Ellensburg

Umtanum Creek Footbridge in Ellensburg, Washington

Yakima (pronounced "YAK-uh-maw") Canyon, where the Yakima River traverses a water gap through Manastash Ridge, is an obvious thoroughfare and was used by Native Americans for thousands of years, and then by Euro-American trappers and settlers into the 19th century. It was also an obvious route for a railroad, and the Northern Pacific Railway was built through it in the early 1880s, along the we…