Exploring Eastern Washington in Google Maps

A meandering post, as I explore some sights in Google Maps. Eastern Washington is not unusual in that the coverage is uneven, some areas have fairly high resolution and clear details, others are blurry images. I believe that the high resolution images are aerial and the lower resolution ones are satellite images. You can see the boundary between the two right on the edge of the Eastern Washington University campus. The top half of the map is in high resolution, the bottom--well, you see:


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Exploring outward from Cheney (and favoring high resolution regions) we find some pretty cool stuff. I like this snakey ribbon of wheat snaking through the hills on the north edge of Cheney. Zoom in and you can see the tire tracks where the tractor turned around:


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Agriculture leaves some of the most visible and dramatic marks on the landscape. In much of the west agriculture = irrigation, and the orderly distribution of water creates patterns of green and brown not found in nature. This is especially true in the case of the large circular sprinklers that pivot around a central point. Here is a great image of these fields near Quincy:


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Roads are another easily visible landmark. Below is my second-favorite set of switchbacks in eastern Washington, the Old Spiral Road that drops off the Columbia Plateau down into Clarkston:


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Finally, I love this image of south eastern Washington where the Blue Mountains meet the Palouse farm country:


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Note: I found each of these images by browsing with Google Earth. But since Google Earth requires you to install a very large and resource-hungry program I chose the "View in Google Maps" function and copied the HTML to embed the images. The integration between Earth and Maps is excellent.