Following Water in the Magnificent North West – Washington

If we don’t have it, you don’t need it

Storefront in a remote area

Mount Adams in the early morning sun, another majestic mountain

Although it has not erupted for over 1,000 years, it is not considered extinct

Less than 520,000 years old – First ascent, like Mt. Shasta, in 1854

Second largest volcano after Mt Shasta in California

After crossing the toll Bridge of the Gods over the expansive Columbia River; I am now in Washington.  It is named after the first Bridge of the Gods, a 200-foot high natural geologic dam feature, created by the gigantic Bonneville slide in approximately 1100 CE, which blocked the Columbia River near Cascade Locks, Oregon.  The river eventually breached the dam and washed much of it away.  The massive event is part of the Native American lore that gave it this name. 

The Pacific Crest Trail crosses the Columbia River here (free to pedestrians).  The Bridge of the Gods is also the lowest elevation on the entire trail. 

Following his trans-Atlantic flight, Colonel Charles Lindbergh in 1927, flew the Spirit of St. Louis up the Columbia Gorge from Portland, low over the new bridge and then made a 180 degree turn and flew under the bridge, back to the Portland airport.   

Artist: Paul A. Lanquist (PAL)

It is mid-June and it still gets cold at altitude.  The road around Mount Adams has a lot of snow, the lakes and rivers barely thawing out.  But it is lush, clean, fresh, and resplendent.

Silver Falls, Mt Rainier

Stonehenge Memorial, 1929

Cement replica to size, by Samuel Hill

Stonehenge Memorial, a Monument to WWI military, overlooks the Columbia River.  ‘In memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country.  This monument is erected in the hope that others inspired by the example of their valor and their heroism may share in that love of liberty and burn with that fire of patriotism which death alone can quench.’  Although I prefer the original English ‘Stonehenge’, I like the sentiment Samuel Hill had for building this memorial.   

Samuel Hill, the famous road baron and patron of this region, established the Maryhill townsite with post office, hotel, general store, and a beautiful, though unfinished, French mansion now turned into The Maryhill Museum of Art.  His tomb is 40 yards away, on the opposite side of the Stonehenge Memorial.  He was a Quaker Pacifist that said, after visiting the ‘true’ Stonehenge: ‘After all our civilization, the flower of humanity still is being sacrificed to the god of war on fields of battle.’  From that inspiration came this monument (today however, the sacrifice legend is generally discredited, current belief is that Stonehenge was a device used by astronomers to measure time).

What used to be a very desolate area is now being surrounded by newly planted vineyards.  Sam Hill would’ve loved to see agriculture finally taking hold in the area.

Maryhill Museum of Art

French mansion (L) mixed with modern addition (R)

Sits on the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail (more on that below)

Brushing, Mike Suri, 2009

Outdoor sculpture garden at the Maryhill Museum

Often windy around here – this piece seems to fit the landscape

As an advocate for paved roads, Sam Hill had ten miles of experimental roads built near Maryhill in hopes to change people’s view of macadam.  It is still in use today for pedestrians, bicyclists and skateboarders only.  He devoted much attention to advocating construction of modern roads in Washington and Oregon.  You can thank Mr. Hill for the scenic Columbia River Highway where today sits the Vista House (previous post).  You may know him better as the person who headed the construction of the Peace Arch, on I-5, at the border between the USA and Canada between Blaine, WA and Surrey, BC. 

Of the Historic Columbia River Highway (HCRH), the King of Roads, Poetry in Stones:

‘On starting the surveys, our first business was to find the beauty spots,

or those points where the most beautiful things along 

the line might be seen in the best advantage, and if possible, 

to locate the road in such a way as to reach them.’
Samuel Lancaster, HCRH Engineer

The Historic Columbia River Highway is a tale of visionaries, civic leaders, skilled engineers and talented craftsmen.  And they did it with elegance, reconciling the beauty of nature with the needs of civilization.

Together with Engineer Samuel Lancaster, lawyer, ‘good roads’ advocate and entrepreneur, Sam Hill envisioned more than a route through the Columbia River Gorge.  He inspired the construction of a highway to rival the great roads of Europe. 

In 1986, the Columbia River Gorge became the first and only National Scenic Area in the United States.

Over the years, this grand road was replaced by a modern highway and many of its treasures lost.  Tunnels were filled and bridges destroyed, but thanks to the efforts of many dedicated supporters, the Highway is being restored.  Today, you can still drive segments of the Historic Columbia River Highway and walk or bicycle along once-abandoned sections that have been restored as the Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail.

Hanford REACH Interpretive Center, Richland, WA

Learning about the Manhattan Project as well as the Big Floods

Shortly after the construction of the Bonneville Dam (previous post), construction of the Grand Coulee Dam began.  In 1941 when its construction was completed, it was hailed as the Eighth Wonder of the World.  The dam contains nearly 12 million cubic yards of concrete, making it one of the largest concrete structures in the world. 

Building the dam provided jobs for thousands of people.  No other public works project had a greater impact on the development of the Pacific Northwest.  The dam was the crown jewel of President Roosevelt’s National Public Works Projects.  Today Grand Coulee Dam is the largest energy producer in North America, producing as much power as six nuclear plants, with zero emission.  It also created the 151-mile-long Lake Roosevelt, which irrigated 670,000 acres with 1,339 miles of irrigation canals and 3,500 miles of drains and waterways. 

In 1943, its electricity was used for plutonium production at Hanford, which was part of the top-secret Manhattan Project.  The demand for power at that project was so great that two generators originally meant for the Shasta Dam were installed at Grand Coulee to speed-up the installation schedule.  Arguably the most important component of the Hanford Engineering Works (HEW), the Columbia, offered a near limitless supply of the clean, cold water that was necessary to maintain the reactors cool.

Five main criteria for site selection (Hanford was chosen after Oak Ridge and Los Alamos) were:

1)             12 x 16 miles of manufacturing area.
2)             10 miles from nearest public highway or railroad. 

3)             20 miles from nearest town of 1,000 or more. 

4)             Available 5,000 gallons/minute of water.  
5)             Access to electrical supply of 100,000 kw

Hanford Construction Camp

The folks who lived here were called Boomers on Wheels (Ted Van Arsdol).  They lived in tiny trailers due to the severe housing shortage.  There were 3,600 trailer spaces.  Each trailer was 147 sqft and could accommodate an average of 3.7 people and didn’t have a bathroom, only a kitchen, sitting area and bedroom.  They nearly provided the equivalent of ‘normal’ family life since barracks were gender specific.  Combination laundry/bathhouse building was provided for each 30 trailers.  They were the Nerve Centers where small neighborhood gatherings happened.  Supper parties were held there since the trailers were too small for entertaining.

People made many homey touches to the trailer spaces to make them uniquely their own.  White picket fences and white painted rocks were used to establish their territory.  Wooden framed canopies were provided to help cut the heat, and residents were given grass seeds and hoses for landscaping. 

To that, add 131 men’s barracks, 64 women’s barracks, 8 mess halls and separate beer halls for men and women.  Additionally, you could find an auditorium, a theater, a butcher shop, a grocery store, a Sears outlet, a hospital, a post office, and a bus system.  Over time they eventually added banks, watering holes, churches, a baseball field, and a swimming pool.

Nearly overnight, it became the fourth largest city in Washington and the largest voting district in the USA in 1944.  It had the largest general delivery post office in the world. 

There were only about 6,700 people living along the 30-mile stretch of the Columbia River between White Bluffs and Hover.  A year later the construction camp at Hanford was home to 51,000 people.  In spring 1945, the camp was closed as the bulk of the construction was completed.  In less than two years, 1,200 buildings, most living quarters of some sort, were built to accommodate 137,000 people who passed through the area.  People didn’t stay at the camp very long.

Heat, desolation, wind, always the wind – in excess of 30 mph gusting to 70 mph + sand working its way into everything.  Called ‘termination winds’ as folks quit by the thousands after a good wind/sandstorm…

Interesting facts:

One Uranium pellet is equal to:

• 149 gallons of oil, or
• 17 million thermal units of natural gas, or
• 1,780 pounds of coal 
• Four pellets can power a typical home for one year.  
• Columbia Generating Station’s reactor = 28 million pellets, third largest producer of electricity in Washington behind Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams.  
• Only one woman, Leona Marshall Libby worked at Hanford; she solved the riddle of the B reactor’s xenon poisoning.  
• $2B Manhattan Project had been called the largest organized construction project since the pyramids.  
• The 51-mile Hanford Reach is the last free-flowing non-tidal stretch of the Columbia in the USA.
• Hanford Reach is the last remaining expanses of shrub-steppe habitat

'Compartmentalization of knowledge was the heart of security’ General Leslie R. Groves wrote in Now It Can Be Told, 1983.  My rule was simple and not capable of misunderstanding – each man should know everything he needed to know to do his job and nothing else.  This rule was strictly enforced by HEW and the FBI who ensured that work-related topics were absent from any conversations between coworkers and family members.  Years later, former workers still speculate about fellow employees who talked one day and were mysteriously gone the next.

While no espionage is known to have occurred at Hanford during the war, the design of the first Soviet’s nuclear reactor closely resembled Hanford’s test reactor, a coincidence that, at the very least suggest some success on the part of Russian spies.  Richard Rhodes

It was a very raucous place where security forces spent as much time fighting gambling, prostitution and rampant drunkenness as they did, looking for spies. 

Nearby Richland (Tri-Cities, WA)

Richland is where people continued living after Hanford was dismantled.  Where counter-intelligence agents kept tabs on residents, background investigations were conducted, local police had copies of keys for every house in town, taking photos required the approval of area managers, phone lines were tapped for evidence of loose talk and outgoing mail was read.  Even the phonebook was stamped ‘CLASSIFIED’.  Only HEW employees and their families could live here, carefully cultivating an image of normalcy. 

‘Nuclear physics is now a mature science with an associated complex technology’ Philip Abelson, UC Berkley, ‘But in the 1930’s, it was an amateur sport…’  Today it’s hard to grasp exactly how theoretical nuclear physics was at the time of the Manhattan Project, a time when some of the 20^th century’s greatest scientific minds helped end a brutal war, and, in the process, changed the world forever.

Part of the National Park Service

Ice Age Floods National Trail established in 2009

The Ice Age Floods Geologic Trail, Montana to Washington, Oregon and Idaho

During the last ice age, about 18,000 to 12,000 years ago, an immense lake covered the western edge of Montana, Lake Missoula. The lake water was trapped by a glacier along the Idaho panhandle that acted as a dam. When the dam melted, the entire lake, as much water as in Lake Ontario and Erie combined (3,000 square miles), surged across Idaho, Oregon and Washington to the sea.

The Ice Age Floods carved a huge, bare, basalt channels and dry falls, stranded massive boulders, deposited gravel bars whose fantastic scale dwarfs their modern counterparts, scoured channels, back-flushed rivers and ponded-in temporary lakes.

In about only two days, 500 cubic miles of water roared across the Pacific Northwest landscape in a wall of water up to eight hundred feet deep and washed away everything in its path in a matter of days.  The waterflow of this mega flood was as great as the combined flow of all the rivers in the world times ten!

This epic flush sounds like the flash flood of all flash floods, but the process happened repeatedly (+/- 40 times) during the last ice age and during previous ice ages as well.  Geologists calculated that the Ice Age Floods created their own earthquakes as they thundered across the landscape.

These mega floods gouged out basins along the Columbia River, deposited 200-ton boulders throughout the area and wore out the territory now known as the Channeled Scablands.  The unflattering term sometimes is applied to rough or barren regions with little or no economic potential, especially for agriculture.

NASA base image shows eastern WA Channeled Scabland from space. 

Major scabland tracts are identified:

1-Moses Coulee, 2-Grand Coulee, 3-Telford-Crab, 4-Cheney-Palouse.

www.hugefloods.com

The Channeled Scablands extend from the area around Spokane, west to the Columbia River

near Vantage and southwest to the Snake River near Pasco. They are known as the Channeled Scablands because they are crisscrossed by long channels cut into the bedrock, called coulees. 

Scabland from the Telford-Crab Coulee area (#3 above)

The big flood hypothesis was first theorized by a geologist names J. Harlen Bretz in 1923.  His theory was very controversial and other geologists thought he was nuts.  It was not until the early 1970’s that his mega flood theory was finally accepted, with the help of NASA’s satellite imagery that clearly revealed the network of channels carved out by the mega floods.

I have driven through the Channeled Scablands innumerable times over the last 25 years, yet I never knew how they were formed.  The force of nature is unsurpassed.

Thanks to all this water, Washington is a top producer of the following crops:

• #1 in US = apples, sweet cherries, pears, concord grapes, red raspberries, carrots for processing, hops, spearmint and peppermint oil, wrinkled seed peas. 
• #2 in US = apricots, asparagus, grapes, potatoes, green peas, corn for processing, onions, nectarines.  Also #2 for diversity of crops, more than 300
• #3 in US = export of food and agricultural products at $9B/year.  Top exports: wheat, corn, apples, processed potatoes, cherries, milk.  
  

Cape Disappointment Lighthouse (for boats coming from the south)

There is also the North Head Lighthouse (for boats coming from the north)

Difference between the two, southern one has black and white stripes

A large cargo ship leaving the mighty Columbia

Calm day but you still need a bar pilot to guide you

Looking towards Oregon from Cape Disappointment, WA

Interesting church in nearby Oysterville

Don’t you just love this barn?  So pristine yet old…

Rugged Cape Flattery, view to the south

Oldest permanently named feature in Washington State

Named by James Cook in 1778

Northwesternmost point in contiguous USA

Where the Strait of Juan de Fuca joins the Pacific Ocean

Overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the town is situated at one of the most remote and breathtaking coastlines of Washington!  The Makah, or Cape People, welcome you while you are in Neah Bay, the beginning of the world.  From their perspective they are not at the end of the road, but the beginning.

Makah meeting place near Hobuck Beach

Olympic Peninsula

Makah carving details

People totems outside Makah Museum

The waters off Cape Flattery and Tatoosh Island have always been frequented by the Makahs on seasonal fishing and hunting trips.  From Cape Flattery, Makah ancestors sighted early European expeditions searching for the northwest passage and the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Welcome from the Makah Tribe. We call ourselves ‘Kwih-dich-chuh-ahtx’ or ‘people who live by the rocks and seagulls’. The name Makah, which was given to us by our neighboring tribes, means ‘generous with food’. We have lived at the most northwestern point in what is now the contiguous United States since the beginning of time.

For thousands of years we have hunted whales and seals and fished in the great waters which border our home. Throughout our history, the great Western Red Cedar tree has provided the material from which we have housed and clothed ourselves. Cedar has also provided the means by which we have fed ourselves by providing material for canoes and tools.

In 1970 tidal erosion uncovered an ancient whaling village at Ozette, parts of which had been covered by a mud slide hundreds of years ago. The subsequent artifacts which were found have now classified Ozette as one the most significant archaeological discoveries ever made in North America!

Cape Alava, Ozette Archeological Site

The village of Ozette was located 15 miles south of Neah Bay and served as a year-round home for Makahs until the early 20th-century.

In the winter of 1969-1970 a storm caused the bank at the Ozette village location to collapse, exposing hundreds of perfectly preserved wooden artifacts! A hiker contacted the Makah Tribe, then the Tribe phoned Washington State University, and in April 1970, some two months after the storm, excavation of the Ozette Archaeological Site began.

Makah’s oral history told of a ‘great slide’ which buried a portion of Ozette long ago.  In collaboration with the Makah Tribe, archaeologists proved this oral history correct.  Radiocarbon dates demonstrated that a slide around the year 1750 buried six longhouses and their contents, locking the pre-contact wooden and wood-based artifacts in a blanket of mud.  The eleven-year excavation produced over 55,000 artifacts, which the Tribe kept on the reservation. 

The Makah museum came about from the Tribe’s desire to curate and interpret this outstanding and unique collection.  A full-sized longhouse has been constructed complete with bench planks, room dividers, and real smoked fish! The uneven floor is exactly as it was in the old longhouse excavated at Ozette.

The exhibits take one through the seasons of the year and the types of activities that were being practiced in pre-contact times. Many of these activities still make up the annual cycles of everyday Makah life centuries later!  

Interesting design in the sand

Yep – it’s upside down but I like it that way, it gets your attention

Olympic Peninsula

Makah Bay

Beach-combing find…

Olympic Peninsula

Moss on giant tree by Lake Crescent

So wet – even mailboxes are covered with moss

Everybody knows about the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest.  However, there are several lesser-known temperate rainforests, such as the Hoh Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula.  Everybody also knows Seattle’s reputation for being rainy all the time.  Seattle gets around three feet of rain a year, by comparison, the Hoh Rain Forest gets as much as 14 feet of rain a year.  

Hanging moss in Hall of Mosses of the Hoh Rain Forest

Like walking through a living green cathedral

Where banana slugs can reach 10” long!

The prevalent fog and mist contribute the equivalent of another 2.5 feet of rain, resulting in one of the world’s lushest rainforests.  The most common types of trees are Sitka Spruce and Western Hemlock (WA state tree), which can reach 300 feet tall and 7 feet in diameter.

Lush beards of clubmoss are attached to boughs but feed only on air and light.  The rainforest atmosphere supplies enough moisture and wind-borne nutrients.  Certain trees like these bigleaf maples support denser clusters of airplants or epiphytes (lichens and hanging mosses), depending on different types of limbs, available sunlight, and relative dampness.  

Largest Sitka spruce in Quinault Rainforest

Average rainfall 12’ per year

58’11” circumference, 191’ tall

About 1,000 years old

Also in this valley, are the World’s largest Western Red Cedar, Douglas Fir, and Mountain Hemlock.  The USA’s largest Yellow Cedar and Western Hemlock.  You certainly feel like you are surrounded by giants when visiting this area.

Olympic Peninsula

To the water that nourishes, the water that cleanses, the water that carves, the water that destroys, the water that buries, the water that produces energy, the water that gives life and hope.  Water of growth, water of change, water of history, no future without water… 

‘Water is the driving force of all nature.’

Leonardo da Vinci