Douglass County Washington is very sparsely populated that mainly produces a variety of agricultural crops. Amongst the most prominent are apples, cherries, peaches, and pears. All of those are grown primarily along the Columbia River valley. Rise up 2,000 feet to the higher plateau and the primary crops are grain, with wheat as the dominant crop. Many of the farms encompass hundreds and some thousands of acres which appears to the passerby as broad open landscapes. When snow covers the fields and the clouds clear you can see for more than a hundred miles in all directions.

This image shows a lonely stretch of state highway 172 with the Cascade mountains in the distant west. Come springtime, the snow covered field will burst to life with waving green fields of wheat and then turn to deep amber as harvest time approaches late in summer.