believe the neighbors pig on the plate.
Today is the day we would take the Wallowa Lake Tramway 3700 feet up to the top of Howard mountain. We have done this in the Swiss Alps and apparently this is a Swiss built gondola. We had been saving our two beers from Steens Mountain Brewing, you can read about that here, and even though it was only 10am, and freezing our plan was to have them at the top of the mountain. The video above has the entire adventure up the mountain.
The gondola is a Swiss-made tram, and was constructed in 1970 as the steepest vertical lift for a four passenger gondola in North America. It is powered by a 150 h.p. electric motor – and a gasoline engine auxiliary drive at the base, operating a single continuous loop cable 19,300′ in length. In just under 15 minutes we were taken from the bottom terminal at 4,450′ up to 8,150′ atop Mt. Howard.
Of course the views from the top of the mountain are spectacular! We are almost to the end of our trip. Tomorrow we will make our way to Joseph Oregon to visit Steins distillery, take a look at Hells Canyon go Railriding and finally end our overland adventure through eastern Oregon. Read the final post here.
