VAF 2026 Bus Tours

Columbia River Plateau: Atomic Space. Native Soil. Geologic Time.

Walla Walla, Washington

May 27-30, 2026

Amanda C. Roth Clark, Whitworth University, Dean of the Library & Special Programs, co-chair

J. Philip Gruen, Washington State University, School of Design and Construction, co-chair 

Thursday Bus Tours (Select 1)

May 28, 2026

Please Note for all Thursday Tours:

• 7:00 am - 8:00 am: Breakfast sandwiches and coffee will be available in the hotel prior to tour departures.
• Lunch and snacks are provided on the tours.

Thursday, Option 1: Pendleton and the West 

This tour heads into Oregon, onto the lands of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and into Pendleton, often framed as the “real” West. Our morning begins with a drive south from Walla Walla, crossing the state line into dryland wheat country at the foot of the Blue Mountains before entering the reservation.

Our approach to the tribally owned and operated Tamástslikt Cultural Institute is marked by both the Wildhorse Casino and Resort and a deliberately meandering road that draws visitors into a locally grounded, Indigenous way of moving through the landscape.

The museum’s architecture and exhibits extend this invitation, and we will have time to explore before continuing west toward Pendleton, where expectations shaped by myths of false fronts, saddlemakers, and cowboy hats must contend with a layered townscape.

Much of that imagery remains materially present. We pass the still active Pendleton Woolen Mills, in operation for more than a century, and stop at the famous Pendleton Round-Up, opened just for our group, for boxed lunches in the grandstand and a brief look into Happy Canyon Arena. The afternoon brings us back to downtown Pendleton, gathering at the repurposed Carnegie Library before choosing among guided tours (see registration page) or self-guided routes through downtown or nearby neighborhoods shaped by ordinary dwellings interspersed with more “polite” houses from the turn of the last century. The day concludes back in Walla Walla, where both tours reconvene over hors d’oeuvres at the repurposed Gesa Power House Theatre, an 1890s building that once supplied electricity to most of the city, followed by a general conference welcome and the keynote address. Afterward, participants are encouraged to explore Walla Walla’s dining scene on their own.

Thursday, Option 2: Walla Walla Land

Walla Walla unfolds as both a city and its surrounding environment, an inviting sweep of vineyards, river valleys, and rolling hills whose layered and complicated histories this tour brings into view through a sequence of memorable places. We begin at Whitman Mission National Historic Site, where a long familiar story about the 1847 events and the settlement that traversed the Oregon Trail has been rethought through close collaboration between the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the National Park Service, dramatically reshaping how this landscape is understood.

From there, we head west to Frenchtown, a former fur trade settlement along the river where Indigenous people, French Canadian traders, and Métis families once lived in close proximity. A reconstructed cabin offers a tangible encounter with this earlier, cross-cultural world.

Our route then carries us through a stunning agricultural landscape in the far southeastern limits of Washington's famous wheat-growing Palouse region. We will gather for lunch at the Mikkelson Barn (1910), a state heritage barn, which features one of the region's few restored wooden grain elevators. 

In the afternoon, participants have the option to step inside the Walla Walla Foundry for rare access to its working factory grounds, where some of the world’s best-known sculptors have their work cast in bronze, in factory buildings typically closed to the public. The tour concludes with a self-guided walk-through downtown Walla Walla, where two vacant historic buildings—a former YMCA and a former department store, both once central to the life and pulse of the city and now awaiting redevelopment—will be opened specially for conference participants, alongside many others accessible during regular business hours. From there, attendees may walk or ride to the Gesa Power House Theatre, once Walla Walla’s principal source of electricity—to reconvene with the Pendleton tour for hors d’oeuvres, the conference welcome, and keynote address. Following this event, conference-goers are invited to enjoy Walla Walla’s lively dining scene on their own.

 

Friday Bus Tours (Select 1)

May 29, 2026

Please Note for all Friday Tours:

• 7:00 am - 8:00 am: Breakfast sandwiches and coffee will be available in the hotel prior to tour departures.
• Lunch and snacks are provided on the tours.

Friday, Option 1: Atomic Space: Hanford, Richland, East Pasco

Today we step into the vast and complicated landscapes of atomic space, tracing the Manhattan Project’s legacy from abandoned river towns and wartime worlds of work and housing to the everyday spaces of life and community that took shape during the Cold War and beyond.

An approximately one hour drive to the Hanford Site carries us through one of the most dramatic stretches of the Columbia River corridor, where visitors can imagine the Ice Age floods surging through the landscape and slamming into the Wallula Gap, carving ravines and striations as we loosely trace the pathways of settlers who followed in the wake of Lewis and Clark. With the generous cooperation of the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Park Service, and guided by authorized Department of Energy docents, we have the opportunity to spend a few hours at the remote Hanford Site: a setting shaped by engineering acuity, environmental transformation, displacement, and secrecy. During our visit, we will explore a few pre-Manhattan Project sites that still remain now more than eighty years after the wartime clearance of the area, including traces of former towns, agricultural landscapes, and Indigenous presence that once animated this landscape.

From Hanford we travel past Richland’s Uptown Shopping Center, one of the nation’s earliest suburban shopping centers, to the Richland Community Center for boxed lunches, which may be enjoyed indoors or at nearby Howard Amon Park along the Columbia River. Participants may stroll along the Richland Parkway, originally envisioned as the civic center of a planned wartime town, before joining guided or self-guided walks through Richland’s Alphabet Houses, a remarkably intact company town neighborhood that embodied DuPont’s carefully calibrated ideals of domestic life for many wartime workers and their families. Though most houses have changed over time, conference goers can still readily distinguish the standardized house types and plans, making the neighborhood an unusually legible landscape of mid-twentieth century planning and everyday life.

We then drive along the Kennewick shoreline, where the 1990s discovery of what became known as the Ancient One drew international attention to deep human histories embedded in this area, before crossing into Pasco’s commercial downtown and passing over rail corridors that long structured patterns of movement and separation in the region. At Kurtzman Park, we will learn about a historically African American community that built and sustained itself despite profound material inequities, and how the park and its surrounding spaces were created through collective labor and advocacy. A few buildings and open spaces still bear witness to that legacy of resilience. We conclude at Sacajawea Historical State Park, at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, where Maya Lin’s Story Circles frame overlapping narratives of time, nature, settlement, memory, change, and loss within a quiet riverbank setting. We then return to Walla Walla for another evening in town.

Friday, Option 2: 1/2 Day: Richland and East Pasco

This tour departs the Marcus Whitman Hotel around 11AM on Friday morning. The tour bypasses the Hanford Site and heads straight to the Richland Community Center for boxed lunches, which may be enjoyed indoors or at nearby Howard Amon Park along the Columbia River. Participants may stroll along the Richland Parkway, originally envisioned as the civic center of a planned wartime town, before joining guided or self-guided walks through Richland’s Alphabet Houses, a remarkably intact company town neighborhood that embodied DuPont’s carefully calibrated ideals of domestic life for many wartime workers and their families. Though most houses have changed over time, conference goers can still readily distinguish the standardized house types and plans, making the neighborhood an unusually legible landscape of mid-twentieth century planning and everyday life.

We then drive along the Kennewick shoreline, where the 1990s discovery of what became known as the Ancient One drew international attention to deep human histories embedded in this area, before crossing into Pasco’s commercial downtown and passing over rail corridors that long structured patterns of movement and separation in the region. At Kurtzman Park, we will learn about a historically African American community that built and sustained itself despite profound material inequities, and how the park and its surrounding spaces were created through collective labor and advocacy. A few buildings and open spaces still bear witness to that legacy of resilience. We conclude at Sacajawea Historical State Park, at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, where Maya Lin’s Story Circles frame overlapping narratives of time, nature, settlement, memory, change, and loss within a quiet riverbank setting. We then return to Walla Walla for another evening in town.

Please contact Julia Griffith, VAF Program Associate, if you have any questions about the conference: conference@vafweb.org