Columbia River and the Mounts St Helens and Rainier

With all these miles being driven it is good that our car, a decent sized Kia is doing 45 miles or so to a US gallon (smaller than ours as regular readers will know) and that filling it up costs about $20 (about £15).  We’ve rolled through southern Idaho, missing out on the undoubted delights of Moscow and Walla Walla.  I could assume that Russian emigres might have named the former but I can’t imagine a bunch of Aussies coming through Ellis Island and pitching up here in Idaho.   The landscape now though is surprising, consisting of mile upon mile of undulating golden grain stubble glinting in the sun with distant mountains as always guarding the horizons.  We’re seeing a lot of undulating but still no potatoes.

Before we got here I had assumed in my ignorance that there were the mid-western plains, then the Rocky Mountains and then a bit more plains and then the Pacific.  I had thought that The Rockies would be a bit more like the Alps, a big barrier to be crossed whereas they seem to be interspersed with big open (yes, undulating) landscapes and then some more mountain.  Then further to the west is The Cascade range running north to south and these are the most seismically active range in North America.  All the volcanic eruptions in the last 200 years in North America have been in The Cascades.

I haven’t yet mentioned Lewis and Clark, respectively Meriwether and William who set off from St Louis with forty others in 1804 heading north along the River Missouri and then westwards hoping to find a waterway to the Pacific and to explore generally as they went.  I don’t seem to meet so many Meriwethers these days.  We seem to have hit upon their meandering trail on a number of occasions and if they hadn’t met up with a French Canadian trapper and more particularly his Shoshone wife, Sacagawea they would never have survived.  She became the guide, translator and contact with the local tribes.  In two years Lewis and Clark travelled about 8,000 miles and reached the Pacific at the end of 1805 at a place they called Cape Disappointment.  Bit of a story there I think.  Then they had to turn round and head back to St Louis to a heroes’ welcome, but what I’d really like to know is what happened to Sacagawea.

When we do get to the Columbia River it’s scarcely more than half a mile wide and is a state border with Washington to the north and Oregon to the south.  Yes it is a big river and is five miles wide at the mouth 200 miles or so downriver at Astoria.  No, not a cinema but a town named after the fabulously wealthy Astor of hotel fame.  The north bank has a standard two lane blacktop with great views across the river and then we pass Stonehenge.  Not a town set up by Wiltshire immigrants but a full sized and finished replica artisanally crafted in tasteful concrete.  We were past it before we realised and didn’t go back but it was commissioned by a businessman as a memorial to those from Klickitat County who had died in World War I.  It seemed to be a bizarre choice of memorial but hey, this is America.

These long journeys are broken by view stops, photo stops, changing driver stops and coffee stops.  At the Bigfoot Coffee Shop, cue lots of things Bigfootish, a note on the till said “We don’t have WiFi, pretend it’s 1995, talk to each other” which I rather liked.  I’d always thought Bigfoot or Bigfeet I suppose because there would have to be more than one, was a Canadian invention but there seems to be a Washington State one as well.  Mind you, I still think Bigfoot is Chewbacca having a day away from all that flying a spacecraft.

The Columbia River used to have some huge rapids which disappeared under water when hydro-electric dams were installed.  Celilo Falls disappeared in 1957; they were only 22 feet high but the sixth largest falls in the world by volume and they had been a hugely important site for the native tribes.  People from as far away as Alaska and the Great Plains had met here for centuries to fish and to trade goods.  When that Lewis and Clark passed this way in 1805 they recorded that they were amazed at the number and variety of people they met here.  We visited the very impressive (and free to visit) Bonneville Dam, completed in the 1930s and extended in the 1980s when the river was widened, a town was moved and generating capacity was doubled.  The engineering was incredible and I think Newt was particularly taken by the turbines but we all enjoyed the viewing windows set into the side of the fish weirs which enable salmon, sturgeon and various other fish to swim upriver to spawn in the same spot they were spawned however many years previously.  We just sat and watched as dozens of two to three feet long salmon of various breeds made their way upstream.  It was a lot better than television.  The fish are counted but machines can’t distinguish between different breeds of fish so human counters are employed.  They sit watching, identifying and counting the fish for an eight hour shift with a break every hour.  Just imagine.  Still, having seen a bit of American football my guess is that fans of the game are sought out as ideal counters as long as they can stand the excitement.

Having driven SW across Idaho and then west along the Columbia, we now head north into the forests and well, Bigfoot country I suppose.  Shoulda brought my Bigfoot spray.  This was the worst day for weather we’ve had as we drove through miles of forest with poor signage and not much in the way of helpful maps in mist and rain heading to Mount St Helens.  Having driven for some considerable way along an access road we came to the lookout point directed towards the northern slope which had collapsed and then exploded in 1980.  We had a stupendous view of thick mist.  Mt St Helens is of course part of The Cascade range I mentioned earlier.  That 1980 eruption had been expected because the side of the mountain had been bulging at a rate of five feet a day.  Eventually the biggest landslide in recorded history took the side out of the mountain, the top collapsed and the eruption was estimated as more powerful than 1500 atomic bombs.  The mountain lost 1300 feet in height, over 185 miles of road were destroyed and 230 square miles of forest was buried under rock and ash.  While we didn’t see the mountain we certainly saw some of the impressive devastation even 36 years on.  Lots of dead trees still stand with their tops ripped off and many more lay where they fell.  It looks just like those photos of First World War battlefields with skeletal trees still just standing and of course in the mist it was similarly monochromatic and definitely eerie.

We did however see the truncated top of St Helens a day or so later from Mount Rainier (pronounced Raneer).  At 14,411 feet Rainier is an impressive snow covered and glacier clad peak, standing isolated rather than in a line of lesser peaks and that isolation makes it look even more impressive.  This is also a volcano and one story I saw suggested that if it went up like Mt St Helens, Seattle would be covered by the mudflows.  For now, it seems peaceful.  While about a dozen glaciers circle the peak, the one most easily seen from the visitor centre direction, the Nisqually Glacier is obviously much degraded with a scraped bare valley extending for miles down the side of the mountain.  If it was less recently reduced in size the sides of the glacial valley would have begun to gain some vegetation rather than being just rock.   Mount Rainier was particularly attractive, not just because we had the luck to see it in full sunshine and cold clear air with a top free from cloud but because of the variety and colours of the plants growing on it.  The visitor centre at about 5,400 feet was crowded on this sunny Sunday and was surrounded by autumnal red and yellow shades extending some way up the mountainside.  Mt Rainier is noted as being one of the flowery places of the world and I would just love to see it in springtime.  Just one other thing about this place.  They get a lot of snow here and the winter record which from memory was some 20 or so years ago was about 95 feet, yes feet not inches. 

Between Rainier and Seattle we saw signs indicating Volcano Eruption Escape Routes which I can’t help feeling would be as much use as those “hide under a table in the event of a nuclear explosion” instructions.  Nearer the coast there were lots of Tsunami Evacuation Route signs or more disturbingly Not a Tsunami Evacuation Route.  Clearly this is not an area for those of a more nervous disposition.  I can’t help pondering how it affects property prices.

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