On a hot October afternoon, Dave Benscoter leads me into a thicket of trees rising from a slope along the edge of Steptoe Butte in eastern Washington. We trudge until a mess of branches—some bent low, crooked like a finger, others soaring toward the sun like Icarus—obscure the outline of his five-foot-nine-inch frame, currently draped in a T-shirt bearing the image of a whitetail buck. He stops, taps me, and points up. Craning his neck, he fixes his bespectacled eyes on an object the size of a tennis ball.
In the late 1800s, local legend James “Cashup” Davis erected a hotel at the top of the butte, a popular destination until travelers figured that navigating a rickety wagon up 3,600 feet was a surefire way to join the departed. (After it closed, the abandoned hotel became an after-hours booze-soaked hangout.) But Cashup also planted several hundred apple trees in the ravines below. Hundreds still stand, scattered like patchwork between overgrown brush and tilled wheat fields.
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