White River Falls 3.0

February 19, 2023February 19, 2023 / Tom Kloster / 4 Comments

White River Falls during spring runoff

Every year, a growing number of summer visitors flock to White River Falls State Park to witness the spectacle pictured above, only to find a naked basalt cliff where the falls should be! The spring runoff has long since subsided by mid-summer, and field irrigation in Tygh Valley also draws heavily from the tributary streams that feed the river during the dry season. Worse, part of what’s left when this federally protected Wild and Scenic River finally reaches the park is diverted by a century-old waterworks into a side channel that bypasses the main falls. It’s a sad sight compared to the powerful show in winter and spring, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Many of these same visitors hike down to see the historic, century-old powerhouse at the base of the falls that once used the diverted river water to spin some of Oregon’s earliest hydroelectric turbines. Though mostly in ruins, the site is fascinating – yet the trail to it is a slick, sketchy goat path coming apart at the seams that hikers struggle with. This short hike doesn’t have to be this way.

The hidden lower tier and punchbowl is called Celestial Falls

Lower White River Canyon

Some hikers push beyond the historic powerhouse to the lesser-known lower falls, and then still further, to a dramatic view into the lower White River canyon. Here, the river finally has carved a rugged path to its confluence with the mighty Deschutes, just a few miles downstream. It’s a striking and beautiful riverside hike, but the “trail” consists of a maze of user paths that are gradually destroying the drifts of wildflowers along the canyon floor. This trail doesn’t have to be this way, either.

Lesser-known Lower White River Falls

In recent years, White River Falls State Park has also become a popular stop for cyclists touring the route from Maupin to Tygh Valley, then looping back through the Deschutes River canyon. While the park has an excellent restroom and day-use picnic area that would make for a terrific stopover, overnight camping is not allowed, even for cyclists camping in tents. This, too, does not have to be this way.

The increased popularity has begun to noticeably wear on the park. The good news is that in the past couple years Oregon Parks and Recreation (OPRD) rangers and the park’s dedicated volunteer park hosts have stepped up their efforts to care for the park infrastructure and get a handle on vandalism (mostly tagging) that had plagued the historic powerhouse. Still, much more is needed to unlock the amazing potential this park holds as a premier destination. It’s time to reimagine White River Falls.

Historic White River Powerhouse just downstream from the falls

[click here for a larger view]

Turbines inside the powerhouse a few years ago, before vandalism began to take a heavy toll. Oregon State Parks has since closed off entry with heavy barriers

[click here for a larger view]

As it stands, the park lacks a comprehensive vision for how its natural and historic wonders can best be protected, while still keeping pace with ever-growing numbers of visitors. It’s a surprisingly big and mostly undiscovered place, and an updated blueprint could achieve both outcomes: protecting and restoring the natural and historic landscape for future generations, while also making it accessible for all to explore and enjoy. While the park includes a surprising amount of backcountry now, White River Falls also holds the potential to become a much larger park that restores and showcases the unique desert landscape and ecosystem found here.

This article includes several proposals for new trails and campsites to better manage the growing demand and provide a better experience for visitors, expanding the park to better protect the existing resources, and even a re-plumbing of the waterworks to allow White River Falls to flow in summer as it once did before it was diverted more than a century ago.

An Unexpected Past

Grist mill at White River Falls in the late 1800s. This rare view reveals a northern cascading segment of the falls to have been part of the natural scene, and not created by the power plant diversion channel that was constructed in the early 1900s.

White River Falls was never envisioned as a park by the white migrants who settled in Tygh Valley and Wasco County in the mid-1800s. In their day, waterfalls were viewed mostly as obstacles to river navigation or power sources to run mills. The falls surely had a more spiritual and harmonious value to native peoples who had lived, fished and gathered along its banks for millennia before white settlers arrived. The Oregon Trail passed through Tygh Valley, and soon the new migrants had cleared the valley and began to build irrigation ditches to bring water to the cleared farmland. By the late 1800s, a grist mill was built at White River Falls, powered by the falling water.

By the early 1900s, the grist mill was replaced with a much more ambitious project, and the abandoned hydroelectric plant we see today was constructed at the base of the falls in 1910. A concrete diversion channel was built where the grist mill stood, and a low diversion dam brought a steady flow from the White River into a series of pipes and penstocks that powered the turbines below. Power from the new plant was carried north to The Dalles, one of the earliest long-distance hydroelectric transmission projects in the country.

Aerial view of the White River Powerhouse and network of penstocks taken in the early 1900s. The group of structures at the top of the photo were located where today’s picnic area and restrooms are now. This photo also shows the concrete dam holding the settling pond, in the upper right. This structure still exists today. The diversion dam is partly visible at the left edge of the photo, with its diversion pipe leading first to the settling pond, then to the lower penstock pipe leading down to the powerhouse at the bottom of this photo.

The White River is a glacial stream that flows from a glacier by the same name on Mount Hood’s south slope, just above Timberline Lodge. Because of its glacial origin, the hydro plant included a large settling pond to separate the fine, grey glacial till that gives the White River its name. The settling pond still survives today (albeit dry), along with the diversion dam and much of the pipe and penstock system. These features are all visible in the aerial photo (above) and described in the interpretive schematic (below) provided by Oregon State Parks.

[click here for a larger view]

After fifty years of operation, the powerhouse had become obsolete and fallen into disrepair, and by the early 1960s it was abandoned. Giant new dams on the Columbia and Deschutes rivers had long since eclipsed it, and the constant chore of separating glacial sediments from the river water made it costly to operate.

How white is the White River? This recent aerial view shows the White River flowing from the upper left corner toward its confluence with the Deschutes River, the wide, dark stream flowing from the lower left. When the crystal clear waters of the Deschutes mix with the silty glacial water of the White River during peak glacier melt in late summer, the result is a pale blue-green Deschutes River downstream from the confluence (flowing toward the middle right)

The site was an unlikely candidate for a new park, given the dilapidated buildings and pipelines scattered across the area. But thankfully, the raw power and beauty of White River Falls made the case for a second act as a public park and nature preserve borne from an industrial site. For many years, the reimagined White River Falls was simply the quiet “Tygh Valley Wayside”, and was way off the radar of most Oregonians. It only drew a few visitors and only the gravel parking area and main falls overlook were improved to a park standard.

Panoramic view of Lower White River Falls during spring high water. The basalt bench to the left marks where flood events on the river have repeatedly overtopped this ledge, scouring the bedrock

The park had one (hopefully) final scare in its natural recovery just over a decade ago, when Wasco County pitched a new hydroelectric plant at the site, promising “minimal impact” on the natural setting. Thankfully, Oregon State Parks expressed major concerns and the proposal died a quiet death. You can read an earlier blog article on this ill-conceived proposal here.

Over the past two decades, growth in the Wasco County and increased interest from Oregon’s west side population in the unique desert country east of Mount Hood has finally put White River Falls on the recreation map. Today, the parking area overflows with visitors on spring and summer weekends, and the park has become a deservedly well-known destination. The rugged beauty of the area, combined with the fascinating ruins from another era make it one of Oregon’s most unique spots. These are the elements that define the park, and must also be at the center of a future vision for this special place.

A new vision for the next century: White River Falls 3.0

New & Sustainable Trails

Weekend visitors skittering down the steep, slick path to the old powerhouse

The trail into the canyon as it exists today is deceptive, to say the least. It beings as a wide, paved path that crosses an equally wide plank bridge below the old sediment pond dam. Once across, however, it quickly devolves. Visitors are presented with a couple of reasonable-looking dead-ends that go nowhere (I will revisit one of those stubs in a moment), while a much more perilous option is the “official” trail, plunging down a slippery-in-all-seasons (loose scrabble in summer, mud in winter) goat path. Still, the attraction of the river below — and especially the fascinating powerhouse ruins – beckon, so most soldier on.

Soon, this sketchy trail reaches a somehow steeper set of deteriorating steps, built long ago with railroad ties and concrete pads. And still, the river continues to beckon, so most folks continue the dubious descent. The “official” trail then ends abruptly at the old powerhouse, where a popular beach along the river is a favorite wading spot in summer. This is the turnaround spot for most visitors. The return up the steps and scrabble of the goat path is challenging in any season, but it’s particularly daunting in summer, when desert heat reflecting off this south-facing wall of the canyon is blazing hot.

Hikers navigating the steep, deteriorating stairway section of the “official” goat path into White River canyon

Looking back at the loose cobbles and scrabble that make up the upper section of the “official” trail into the canyon. Two hikers at the top of the trail consider their fate before continuing the descent

The stairway section has deteriorated enough that hikers are simply bypassing it, which is damaging the slope and causing the stairs to come apart still faster

The railroad tie steps were filled with poured concrete pads at some point, making this a very difficult repair job. In the long term, this section of the “official” trail simply needs to be bypassed with a properly graded route and the old goat path turned back to sagebrush

Beyond the “official” trail, a user path skirts a fenced river gauge, then slips through a patch of waist-deep sagebrush before dropping down to a beautiful streamside flat. Here, Ponderosa pine survive in the deep sand along the riverbank and rugged basalt cliffs soar above the trail. This path soon passes Lower White River Falls before ending at an impressive viewpoint looking downstream, where the White River tumbles another two miles through a deep canyon to its confluence with the Deschutes River.

The “unofficial” trail below the powerhouse was little known just ten years ago, but today it is quickly devolving into a tangle of user paths as an increasing number of visitors push further into the canyon. The flat canyon floor is quickly becoming a maze of these social paths, greatly impacting the desert wildflowers that grow here.

In contrast to the “official” trail, the lower “unofficial” trail rambles at a pleasant grade along various user paths through a beautiful canyon floor framed by towering basalt cliffs

After flying under the radar, the lower canyon has been “discovered”, with a maze of new social paths forming in the past few years that are gradually expanding and destroying the wildflowers that grow here

So, how to fix this? The first step is to improve both the “official” and “unofficial” trail sections to something resembling proper trails. The official route is a tall order, and in the long term, it really needs to be retired and replaced with a correctly graded trail that can be safely navigated and doesn’t trigger heart attacks for visitors making their way back out of the canyon. In the near term, however, simply repairing the damaged stairs and adding a few more in a couple of especially steep sections would buy some time until a better trail can be built.

The unofficial, lower trail is a much easier fix. It simply needs a single route with improved tread and modest stone steps in a couple spots, while also retiring the many braided user paths that have formed. The new interest in the lower trail underscores a more significant need, however, and that’s the main focus of this trail proposal: this hike is simply too short to be satisfying for many visitors.

The solution? Build a return loop from the current terminus of the lower, unofficial trail that traverses the canyon rim back to the trailhead. This simple concept is shown in the map, below.

[click here for a larger view]

The proposed return trail (shown in red) would be approximately one-half mile long, making the new loop about one mile in length – short enough for families and casual hikers, yet long enough to make for a more immersive experience. The loop would also allow hikers to avoid climbing back up the goat path section of the existing trail, buying some time until that segment can be rebuilt. The upper end of the proposed loop would actually follow the well-defined game path that many hikers assume to be the main trail where it now connects at the top of the “official” goat path.

Another surprise feature of the loop? The new route would not only provide spectacular views into the canyon and its waterfalls from above, but Mount Hood also appears on the horizon, rising directly above White River Falls. While most hikers would likely continue to first follow the existing trail to the old powerplant, then complete the new loop from there, the rim trail could also work in reverse for hikers looking for big views without the challenging up-and-back climb and steep steps on the existing trail. The upper end of the new rim trail would traverse at a nearly level grade to a spectacular viewpoint (shown on the map, above) that would be a fine turnaround destination just one-quarter mile from the trailhead.

One important detail of this trail concept that should be completed in the near-term is a formalized spur trail to the Celestial Falls overlook. This is an irresistible, yet extremely dangerous overlook just off the main goat path section of the “official trail”, with abrupt, vertical drop-offs and another maze of sketchy social trails.

The stunning overlook at Celestial Falls is a scary mix of ever-expanding social trails and abrupt vertical cliffs that needs near-term attention to be stabilized and made safer for hikers

[click here for a larger view]

Much of the new return trail would follow game paths (like this one at the upper end of the proposed trail) that already traverse above the rim of the canyon.

The new rim trail would bring hikers to this spectacular birds-eye view of White River Falls and Mount Hood on the horizon (Oregon State Parks)

The crux to completing the new loop is a short section of new trail that would climb from the current terminus of the “unofficial” trail to the rim of the canyon, where the new route would then traverse at a nearly even grade back to the trailhead. The crux section follows a sloped ridge through a gap in the canyon rimrock, as is shown in the close-up map (below).

[click here for a larger view]

The end of the user path in the lower canyon marks the start of the proposed new trail, where a set of switchbacks would ascend the slope to the left to the canyon rim and return to the trailhead

The crux section would require some switchbacks and thoughtful trail planning, but it is no steeper than the terrain covered by the “official” trail at the start of the hike. What would it take to make this trail vision happen? More on that toward the end of this article.

2. Accessible Trails

Did you know that rural Oregon has a higher percentage of elderly and mobility limited folks in its population than the state’s major urban areas? Yet, even in our most urban areas, Oregon is woefully short on accessible trails, and the gap is even greater away from major population centers. At White River Falls, there are building blocks for a new accessible trail system that could be phased in over time to become among the finest in the state.

The existing parking area is gravel and would need at least a couple paved spots to be considered accessible

This paved path starts (inexplicably) about 50 feet from the edge of the gravel parking area and leads to the fenced, main viewpoint (in the distance)

Currently, the parking area and initial approach to the main falls overlook is a combination of gravel and mowed lawn that falls short of an accessible. Just a short distance from the gravel parking area, a paved path leads to the fenced overlook of the falls, where interpretive signs tell some of the unique history of the area. It wouldn’t take much to make this viewpoint fully accessible.

The wide plank bridge that crosses below the old settling pond dam (left) and marks the east end of the paved trail system at White River Falls. The “official” goat path down to the old powerplant begins at the far end of the plank bridge

From the main viewpoint, paved routes head off on two directions. The wide, gently sloping main route heads east, across the plank bridge and then ending abruptly where the goat path section of the main trail begins. Like the main viewpoint, this section could be curated to make the terminus at the bridge more interesting as a stopping point, including history of the concrete settlement pond dam that rises directly above the bridge and some of the penstock pipe remains that still survive here. This is also the point where signage marking the hiker trails ahead is sorely needed – including some cautions about the state of the goat path trail.

The west end of paved trail system ends here, at a profile view of the falls

Another paved trail spur heads west from the main viewpoint, along a fenced cliff to a fine profile view of the falls. The pavement ends here, and a user path continues along the fence to a view of the diversion canal that once fed river water into the old hydro plant. This section of the paved trail system is somewhat narrow and uneven, but it could also be improved with some relatively minor work, including improving the surface and creating a more intentional viewpoint of the falls.

From the end of the paving, the fencing continues west to a view of the diversion channel (center)

New interpretive signage could also be added here to tell the story of this part of the park, since this is where the original grist mill also stood. The views here include Tygh Valley, and new signage could also describe the natural history of the White River and the native peoples who lived here before white migrants settled in the area.

Profile view of White River Falls from near the end of the paved section of the west spur. This is a fine viewpoint that could be improved to be a more accessible destination with interpretive stories about the surrounding area

Oregon State Parks has provided picnic tables at the main viewpoint in the past, but to make the existing paved routes more accommodating as accessible trails, several benches along the way would be an important addition. This is perhaps the most overlooked feature on accessible trails, yet they are especially important in a hot desert environment. The National Park Service sets the standard on this front in their parks across the American Southwest, where resting spots are prominent on all trails, especially where a spot of shade is available.

Thinking more boldly, a new accessible trail spur could be added along the nearly level grade below the main viewpoint that once carried water in huge steel pipes. Most of the pipes are gone, but a few remain to tell the story of the old power plant. This grade leads to a front-row view of the main falls that is close enough to catch spray during the spring runoff. It’s also an area where park visitors chronically (but understandably) ignore the many “AREA CLOSED” signs to take in this spectacular view.

Fences and warning signs are no match for these Millennials, but they are right about the view: this lower viewpoint ought to be a spot that more people can enjoy

In this case, the scofflaws are right: this viewpoint ought to be open to the public, and an accessible trail spur would expand that to include all of the public. This proposed accessible spur is shown as the dotted blue line in the trail concept map (above).

Looking east along the existing paved spur to the settling pond dam and plank bridge; the proposed accessible spur trail to the lower falls viewpoint would follow a well-established bench that once held penstock pipe (now covered in blackberries in the lower right)

Another view of the proposed accessible trail spur from the plank bridge, looking west, and showing the blackberry-covered bench that the trail would follow. White River Falls is just beyond the rock outcrop in the upper right

There’s are chunks of penstock pipe along this route, and maybe these could become part of the interpretive history? This entire spur trail concept is possible only because the grade was blasted from basalt for the penstock pipes, which is a great way to connect the industrial history of the site to the park that exists today. From the lower viewpoint, those folks who we rarely provide great accessible trail experiences for would be rewarded with an exhilarating, mist-in-your-face view of White River Falls.

3. Walk-in Campsites

The word is out to cyclists that White River Falls is a perfect lunch spot on touring loops from Maupin and Tygh Valley. The restrooms were recently upgraded, the water fountain restored to include a water supply for filling bottles and there are plenty of shady picnic tables under the grove of Black Locust and Cottonwood trees that surround the parking and picnic areas.

A growing number of these cyclists are “bikepackers” camping along a multi-day tour, often starting from as far away as Portland, and there’s new interest in bike-in campsites for these folks. Unlike a traditional car-camping format, these campgrounds require only a network of trails and simple tent sites with a picnic table.

The modern restrooms at White River Falls State Park have been recently renovated to be accessible and are in top condition

This newly restored water fountain has a handy spigot on the back for filling water bottles (and dog dishes, as seen here)

The park has a nice spot for exactly this kind of campground just to the west of the parking lot and picnic areas. Today, it’s just a very large, mowed lawn that slopes gently toward the White River, with a nice view of Mount Hood. Creating a bike-in campground here wouldn’t take much – no underground utilities or paving would be required, just some paths and graded camp spots. The park already has on-site hosts living here from spring through fall to keep an eye on things, and that coincides with the bicycle touring season.

The wide west lawn adjacent to the main picnic area (marked by the group of trees) at White River Falls State Park

Looking toward the west lawn (and riparian Cottonwood groves, beyond) from the picnic area

Perhaps most important would be to add some trees to shade this area. Right now, the west lawn is blazing hot in summer, so more of the tough, drought-tolerant Black Locusts that grow in the picnic area could provide needed shade without requiring irrigation. Even better, our native Western Juniper would provide some shade, as well as year-round screening and windbreaks.

4. Bringing Back the Falls

From roughly mid-July until the fall rains kick in, a visit to White River Falls can be a bit deflating. Instead of a thundering cascade, the main face of the falls is often reduced to a bare basalt cliff.

White River Falls in full glory during spring runoff

White River Falls by late summer, when most of the flow diverted away from the falls by the old waterworks system

Why is this? In part, seasonal changes in the river from spring runoff to the summer droughts that are typical of Oregon. But the somewhat hidden culprit is the low diversion dam that once directed the White River to the penstocks that fed to the old powerhouse. The hydroelectric plant is now in ruins, but during the dry months the diversion dam still pushes most of the river into a concrete diversion channel, which then spills down the right side of the falls.

The entire flow of the White River was channeled through the diversion channel on this summer day in August 2021. At this time of year, the glacial silt that gives the river its name is most prominent

The entirety of the diversion system is now a relic, and the old dam should be breached. There are more than aesthetics involved, too. White River Falls creates a whole ecosystem in the shady canyon below, with wildflowers and wildlife drawn to this rare spot in the middle of the desert by the cool, falling water.

The earlier image of the original grist mill shows that a side tier of the falls always existed, even before the L-shaped diversion dam was built. However, as this aerial schematic (below) shows, the natural flow of the river is straight over the falls, not over the side tier.

The diversion system at White River Falls is simple. The low, L-shaped dam at the top of this aerial view directs water to the concrete diversion channel at the right. From here, river water once flowed into the metal penstock pipes and on to the hydroelectric works, below. Today, the diversion channel simply flows over a low cataract and back into the main splash pool of White River Falls. In this view, the river was high enough for water to still flow over the diversion dam and then over the falls, but by mid-summer, the dam diverts the entire river into the side channel, drying up the falls.

I have argued for restoring waterfalls to their natural grandeur before in this blog, and in this case the same rule applies: nature will eventually remove the diversion dam, but why not be proactive and do it now? Why deprive today’s visitors the experience of seeing the falls as it once was?

5. Thinking big… and bigger?

In an earlier article I imagined a much larger desert park centered on White River Falls. Just 100 miles and about two hours from Portland, it would become the most accessible true Oregon desert experience for those living on the rainy side of the mountains.

That possibility still exists, thanks to several puzzle parts in the form land owned by the Oregon State Parks and Oregon Fish and Wildlife (both shown in purple on the map, below) and federal Bureau of Land Management (shown in orange) along the lower White River and its confluence with the Deschutes River.

[click here for a much larger view of this map]

There’s a lot of private land (shown in yellow on the map) in this concept of an expanded park, as well, most of it held by about a half-dozen land owners. Such is the nature of desert land holdings, where typical ranches cover hundreds (if not thousands) of acres. Why did I include these areas? Because area surrounding White River Falls includes one of the least-known and most fascinating landscapes in WyEast Country, and it that warrants long-term protection and restoration.

Most notable is the ancient river channel to the south of the White River Falls that I’ve called “Devils Gulch” for lack of a proper (and deserved!) name, as it is adjacent to a pair of basalt buttes called Devils Halfacre. This dry channel was formed by a massive landslide along the south wall of Tygh Valley that is nearly five miles long and more than a mile wide, and has likely been moving for millennia. The landslide may have begun as a single, catastrophic event, then continued for move slowly over the centuries, eventually diverting the White River north to its current route over White River Falls. I’ll be posting a future, in-depth article on this amazing geologic feature in addition to the following photos and caption highlights (and if any geoscience graduate students are reading this, we could use research in the form of a thesis on this area!)

This is the fascinating view across a massive, jumbled landslide and into the former canyon of the White River before it was diverted by the landslide. Today, the river flows beyond the two flat-topped buttes known as Devils Halfacre, in the upper left corner of this photo, diverted from the dry “Devils Gulch” valley at the center of this photo

This is a closer look at the two buttes known as Devils Halfacre. They once formed the north side of the ancient White River canyon, but the debris in the lower third of the photo diverted the river north sometime in the distant past. Today’s White River flows where the ribbon of Cottonwoods marks the valley floor, beyond the two buttes. White River Falls is behind the larger butte in the center. Snowy Tygh Ridge is in the distance

Below the landslide, the floor of the ancient White River canyon is fully intact. Beyond these dry meanders where a river once flowed is today’s White River canyon, marked by the canyon wall in the upper right of this view

This view of the east end of the landslide shows distinct rows of basalt debris formed by the landslide known as transverse ridges. These ridges form perpendicular to the direction of flow, in this case from the cliffs in the upper right that formed the source of the landslide toward what was the ancient path of the White River, in the lower left

Basalt rimrock is a common sight in Oregon’s sagebrush country, but in this case, the cliffs are a scarp resulted from a massive landslide event, not gradual erosion

This view from just below the landslide scarp looks north, toward Tygh Ridge, and across more than a mile of landslide debris now covered in sagebrush and desert grasses. The landslide covers roughly the bottom two-thirds of this photo

Looking west along the landslide scarp, Mount Hood and the Cascades rise on the western horizon

Another mostly forgotten feature in this larger park concept is a 1.5-mile section of old Highway 197 that was bypassed in the 1950s when the modern route was constructed. Because the desert does a fine job in preserving things, this piece of old road looks as if it were closed yesterday, not a half-century ago. While much of the historic road was destroyed by the modern highway, this section provides a view-packed tour of the Tygh Valley landslide from this graceful old road, including views into Devils Gulch.

The original highway from The Dalles to Maupin curved with the landscape, as compared to its 1950s-era replacement that used cut-and-fill design to make modern highways straighter and faster. This long-bypassed section of the old road is where the historic highway remnant makes a dramatic descent into the Tygh Valley. Surprisingly, even the painted centerlines still survive after more than 60 years of being abandoned!

Mount Hood rises above the highway for much of this lost highway, as well. If you simply enjoy following old routes like this, it’s a resource in its own right, but it could also be an excellent jumping-off point for hike or bike trails in an expanded park. Like accessible trails, mountain bike trails are lacking in Oregon, especially on the dry east side of the Cascades. For cyclists touring Highway 197, it could be an excellent, traffic-free alterative to a steep section along the modern highway alignment.

Cracks in the old paving are quickly discovered by moss and grasses. After making a sharp turn in its descent into Tygh Valley, the surviving section of old road points toward Mount Hood for much of its remaining length

Hundreds of mysterious desert mounds dot the slopes of Tygh Ridge, including large swarm along the north rim of the White River Canyon, downstream from the falls

Finally, there are flat-topped bluffs above the White River gorge (one that I’ve called the Tuskan Table, others north of the river) that have never been plowed, and still hold desert mounds – another topic I’ve written about before. Left ungrazed, desert mounds function like raised wildflower beds, providing both wildlife habitat and a refuge for native desert plants that have been displaced by grazing.

This is private land, so I haven’t ventured to these spots along the White River rim, but there’s a very good chance they are home to a threatened wildflower species that grows here and nowhere else in the world – the Tygh Valley Milkvetch. Scientists have documented the greatest threat to this beautiful species to be grazing, and therefore the importance of setting some protected habitat aside for these rare plants as part of the larger park concept.

Tuskan Table is a stunning, flat-topped peninsula of basalt that separates the Tygh Valley from the Deschutes River. In this view the table forms the west wall of the Deschutes Canyon. The White River joins the Deschutes just beyond Tuskan Table, in the upper right of this view

As the name suggests, the beautiful and extremely rare Tygh Valley Milkvetch grows only here, and thrives in several of the areas proposed as part of the larger White River Falls park concept (photo: Adam Schneider)

It turns out there is quite a bit of movement toward expanding park and wildlife lands in the lower Deschutes area. A few miles to the north, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has acquired several thousand acres in recent years along the north slopes of Tygh Ridge, where a series of side canyons and ravines drop into the Deschutes River.

The federal Bureau of Land Management has also been expanding its holdings to the south, along the Deschutes River, and upstream from Tygh Valley, where the White River flows through a deep basalt canyon. In both cases, these acquisitions have been through willing seller programs, often made possible through the federal Land and Water fund for public land purchases.

Making White River 3.0 happen..?

After some lean years in the 80s and early 90s, Oregon’s state park system has seen relatively stable funding thanks to a dedicated stream from the Oregon lottery approved (and later re-upped) by voters. This has allowed the state to open the first new parks in decades – Stub Stewart in the Portland Area and Cottonwood Canyon on the John Day River. Other parks have benefitted, too, with major upgrades at iconic spots like Silver Falls State Park. So, a refurbishing at White River is certainly within reach, if not a current priority.

Rugged canyon country in White River Falls State Park

The first step is a new park master plan. This is the document that guides park managers and volunteers toward a common vision and it is created through a planning effort that includes the public, area tribes and others interested in the future of the park.

What would a new master plan look like? It might include ideas from this article, along with other ideas for accommodating the growing interest in the area and the need to actively manage the visitor impacts that are becoming visible. It would likely include plans to do nothing at all in places that should remain undisturbed, for ecological or cultural reasons.

Mostly, a new park plan for White River Falls should go big – not simply be a property management plan, but one that seeks to assemble a complete snapshot of the unique desert ecosystem that surrounds White River Falls through an expansion of the park. Cottonwood Canyon State Park is a fine model, as it was once a private cattle ranch, and is now being restored to its original desert habitat.

_________

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever growing insistency” (Daniel Burnham)

_________

Once a park master plan is in place, new trails are the easiest and most affordable first step, especially in desert country. Much of what I’ve described here could be built by volunteer organizations, like Trailkeepers of Oregon (TKO). A new tent campground might be as simple as grading and adding water lines, also a manageable cost.

The White River has carved a deep gorge into hundreds of feet of Columbia River Basalt below the falls

Acquiring land for a greatly expanded park? There are plenty of tools and funding sources for this, but the first step is a vision described in a park master plan. The partners in making it happen would be public land agencies who already have holdings in the area, including Oregon State Parks, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the BLM. Tools for making it happen could range from outright purchase from willing sellers to conservation easements and wildlife easements.

While researching the area, I discovered that a private, California-based hunting club has already leased hundreds of acres of private land within the expanded park concept for use by its members. Other land trusts may be interested in this unique area, as well, and could lead the way to an expanded park, as they have in other new parks in WyEast Country.

Winter sunset at White River Falls

And how about removing the diversion dam? This would be a more complex project that would probably require an environmental review, among other questions that would have to be answered. The actual removal is less an issue, as the dam is only a few feet tall and could easily be breached. Even without a plan for removal, the diversion dam is doomed. It hasn’t been maintained for decades and will eventually succumb to the wrath of the river. If we don’t remove the dam, the White River surely will!

I’ve written about the future of White River Falls in this article, but you don’t have to wait. You can enjoy it now! Here are some tips for visiting White River Falls:

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• for maximum waterfall effect and the best wildflowers, stop by in late April and throughout May, but consider a weekday – the secret is out!

• bring hiking poles for the trip into the canyon – you won’t regret it.

• factor summer heat into your trip – the hike out of the canyon can be grueling on a hot August day.

• watch for poison ivy on the boot path below the main falls – the leaves are similar to poison oak, but it grows as a low groundcover, often around boulders that might otherwise look like a great sitting spot!

• make a driving loop through the town of Maupin and a section of the Deschutes Canyon from Maupin to Sherars Falls part of your trip.

• stop at the Historic Balch Hotel in Dufur and a walk down Dufur’s main street to Kruger’s Grocery on your return trip. It’s always important to support local communities when traveling through WyEast Country.

• finally, for Portlanders, stop at Big Jim’s drive-in at the east end of the Dalles for cool milkshake (and crinkle fries?) on the long drive home

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Enjoy – and who knows? I might even see you out on the trail!

Tom Kloster | February 2023

20 years of change on Cooper Spur… and the future?

January 1, 2023January 2, 2023 / Tom Kloster / 10 Comments

Workers cutting beams from solid pine trunks for the new Cloud Cap Inn during the summer of 1888. The (then) surging Eliot glacier loomed just beyond Cloud Cap in those early days (Author’s note: this is a modified historical image that I have colorized to bring the sense of the distant past a bit closer to our present-day world)

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When the builders of Cloud Cap Inn began construction in earnest in early summer 1889, the backdrop for Mount Hood’s first mountain lodge was radically different than today. The Northern Hemisphere was experiencing the final decades of a brief, still unexplained cooling period known as the Little Ice Age that stretched from the 1500s through the 1800s.

The cooling was modest, but enough to surge the Eliot Glacier down to the tree line, nearly filling the deep trough between the high lateral moraines that were created in the last true ice age, thousands of years prior. The debris-covered terminus (or snout) of the Eliot Glacier was in plain view from Cloud Cap, directly behind the workers on the left side of the photo, above. It was formidable wall of glacial ice and rock rising nearly 300 feet above the valley floor.

Early photo views of the Eliot Glacier’s terminus shows the river of ice already receding between the 1890s and 1920s

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The Little Ice Age faded in the 20^th Century, and as the photo pair above shows, the Eliot Glacier was already receding from its recent surge by the 1920s. Today, the Eliot Glacier has retreated about a half mile from its terminus in 1889, and lost as much as half its depth to our warming climate.

The following photo pair shows the dramatic change from 1920 to 2020. The change in the glacier’s thickness can be seen by (A) the exposed cliffs below Cooper Spur were carved into a vertical wall by the glacier at its peak. The glacier’s terminus (B) has receded dramatically over the past century, revealing the high moraines we now see rising above the Eliot Branch. A more subtle change (C) are the alpine forests gradually moving up the mountain as summer snowpacks diminish.

Another, more detailed 1920 view of the Eliot Glacier’s terminus compared to the same view in 2020 shows the radical change over the past century

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For much of the past century, these changes were gradual enough that only a few scientists and mountain climbers noticed the ongoing change. But since the turn of the millennium the pace of change has accelerated to an alarming rate as our climate warms.

This article documents this most recent period of change, over the two decades that span from 2002 to 2022, including how the landscape on the mountain, itself, as changed. The article focuses on the area around Cloud Cap and the Eliot Glacier, as viewed from the Cooper Spur trail, as this corner of the mountain has seen some of the most volatile change.

Why 2002 as a starting point? That answer has to do with technology, not climate change. That was the year that I began shooting with a digital camera. For someone who learned photography with a film camera (including plenty of spent time in the darkroom in the 1980s) the age of digital has been a revelation. Film and print paper was expensive, and while I have a lengthy archive of images going back to 1980, the digital era has allowed me to bring back hundreds of photos from a single trip to the mountain, where I might have captured a dozen during the film era that was rapidly winding down by the early 2000s.

Then and now – my 2002 pocket camera and 2022 digital SLR, along with the 2002 photos I hoped to re-create.

The result is enough archived images beginning in 2022 to create a fairly thorough then-and-now comparison of the Eliot Glacier and surrounding environment along the Cooper Spur trail. The 2002 images came from a Canon A50 PowerShot pocket camera, still one of the best digital cameras I’ve owned over the years. Not long after this trip in 2002, I added my first digital SLR to my camera collection, and I have long since retired my film cameras for good. The 2020 images were captured with an Olympus EM-10 digital SLR, my fifth digital SLR, and easily my favorite (thus far).

To re-create the images from that 2002 trip, I carried a folded-up, modern-day version of a film-era proof sheet from that earlier visit in my pocket on a hike up Cooper Spur last September. Along the way, I did my best to match the scenes as I had viewed them 20 years prior. Once home, I was able to assemble 19 pairs that were close though to allow for nearly identical side-by-side comparisons. I’ve also noted a few points of interest for each image, keyed to both the 2002 and 2022 versions, to help highlight the changes that have unfolded. Because the embedded images in this article are inherently small, I’ve also posted a link below each image to a large version that will open in a new tab.

And now, how about a tour of these places in 2002 and 2022?

Change is constant… and surprising!

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From Cloud Cap, the Timberline Trail route to Cooper Spur makes a dramatic entrance to the upper section of Tilly Jane Canyon and the first big view of Mount Hood. The changes in the first photo pair (above) are subtle, though telling. As is the case throughout the Cascades, groves of (A) Mountain hemlock continue their march to higher elevations, one more indicator of our changing climate. Lighter snowpacks (which translates to longer growing seasons) might also be the explanation for more expansive groundcover (B) of Juniper and Penstemon in the foreground. In distance (C), a pioneering Whitepark pine has survived to grow from a few feet tall to nearly 20 feet.

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Moving further up the mountain, the Timberline Trail reaches a junction with the Tilly Jane and Cooper Spur trails (above), just above the tree line. Here, the most notable change is the battering the old trail sign has taken in 20 years of winter storms and avalanches. The two signboards were still around as recently as four years ago, but they were finally swept away in the last couple years. The bottom of the 8×8” post remains, though it had snapped off mid-way several years ago — a reminder of the power of moving winter snow in this avalanche-prone area!

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Just uphill from the trail junction, the next photo pair (above) shows a venerable Mountain hemlock that has caught the eye of many hikers over the years. Notably, the Whitebark pine just behind the hemlock (A) has grown considerably, a hopeful sign for a keystone species that has been hard hit by climate change and disease in recent decades. The hemlock (B) shows some wear, however. The upper limb that reached out toward Mount Rainier and Mount Adams has lost the battle with the winter elements, and some of the lower limbs seem to be fading, too. But in the timeless cycle of nature, a completely new Mountain hemlock (C) has grown from beneath its elder, no doubt helped along by nutrients from the decaying limbs of the older tree and the protection from the elements the old hemlock still provides.

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Further up the trail, the old stone warming hut at Cooper Spur appears (above). These shelters were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the early 1930s, when the Timberline Trail was first completed. Thankfully, almost nothing has changed here, thanks to the work of volunteers who keep this old structure cabled to the ground and intact after nearly a century.

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Above the old warming hut, the Cooper Spur Trail heads into tundra country (above) as it nears the 7,000 foot elevation on the mountain. From this perspective, the retreat of the Eliot Glacier starts to become apparent, especially to those familiar with the area. The rounded ice crest known to climbers as the Snow Dome (A) is notably smaller and the depth of the glacier has receded enough in the lower reaches (B) to drop beyond the top of the east moraine from this perspective. In the foreground (C) alpine wildflowers continue their march to higher elevations where only a few grasses once grew because of once-lingering snowpacks.

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This photo pair (above) is from the first big view of the Eliot Glacier from the Cooper Spur Trail. The change over the past 20 years is unmistakable here. On the upper shoulder of the mountain (A), the snowfields that once led climbers to the summit well into summer are much smaller, making this approach in summer a very sketchy affair today, with much falling rock.

This pair of images also shows how the lower Eliot Glacier icefall has changed dramatically in just two decades of glacial retreat. The blue chaos of seracs and crevasses (B) that were once a prime ice climbing destination are now well below the “firn line”, the point at which a glacier is losing more ice than it is gaining. This line is generally where a glacier changes from blue and white clean ice to a gray mix of ice and rock, as the glacier gradually shrinks and melts in its descent. Further down (C), the decreasing depth of the glacier is especially notable where blue and white ice have disappeared.

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The next pair of images (above) is from an overlook just below the crest of Cooper Spur, at about the 8,000 foot elevation. Here, the Eliot Glacier is still impressive and awe inspiring as a mass of tumbling ice and wrinkled crevasses. The notable change in these views is the thinning of the ice (A and C) along the glacier’s margins, with piles of rubble appearing between lobes of flowing ice. The main icefall (B) also has some underlying rock showing as yet another sign of the thinning of the ice sheet

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This pair (above) is simply a closer look at the main icefall from the same vantage point, showing (A) where the thinning ice mass has revealed more of the north wall of the mountain, and (b) where rock outcrops are now pushing through the icefall from below. Icefalls form because of these outcrops, so the appearance of the underlying rock is measure of the glacier depth decreasing. Twenty years ago, enough ice flowed over this outcrop to completely overwhelm it, whereas today we’re beginning to see traces of the rock beneath the glacier.

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This is another view of the Eliot Glacier from just below the crest of Cooper Spur, looking across the upper part of the glacier. Here the shrinking snowfields on the climbing route above Cooper Spur (A) are more apparent, as are the exposed cliffs (B) below the north face of the mountain, where the thinning ice has revealed a vertical well. On the shoulder of the mountain, a once-crevassed section of moving glacier has slowed to become a snowfield along the margin of the glacier.

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This photo pair (above) is looking across the Eliot Glacier from the crest of Cooper Spur, at about 8,500 feet elevation. It’s subtle, but the permanent snowfields (A) along the upper end of the Langille Crags are smaller today, and the lower icefall (B) is dramatically diminished, as shown in previous views. In the near distance (C) the silver ghost forest of the 2011 Dollar Lake Fire shows up today along the Mount Hood’s northern foot. In the far distance (D) the massive (and completely unsustainable) logging spree being carried out by timber giant Weyerhauser since taking over the timber holdings in the West Fork Hood River area a few years ago is painfully apparent.

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This pair (above) is a closer view of the previous set, focusing on the lower Eliot Glacier icefall. This comparison shows the thinning of the ice sheet (A and B) against the cliffs of the Langille Crags, and (C) the dramatic change on the near side of the glacier, where the firn line has moved several hundred feet up the mountain over two decades.

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Moving away from the Eliot Glacier, this photo pair (above) shows the broad east slope of Cooper Spur from the crest, looking toward the canyon of the East Fork Hood River. The changes here are subtle, but still notable. Historic Cloud Cap Inn (A) still stands, despite being threatened by both the 2008 Gnarl Ridge Fire and 2011 Dollar Lake Fire. The ghost forests of the Gnarl Ridge Fire (B) are recovering rapidly today, filled with understory and rapidly growing Western Larch seedlings that are now 6-8 feet tall. In the distance, the human scars (C) caused by Forest Service clear cutting on the slopes of Surveyors Ridge in the 1980s and 90s are gradually fading away, too, as the forests there slowly recover.

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Happily, not much change at Hiroshima Rock (above) in 20 years – or even 122 years! This unlikely etching by a 1910 Japanese Climbing expedition has somehow survived more than a century of fierce ice and sand blasting, perhaps because the carving is on the leeward side of the rock? It remains a favorite touchstone for hikers passing through. Here’s an earlier blog article on this unique message from the past.

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This photo pair (above) is looking back toward the crest of Cooper Spur from a bit further up the mountain, with a feature known as Tie-in Rock in the foreground. As in previous photos, the burn scars (A) of recent forest fires can be seen in the distance. The seemingly inescapable modern phenomenon of rock stacking (B) is present on Tie-in Rock, too. Size is hard to gauge here, but the rock is about 15 feet tall and takes some effort scale — much less with rocks in hand! The Newton Clark Glacier’s retreat (C) is somewhat noticeable on the far right, though the changes are much more apparent in the image pairs that follow.

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This image pair (above) provides full-on view of the Newton Clark Glacier from Cooper Spur. This sprawling glacier faces southeast, and because it catches summer sun from sunrise until late afternoon, it is has been more visibly impacted by climate change than the northeast-facing Eliot Glacier. What was once an icefall (A) 20 years ago is now bare rock, with the glacier flowing around it. Along the margins of Cooper Spur (B and C) the shrinking expanse of the glacier is prominent.

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This is a similar view (above) looking south across the Newton Clark Glacier. Like the Eliot Glacier, the lower, blue and white ice crevasses (A) on the glacier have fallen below the firn line, replaced by a grey mix of moving rock and ice. On the far shoulder of the mountain the former icefall at the center of the glacier (B) has receded around the rock outcrop that once produced it. In the foreground (C), the thinning of the overall ice sheet is dramatic over just two decades. Mount Jefferson is visible on the far horizon.

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This photo pair (above) is from far below Cooper Spur, at an overlook above the Eliot Branch called Inspiration Point. I’ve included it in this series because the retreat of the glacier has had dramatic impacts downstream, too. As the glacier continues its retreat, the Eliot Branch is cutting a v-shaped channel into the soft, flat valley floor that was once beneath the glacier, releasing vast amounts of rocky debris into the stream below. Compounding that effect are periodic flood events that have repeatedly scoured the canyon. As this pair shows, the changes are extensive.

For reference, a grove of three trees (A) in the lower center of the above photo pair have dodged the mayhem, though a group just below this trio has been swept away by the Eliot Branch. Meanwhile, an entire stand of trees (B) on the west wall of the canyon has slipped away in a massive landslide, revealing raw, banded volcanic bedrock, below. Another stand of trees on the east side of the canyon (C) burned in the 2011 Dollar Lake Fire, as did the remaining trees (D) in the upper west side of the canyon. This continues to be a very active, dynamic area, with constant changes to the river channel and canyon walls.

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The final photo pair is a longer comparison of just over 120 years, as seen from Cloud Cap Inn. Mirroring the changes shown throughout this article, the Eliot is a much smaller glacier today than it was when my own grandparents were born around 1900. The mass of ice and rock (A) that once made up the terminus would be enough to fill up much of downtown Portland. The lesser-known Langille Glacier (B) has almost certainly stopped moving, and has become a series of icefields. The Coe Glacier (C) is also in retreat, despite its shady location on the north side of the mountain.

Changes like those we are seeing on Mount Hood are tough to absorb, and thus I was determined to end this article on a hopeful note. Why? Because I’m a hopeful and optimistic person to the core, but also because there is much we can do to slow the climate change that is affecting so much of our world.

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We’re not powerless against these changes, though we do have a limited time on this planet to do our part. And thus, the final image pair (above). Why, it’s me! In 2002 I was a 40-year-old with blond hair and a red beard. Fast forward to 2022 and… well, at age 60 there’s not much hair left and the beard has turned decidedly gray. Time is not on my side, to be sure, but there is plenty more I can do in my life!

The benefit of 20 more years of living is the knowledge that I can still hoof it to the top of Cooper Spur (if a lot more slowly — and feeling it more the next day, too!) and still see things I’ve never noticed before. In 2002 I was still just thinking about how I could help keep the century-old idea of a national park around Mount Hood and the Gorge alive. Two years later, I started the Mount Hood National Park Campaign website to put the idea into words and pictures (and yes, it does need an update!). Six years later, I started writing this blog to continue celebrating the future Mount Hood National Park. That’s something I can continue to do even when getting to the top of Cooper Spur is finally out of my reach!

At age 60 I know I can’t single-handedly stop the changes happening on Mount Hood and in the Gorge, whether it be from climate change to just the sheer growth in the number of people coming here. But age DOES bring the super-power of perspective that can only come from time and lived experience — and in my case, I’ve also got the photos to prove it! I’m able to put a face on those changes to help inspire caring and action toward a new vision for the future, one that focuses on sustainability and adaptation in the face of change. That’s the point of this article and the WyEast Blog, of course.

And what about the future..?

Throughout that day on Cooper Spur in September, I watched a group of young glacier explorers far below me, working their way through rock debris and over crevasses as they approached the main icefall on the Eliot Glacier. I took a few photos of the group along the way, and was thus delighted to run into them on their return to the trailhead that afternoon. I turns out they were students from Pacific University’s Outdoor Leadership Program, led by instructor Philip Friesen.

If the then-and-now photos of changes on Mount Hood are tough to look, this is where the real hopefulness in this article comes in. Phil’s program at Pacific is pointing a new generation of future leaders toward a life and careers in the outdoors that I believe will be transformational for many of the environmental challenges we’re facing today.

When I asked, here’s how Phil describes his program:

“I think the main thing to share with the world is that the students in our program focus on addressing systemic oppression and environmental issues while learning how to courageously lead others into the mountains, on rivers, and on the rock–we combine the joy of being outdoors in nature with the challenge of meeting some of our society’s biggest challenges.”

And there are many other educators like Phil out there helping young people of today turn their passion for the outdoors and their hunger to enact positive change into lifelong careers that will have a real impact in making a better world. As an old guy with only a few years left to do my part, I find this so inspiring and reassuring!

Phil Friesen (left) and his group of Pacific University students from the Outdoor Leadership Program are all smiles last September, even after a grueling climb up the Eliot Glacier!

Students in Phil’s program spend extensive time in the outdoors, learning how to hike, climb and kayak, so that they may be able to bring the outdoor experience to others over their lifetimes. This is the very best path toward conservation and sustainability, especially for our public lands. Only when we spend time there can we begin to feel the personal sense of ownership necessary to care for and protect these spaces in perpetuity.

I have great faith in what we have named “Generation Z”, and so does Phil. Young people majoring in Outdoor Leadership at Pacific are readying themselves for a life doing what they love, whether it be as a guide, ranger, naturalist or many other emerging careers in the growing outdoor industry. They’re also learning about the history of exclusion on our public lands, and the urgent need to remove barriers so that all Americans can enrich their lives in the same way that the most privileged among us already do. That hits home for them, too, as they are by far the most diverse generation in our history.

Phil plans to share these images with his students, most of whom were born around 2002, when I took that first set of photos. They will likely find them jarring, as they only know the Eliot Glacier of today, and may not realize how quickly it is fading away. But they have an abundance of passion for the environment, and I do think these photos will lend still more urgency to them in their commitment to make our world a better place.

The author getting his head straight in the shadow of mighty WyEast before heading home for another week in civilization (Photo by Andy Prahl)

The real power of the Outdoor Leadership Program – and this is true for anyone who spends time in the outdoors – is the cascade of reflections that immersion in nature fosters. No matter your walk of life, time on a trail, among the trees or through mountain meadows, ensures the perspective, peace of mind and hopefulness needed to make the rest of our busy lives more successful. I refer to as my mental health time, when I get my head straight before another week of Zoom meetings and e-mails. Phil’s students are learning this early on, and I’m certain it will be as restorative and rejuvenating in their lives as it is in mine.

Phil’s group was all grins after a grueling day climbing up a glacier. Such is life when you’re 20 years old! They don’t know it yet, but they are part of what could be the most consequential generation in our history. They have no choice but to grapple with enormous challenges that my own generation has so short on. But because I do get to spend a fair amount of time around today’s Generation Z, I’m more certain than ever that they are special. They are uniquely up for the challenge. Phil’s students are way too young to know this quote that has guided since childhood, but they are nonetheless embracing it like no generation has before them:

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“Unless someone like you cares an awful lot,

it’s not going to get better. It’s not.”

-The Lorax

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And a final note to Phil Friesen and his Outdoor Leadership Program students: Thank you for the great things you are about to do!

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Author’s postscript: My best to all who have followed this blog over these many years! I greatly appreciate the support and especially your passion and concern for the future of our WyEast Country. I have a bunch of new articles planned for the coming year and look forward to sharing them with you!

In the meantime, I hope to see you on the trail!

Tom Kloster • January 1, 2023

2023 Campaign Calendar!

December 7, 2022 / Tom Kloster / 2 Comments

It is that time of year, so I will indulge in my annual plug for the Mount Hood National Park Campaign Calendar, of which all proceeds go to benefit Trailkeepers of Oregon (TKO). This article covers this year’s calendar scenes with some of their backstory, but if you’re itching to get a calendar before reading any further, here’s the link to my Zazzle store:

2023 Mount Hood National Park Calendar

Zazzle does a truly amazing job with these. They are beautifully printed on quality paper and orders typically arrive within about 10 days or so. I’ll post another link at the bottom of this article if you’d like to learn more about the images, first.

Another Year in WyEast Country…

Starting with the cover image (above), I picked an scene captured this fall, near Lolo Pass, on Mount Hood’s northwest side. This is my favorite profile of Mount Hood – a nearly perfect pyramid seemingly cut from solid stone that belies its origin as a stratovolcano. While most big Cascade volcanoes are lumpy and dome-shaped, glaciers have sculpted Mount Hood to have the many distinctive faces that often bely its volcanic origin. The sheer, towering Sandy Headwall in this view is among its most impressive.

For January (above), I chose an image of a stunted group of Oregon white oak over on the east side of Mount Hood. Here, the forests transitions in the dry rain shadow of the Cascades from Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir at higher elevations, to short, tortured oaks that seldom exceed 10 or 15 feet in height – a tenth of what they might achieve under less harsh conditions. Eventually the oaks give way to the sagebrush hills of Oregon’s desert country.

Freezing fog crystals on Oregon white oak leaves

On this particular visit, freezing fog had hovered over the area for several days, leaving everything flocked in elaborate ice crystals. It’s one of my favorite weather phenomena, and it is surprisingly common in select spots on the east side of the mountain, where freezing fog often banks up against the Cascades in winter.

Freezing fog crystals on an Oregon white oak

The February image (below) in the new calendar features the last light of a winter day on Mount Hood’s crater, as viewed on a snowshoe trick into the White River Canyon. From this perspective, you can visualize the extent of the mountain’s last major eruption in the 1790s. The smooth south slopes on the left that extend all the way from the crater area to Government Camp were formed by debris flows that streamed down the mountain as new lava poured out in the crater. Though it seems timeless, today’s Crater Rock — an 800-foot monolith guarding the left side of the crater — was formed during this event, and is just 230 years old!

This snowshoe trip was memorable for the changing conditions. It was a brief ray of winter sun between storms. It had been a cloudy day, with the mountain mostly hiding in the overcast. The next weather system was already moving in, but as evening approached, the clouds suddenly lifted from them mountain for about an hour. The image below was taken about 20 minutes before the calendar view, as the clouds were still lifting away from the summit. After the brief light show, sun dropped down and the mountain disappeared into clouds, once again.

Winter clouds lifting from the mountain in late afternoon

For March, I choose a sylvan scene at Columbia Hills Nature Preserve, on the north side of the Columbia River in the desert country east of Mount Hood. Here, the wildflowers were just beginning to bloom while the grove of Oregon white oak was still dormant after a cold, windy winter. The wispy spring clouds completed the scene! The Columbia Hills are a gem, and their transformation from cattle ranch to wildland over the past few decades is one of the great recent conservation stories in WyEast county.

While I was setting up this photo, a pair of Western fence lizards were courting on a stack of rocks, nearby. They had found a warm, protected spot on a brisk day and didn’t seem too concerned about me. Just two friends soaking up the sun, or was it a romantic interlude? Hard to say, but they clearly were enjoying the re-emergence of spring, too.

Just friends..?

…or maybe more..?

The April calendar image (below) is a bit of an abstract made possible by weird geology and the brilliant colors of spring in the desert landscape. These are the Ortley Pinnacles, a sharply tilted layer of flood basalts that has been so uplifted that the once liquid layers of rock now stand almost on end. The bright yellow patches are Bigleaf maple flowering on the steep talus and groves (still leafless in this view) of Oregon white oak can be seen in the upper left.

The scale of this image is a bit hard to appreciate, too, so this wider image (below) shows the river, a freight train and the 2,000-foot north wall of the Columbia River Gorge for reference. Though beautiful at any time of the year, the rainbow of colors in the east Gorge are especially striking in mid-spring.

Freight train passing under the Ortley Pinnacles in the east Columbia River Gorge

Staying on the east side of Mount Hood, the May calendar image features another Columbia Hills Nature Preserve scene. This view, looking toward Mount Hood (and Mount Jefferson for the sharp-eyed), is across vast fields of yellow Arrowleaf balsamroot and blue Lupine that famously carpet the area in spring.

This is an increasingly popular place for hikers and photographers during the spring bloom, with people coming from all over the world to capture the spectacle of these meadows.

While setting up another photo, I watched an unexpected drama suddenly unfold through my lens (below). A white SUV suddenly appeared, with the driver apparently unaccustomed to driving on backroads. Rounding the corner too fast, they skidded off the soft shoulder and were quickly stuck in the ditch. Another driver soon stopped, and everyone seemed to be okay. Later, I passed a tow truck from The Dalles finally arriving to pull them out. A memorable day for these visitors, but at least they had a lovely backdrop while waiting for the tow!

If you’re doing to ditch your car, you might has well choose a scenic spot!

For June, an image of White River Falls in all its spring runoff glory is the featured image. This is a favorite spot I’ve been visiting since the early 1980s. Over those years, it has continued to recover from its industrial past to re-emerge as one of the most striking features in the desert country east of Mount Hood. Until 1960, a small hydroelectric plant built at the turn of the 20^th Century operated here, and much of the old infrastructure still remains in place as sort of an industrial ruins.

As the park gathered popularity in the late 2000s, the interior of the old power house took a real beating, with lot of tagging and senseless vandalism. Like so many parks, the steep increase in visitation is also taking a toll on the trails at White River falls, with old staircases just wearing out from the heavy use and new user paths sprouting in all directions.

In recent years, Oregon Parks and Recreation Department (OPRD) has stepped up their efforts at White River Falls, including securely enclosing the power house interior against further damage and increasing their efforts to managing tagging at the park. On-site park hosts now care for the park for from spring through fall, as well. Fact is, any park with a swimming hole is bound to deal with these issues, so it’ good to see OPRD beginning to get ahead of the problem.

These steps made of railroad ties and concrete slabs have seen better days at White River Falls

I continued the White River Falls theme in July, with a view of the lesser-known Lower White River Falls. This lovely spot is a short walk down the canyon from the historic powerhouse and is framed by desert wildflowers in early summer.

The trail to the lower falls – like most in the park – are social trails. Unfortunately, they are have become increasingly tangled and impactful as ever more new trails form with the growth in visitation. In desert environments, managing trail routes is especially important, as new user trails can leave tracks that last decades.

The good news at White River Falls is that there is a lot of park and thus much potential to spread visitors out a bit with a modest expansion of the trail system. And, the trails in the impacted areas just need some care and management to become sustainable again. Much of the work could be done by volunteers, too. Given the relative remoteness of the park, one option could be “volunteer vacation” events where trail volunteers spend a week working at a site. This would take advantage of the new restrooms and other accommodations already at the park.

Keeping hikers on the few trails that exist at White River Falls is a challenge. These hikers walked right past a closure sign.

In the coming year I’ll be sharing some concepts for expanding trail opportunities at White River Falls with an eye toward accommodating the continued growth in popularity and preserving its beauty and history. Both can be accomplished with some thoughtful planning, much of the work by volunteers.

Moving to August, I made the unusual choice of an image with people in it! That wasn’t really the plan, but these hikers walked through my setup and so I captured a few images. I later decided they added to the story of the pilgrimage experience that hiking up the shoulder of Mount Hood offers so many – in this case, the venerable trail to Cooper Spur.

I had about a dozen images from this sequence and chose one that would be anonymous. However, another consideration was an off-leash dog with the lead group. I’m a dog-lover (I currently have three) and am of the view that dogs in wilderness should always be leashed. There are lots of good reasons for this, mostly for the benefit of both wildlife and the dogs. However, this is not the law, and even in the few National Forest areas where leashes are mandated, the U.S. Forest Service does little to enforce the rules.

Hikers (and a hiker’s best friend) on the trail to Cooper Spur

Given that reality, I’ve got a mostly-written piece on “dog etiquette for hikers” that I will eventually post on the blog. Dog owners are just looking for a great outdoor experience, after all, and mostly don’t realize the impact of off-leash pets, so in the end, managing how we take our pets into the wild really depends on awareness and culture change. I’m already seeing that happen, albeit slowly.

For September, I chose an image of the Eliot Glacier from the same Cooper Spur hike featured in the previous month. The Eliot remains Mount Hood’s largest glacier, and the view into its mass of crevasses and seracs is truly breathtaking from the upper reaches of Cooper Spur. Yet, for old timers like me, the changes in the glacier in recent years are increasingly worrisome. To put a face on the change over the past couple of decades, I’ll be posting an article soon that does exactly that: side-by-side comparisons of change over the past 20 years. The differences are startling, and hopefully helpful inspiration to do our part to address global climate change.

A pleasant surprise that September day on Cooper Spur were swarms of Ladybugs all along the crest! Entomologists have studied this phenomenon extensively, and the thinking is that when bugs from opposite valleys meet along ridgetops to mate, they are rewarded with genetic diversity. In the moment, however, it was just a wild and crazy party atmosphere among the little beetles!

Scenic spot for a Ladybug convention!

Lots of action, here – beetle romance in the air!

Moving on to October, I chose this image of Mount Hood from the shoulder of Vista Ridge. I’ve spent a lot of time on this side of the mountain over the past couple of decades, and like much of the mountain, this corner has seen a rapid increase in visitation. The Vista Ridge trailhead is really just a stubbed logging road, and thus ill equipped to handle the amount of traffic it sees, with cars park at crazy angles and backed up down the road on busy weekends.

Therefore, another piece I’m planning to post in the coming year is a new trailhead concept for Vista Ridge that I’m actively working on with Trailkeepers of Oregon (TKO) to advance.

The idea is to solve the current trailhead crowding issues while also converting a section of the current access road to become an accessible trail – turning the roadside view captured above into a trail destination for less able-bodied visitors or those with mobility devices. Far too few of these opportunities exist on the mountain, so this seems like a good starting point.

Future Vista Ridge trailhead? Maybe…

The relocated Vista Ridge parking area would move downhill by a half mile to a recently logged area (above) that is already disturbed and better situated as a trailhead. Some of this work could be done by volunteers, but it will take a partnership with the Forest Service to make this happen. More to come on this concept!

For November, I chose a wintery scene from the Ponderosa pine country of Lookout Mountain, located just east of Mount Hood in the Badger Creek Wilderness. This image is from still another freezing frost event, along with a skiff of snow on the ground from an early winter storm.

The contrast of rust-colored Ponderosa bark to the cool blues and greens of frost-covered pine needles is truly striking during these events. The effect is also fleeting, as even a light breeze can shake the ice crystals loose in a miniature snow flurry, and a break in the clouds would quickly melt them away.

Freezing fog scene in a Ponderosa forest

Ice crystals decorating Ponderosa pine limbs

Last up, the December image is from another winter trek into the White River Canyon (below). On this quiet trip, I followed another snowshoer and her dog into the canyon on a weekday afternoon when crowds on the mountain were few.

Heading into the White River Canyon in winter

On the way back down the canyon, I set up the camera for some evening views of the mountain using long exposures to capture the movement of the White River. This image (below) ended up being my pick for the calendar.

However, I wrestled between a couple of images from this trip for the calendar, both taken from exactly the same spot, though about 20 minutes apart. So, if you like pink alpenglow scenes, you’ll be disappointed in my choice of the previous photo for the calendar! The image below was last light on the mountain that day.

Alpenglow along the White River

As with most years, I chose the 13 calendar images for 2023 from about 150 “keepers” that I had pulled aside over the year as favorites. The best thing about putting the calendar together each year is sharing my experiences in WyEast Country, while also challenging myself to see new places, or see familiar places in new ways. Every year I learn new so many new secrets about Mount Hood and the Gorge!

Also among the photos each year are nine wildflower images on the back of the calendar. My thanks to Paul Slichter’s for his terrific Flora and Fauna Northwest website and to the Oregon Wildflowers Facebook group administered by Greg Lief and Adam Schneider for their help on identifying several of these beauties.

So, there’s the backstory! If you’d like a calendar, they’re easy to order online from Zazzle – and to repeat, all proceeds go to Trailkeepers of Oregon (TKO), as always. Just follow this link:

2023 Mount Hood National Park Campaign Calendar

As always, thanks for following the WyEast Blog for another year. I hope to run into you on the trail sometime in 2023!

Tom Kloster | December 2022

Let’s get this restarted..!

October 21, 2022 / Tom Kloster / 7 Comments

2022 brought new life for our 80-year-old house in North Portland!

Why, I haven’t posted an article since the end of May! Where have I been? Painting, scraping, nailing… repeat! For 30 years we have lived in a World War II-era tract house built above the North Portland shipyards back in 1944, and this year we celebrated three decades of living here by adding some much-needed space on our second floor.

Like so many workers in the COVID era, the pandemic converted me to full-time teleworker overnight, so the new space on the second floor is a new home office where I’m spending (too much) time in Zoom meetings by day and working on the house at night.

Lath from our old plaster-and-lath walls cleaned and bundled for reuse by the deconstruction crew

If you follow the photo sequence (opening image), you might note that our house was without a roof during the month of April this year – a month when Portland set the all-time record for the wettest April ever. It rained every single day! The roof had been scheduled to be installed the first week of that month, and we finally got it tacked on during the first dry stretch in early May, after 6 weeks under a leaky, whole-house tarp. The frosting (quite literally) during this saga was a freak snowstorm in mid-April (again, climate change at work) that nearly destroyed the tarp. It was like camping in our own upstairs!

My role in the project has to install trim and window casings throughout and complete all of the interior painting – work I enjoy, but also really time-consuming. Thus, the unintended “sabbatical” from my blogging. With this article, I’m happy to be putting the paintbrush aside (for a moment) and getting back to writing a few articles about all things WyEast. If working on the house left precious little time for anything else except my day job, the monotony of painting and trimming gave me time to dream up lots of new topics to write about here – so, much more to come!

Eighty-six years of very slow Douglas fir growth created this perfectly straight trim board, first installed in 1944

This article stems direction from the trim work. Whenever possible with the remodel, I recycled old trim, doors and casings from the original 1944 construction, as it is mostly made from dense, incredibly solid old-growth wood. Most lumber cut in the Pacific Northwest in the 1940s was still from centuries-old trees. This piece of 4” baseboard trim (above) was typical – it has 86 growth rings! Modern wood trim of this dimension might have ten rings, and it’s finger-jointed, engineered wood made up of foot-long sections glued together, not cut in a single plank, straight from a tree.

This was on my mind while taking a much-needed day off from nailing and painting trim a few weeks ago when I came across this fallen giant (below) along Elk Creek, near Lolo Pass. It’ an old growth Douglas fir that survived in an island of ancient forest that was passed over by the logging heyday of decades past, when much of the north side of Mount Hood was clearcut.

That’s a big log! This Douglas fir giant fell along Elk Creek in the Lolo Pass area last winter, temporarily blocking Lolo Pass Road

How big is it? Just over 4 feet in diameter – very large for a forest located just below timberline on Mount Hood

I’d always admired this old stand of trees, so I stopped to measure the fallen giant – four feet in diameter. It was not even close to the largest trees I’ve come across in Oregon’s remaining old growth forests, but then I began to count the growth rings, and stopped at two hundred when I was less than halfway toward the center of the tree! Surprised at its age, I took several photos so I could count the rings more definitively at home with the aid of computer monitor. Upon later inspection of the photos, this ancient Douglas fir turned out to be 516 years old when it was finally tipped by a storm last winter!

All around this downed giant are dozens of equally ancient Western hemlock, Western redcedar and Douglas fir growing in a spectacular, species-diverse stand that I had passed through scores of times over the years. I’d always appreciated these big old trees, but I had no idea just how long they had been growing here. How lucky we are that they have survived multiple waves of logging over the past 150 years!

These giants – Douglas fir, Noble fir and Western hemlock – are the surviving neighbors of the big tree that came down along Elk Creek last winter

Then I thought about the 86 growth rings on that old piece of base trim I’d been working with. It occurred to me that it had likely been milled from just such a tree, and was likely hundreds of years old, just as much of the wood in my 1944 house is. In the 1940s logging was still mostly focused on old growth forests, with trees that were centuries old, and the mistaken belief that it would all grow back and we would never run out of big trees.

What struck me about this 500-year-old giant is how casually it had been sawed out of the road, as like any other blowdown that got in the way. We’re still learning to appreciate these irreplaceable monarchs as more than just the board feet of lumber or sticks of firewood they can be converted into. So, to honor this ancient Douglas fir I attached a few human milestones from our frail, checkered history to its long, peaceful timeline, as told in 516 annual growth rings (below).

500 years covers a lot of recent human history. This big old fir took root as a seedling a couple years before the first Spanish settlements appeared in North America in 1508 A.D.

[click here for a large version of this graphic]

Thinking of pre-1960s homes as “old-growth homes” was a bit of a revelation for me, though it makes sense. While private lands had been heavily logged for a half-century or more at that point, second-growth forests still weren’t being logged in a significant way until well into the 1950s. Logging on public land also went into full swing in the late 1940s, flooding the market with a new supply of old-growth logs cut from mountainsides that had never been logged before.

That’s why I was pleased to learn that a big, old Portland home just a few blocks down the street from mine was being carefully deconstructed this summer, and the materials set aside for reuse. When I took at closer look at the notice posted in front of the home, I learned this was no whim of the developer – a few years ago, houses like this were routinely razed, and the debris sent to the landfill in Arlington. Now, the City of Portland now requires homes built before 1940 to be deconstructed and the materials made available for reuse.

What it looks like to un-build a house, one floor at a time – this home will be replaced with multiple dwellings in growing Portland

Behind the disappearing old home, salvaged wood and bricks are stacked in neat piles, waiting to be transported to the Rebuilding Center, a recycled building materials nonprofit working in partnership with the City of Portland in this effort. There, old reclaimed lumber and other construction materials can be reused by builders in older homes where it matches the varying lumber dimensions that were common before modern standards were applied.

Salvaged wood is organized by dimension on site and prepared for reuse at the Rebuilding Center

While it was great to reuse my old wood trim, fact is that original, old growth wood is increasingly an artifact from an era that will never repeat. Yet, wood-frame homes aren’t going away, either. Instead, they are increasingly being built with engineered wood products that are stronger, more stable and use wood cut from fast-growing, farmed tree plantations, not public lands.

Many of the new structural beams in our remodeled home were produced this way, to exacting dimensions that would be impossible with conventional cut lumber. All around Portland multi-story buildings are also being constructed with engineered cross-laminated timber beams and panels that replace steel and concrete.

This new six-floor office building on Portland’s east side streetcar loop is a wood structure, constructed entirely with cross-laminated timbers and panels, one of several new mid-rise buildings proving the value of this new material

This new industry of manufacturing cross-laminated materials (also called “mass timber”) is growing in Oregon, and has the benefit of using very small trees that can be harvested from commercial farms or – importantly – from plantation thinning on our public lands. In this way, there’s a tremendous potential for this new industry to restore rural economies around Oregon that were left behind when old growth logging faded in the 1980s and 90s. You can read more here about this emerging opportunity.

Big trees left behind during the logging heyday of the 1960s, 70s and 80s on Mount Hood’s north side now tower over the crowded plantations that cover old clearcuts. Many of these giants are hundreds of years old. Now that technology has created modern wood products that are superior to traditional lumber, will we allow these recovering forests to grow old, once again?

I like this glimpse into the future. It’s one that could allow our magnificent mountain forests to finally recover, without the future threat of commercial logging of large trees, while also providing the materials needed to house future generations of Oregonians.

This end result of having better, stronger building materials while also restoring our public forests is encouraging. If we do manage this transition, future generations will surely thank us, too.

_______________________________

Tom Kloster | October 2022

Postscript: Shepperd’s Dell Fir

April 30, 2022May 1, 2022 / Tom Kloster / 4 Comments

Hand-tinted view of the Shepperd’s Dell bridge and the Columbia River circa 1920s

Serendipity was at work after I posted this recent article on the venerable old Douglas fir that grows at the east end of the historic Shepperd’s Dell Bridge. First, I’ll share some great comments on the article from readers that shed more light on the story of the big fir. Reader Rosemary Shepperd Guttridge writes:

“I use that tree as an indication of age of photo. My photo by Weister has the top in the tree. A slightly newer photo by Kinsey with a date of 1925, the top is out.”

Rosemary is George Shepperd’s great, great-granddaughter and keeper of the Shepperd family history. You can read my 2014 interview with her and see some of Rosemary’s rare photos of Shepperd family history in this article:

Heirs to George Shepperd

Reader Jerry King shared this fascinating bit of history:

“Labor Day weekend in 2017 wasn’t this tree’s only threat. In the summer of 2016, my wife and I were westbound approaching the fir when smoke came up out of the canyon! We parked after crossing the bridge and saw flames crawling up the east bank (north of the bridge). I quickly called 911 and then began the 26-minute wait for the first Corbett Fire truck to arrive. Flames came within 20’ of the grand old fir!”

Jerry’s account raises the question of whether this earlier fire might have actually saved the big fir by burning some of the accumulated fuel and brush on the slope beneath the tree before the big fire swept through in 2017?

_______________

On the same day that Rosemary and Jerry posted their comments on the article, a couple of historic postcards I had bid on arrived in the mail. Both were of Shepperd’s Dell, and both are new images to my ever-growing collection of old photos and postcards. The first is the hand-tinted image at the top of this article. You can view a large version here:

Shepperd’s Dell and the Columbia River (1920s)

What sets this image apart from the many Shepperd’s Dell postcards I’ve collected is the wide view that includes the Columbia River, Sand Island and the pasture land in the floodplain that has now reverted to forests, meadows – and a freeway, of course.

The second image (below) is even more unusual, so I will dissect this one a bit for some of the stories it tells. This is the full image, shot (somewhat impossibly) from the steep cliff at the west end of the Shepperd’s Dell bridge. It features a parade of touring automobiles coming across the bridge, and visitors parked at the east end pullout, as well. Like the first image, it also shows the Columbia River and Sand Island in the distance.

Traffic jam on Shepperd’s Dell bridge in the early days of the historic highway

Photographers back in the day hauled around large format cameras and even larger tripods to capture these photos – a testament to the photographer who staked out this image. There’s good reason why this view is rare!

A closer look at the three vehicles on the bridge (below) suggests that, while this was a well-planned image, it probably wasn’t staged. Only the woman in the middle of the backseat in the first vehicle is looking up at the photographer, and cars still stack up like this on the bridge today as tourists take in the amazing views of Shepperd’s Dell, no prompting required. Given the popularity of auto touring in the early 1900s, it’s likely the historic highway looked like this on any given sunny, summer afternoon (and I’m basing that on the tops down on the cars and shadows showing the sun moving toward the west horizon).

Well, at least SOMEBODY spotted the photographer on the cliff above the bridge! (…the woman looking up from the backseat of the first car)

This photo was taken between 1914 and 1917, and there are surely some auto buffs out there who can identify the makes and years of the vehicles in this image to me, too. While I’m definitely not an auto buff, I did notice that two of the three (!) vehicles on the bridge have their steering wheels on the right side of the car – not unusual at the time, as left-side steering only because predominant with the introduction of the Ford Model T in 1908.

A closer look (below) at the pullout at the east end of the bridge reveals a scene with all manner of activity. Several cars are parked or stopped, with visitors walking onto the bridge for views of the river and Shepperd’s Dell waterfalls – just as we do today. Two children are playing under the big fir – perhaps picking up its fallen cones? The big tree is already impressive in this view, too – at least 3 feet in diameter more than a century ago.

Lots going on at the east end of the bridge (and below the big fir) in this scene!

The scene beyond the pullout, directly under Bishops Cap, really caught my eye. There are several people walking about in the middle of the road and what looks to be a car stopped in the middle of the road. That would be hair raising on this blind corner today, and it probably was back then, too! It is this part of the scene, along with the overall level of activity, that makes me think this photo was captured when the historic Columbia River Highway was dedicated in June 1916.

How did I narrow the image on this card to between 1914 and 1917? The message on the back is key (below), as the postmark confirms the date, and that it was sent from Portland. The Shepperd’s Dell bridge was completed in 1914, and thus this image was captured sometime during that period. The postmark means this card was sent almost exactly one year after the highway was formally dedicated.

1917 Message on the reverse of the Shepperd’s Dell Bridge postcard.

As postmarked postcards go, this one is a real gem. The sender (“Margaret”) not only dated her message, she also describes her “grand trip” along the road pictured on the front of the card – surprisingly few postcards contain messages that speak to the image on the front We can only guess who young Eliott might be in relation to the sender, only that he “is a mighty good boy and wishes to be remember to Aunt Elizabeth.”

Yes, it still is a “grand trip”, Margaret!

Out of curiosity, I looked up Miss Elizabeth’s address and it turns out to be an impressive, turreted townhome (below, with red doors), now part of the Moreland Street Historic District in south Boston. Margaret and Elizabeth would be shocked at the changes both Portland and Boston have seen over the past century, for sure.

Meanwhile, the scene at Shepperd’s Dell remains largely the same as it appears in this old postcard. Even the big fir survives. We should be proud of that, as it didn’t happen by accident – beginning with George Shepperd donating his dell to the public in 1915, and later, federal protection of the Gorge as a national scenic area and restoration of the historic Columbia River Highway.

The lovely townhome in Boston where Aunt Elizabeth lived in 1917 still stands!

Reading century-old postcard messages like this always makes me wonder just what bits of ephemera from our time might even survive to be looked upon a century from now as a glimpse into how we lived. I think about this when I write these articles and post the images into a digital ether, to be stored on servers 1,000 miles away, then temporarily viewed on computer screens and electronic gadgets.

Paradoxically, the same digital era technology that reduces our words and memories to electrons also allowed me to find an old postcard sent to Massachusetts a century ago and bring it back home to Oregon.

I’m not sure there are any lessons here… just a reminder to go write a few postcards!

________________

Tom Kloster | April 2022

The Big Fir at Shepperd’s Dell

March 31, 2022March 31, 2022 / Tom Kloster / 9 Comments

1920s postcard view of the Shepperd’s Dell Bridge and its iconic Douglas fir (colorized for this article)

A reader reached out a few weeks ago with a question about “that big fir tree at Shepperd’s Dell, and as it turned out, I had been working on an article on that very subject! The tree in question is unmistakable: it stands near the east end of the iconic Shepperd’s Dell Bridge, perhaps the most recognizable of the many graceful bridges along the Historic Columbia River Highway.

The big tree is a Douglas fir, Oregon’s official state tree, and it has been growing here since well before this section of the historic highway was constructed in 1914. The tree grows in a protected hollow, surrounded on three sides by basalt cliffs. George Shepperd, the local farmer who donated what is today’s Shepperd’s Dell State Natural Area to become a park, walked under the tree with his family on their regular visits to visit the waterfalls at Shepperd’s Dell from their farm, located just to the east. Today, countless visitors admire it from the shady wayside at the east end of the bridge.

1910s view of the west approach to Shepperd’s Dell with the big fir rising in front of Bishops Cap

Early photos of the new Shepperd’s Dell Bridge taken in the late 1910s (above) show the tree prominently framing the rock outcrop known as Bishops Cap, more than a century ago. At the time, the tree was large enough to easily be 60-70 years old, though it still had the symetrical shape of a relatively youthful tree.

The image below shows the 1910s scene in reverse, from atop Bishops Cap, with the big Douglas fir standing out in the foreground and a few early motorists parked along the opposite side of the highway.

1910s view looking west from the top of Bishops Cap toward Shepperd’s Dell Bridge, with early motorists and the big fir front and center at the east end of the bridge

This hand-colored postcard (below) from the 1930s features Bishops Cap, and the big Douglas fir is especially prominent in this view. The construction of Historic Columbia River Highway was famously designed to blend with nature and follow the contours of the land, but that still required road engineer Samuel Lancaster to do some fairly heavy blasting and grading to complete the scenic route. At Shepperd’s Dell, he graded the slope above the big fir, but clearly took care to protect the tree from fill debris, likely extending its life for another century.

1930s hand-tinted postcard view of Bishops Cap with the big fir prominently featured to the left

Here’s another hand-tinted 1930s postcard view (below) from the west end of the Shepperd’s Dell Bridge showing Bishops Cap and the big fir. When I first came across this image, I assumed that a fair amount of artist’s license was used to create the scene, since it appears to be from a point in space, where a vertical cliff drops directly below the historic highway.

1930s hand-tinted postcard view of the Shepperd’s Dell Bridge and the big fir in the upper left

However, I eventually came across the 1920s era photo (below) that the previous, hand-tinted image was created from. It turns out the photographer was part mountain goat and managed to capture the scene from a vertical slope below the old highway! As in the hand-tinted view, the big Douglas fir rises beyond the bridge, on the left.

This is the 1920s photograph that the previous hand-tinted scene was based upon, with the big fir in the upper left

This 1910s view (below) is perhaps the most popular of the early images of the Shepperd’s Dell Bridge. It appeared in both its black and white original form and in colorized versions on countless postcards and in souvenir folios that were popular with early motorists visiting the Gorge. At the time this photo was taken, many sections of the new highway were still unpaved, including the section at Shepperd’s Dell.

This is perhaps the most popular 1920s postcard view of Shepperd’s Dell Bridge, with the big fir on the left

Over the century since Samuel Lancaster built his iconic highway through the area, the big fir at Shepperd’s Dell has thrived, as shown in this pair of images (below). The arrows provide reference points on Bishops Cap that helps underscore just how much the old fir has grown in just over century when viewed from the same spot at the west end of Shepperd’s Dell Bridge.

A century passed between these views, but the big fir remains and has grown noticeably larger — the 2021 view is somewhat wider than the 1920s view to fully capture the big fir!

[click here for a larger version of this comparison]

In the 1920s view, the top of the big fir was visually just a big higher than the top of Bishops Cap. By 2021, the tree had not only added some 50 feet to its height, it had also spread out and formed a more rounded crown that is typical for mature Douglas fir. The upper arrow in the 2021 image points to what was the approximate top of the tree in the 1920s. The spread of the tree is noticeable in the 2021 image, as well, as it now obscures part of Bishops Cap from this perspective.

The big fir at Shepperd’s Dell after the fire..?

The charred base of the big fir at Shepperd’s Dell in 2018, one year after the fire

Today, the Shepperd’s Dell fir remains a familiar feature to those stopping at the wayside, a true survivor that stands out from the surrounding forest. Its stout trunk is much larger than other trees in the area, and there has always been a bit of a mystery about a plank attached to the tree and metal cable that disappears into the canopy (I won’t attempt to solve that in this article!). So, when Eagle Creek Fire swept through the Gorge and reached Shepperd’s Dell over Labor Day weekend in 2017, the fate of this old tree was on my mind.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, it was clear that the big tree hadn’t crowned (meaning the fire hadn’t engulfed the entire tree), but a significant part of the crown had been scorched and the bark at the base of the tree was badly blackened. The understory around the tree was completely burned away, so it was clear the fire had burned hot when it swept through. Because the fire occurred toward the end of the growing season, when conifers are becoming dormant with the approach of winter, it was impossible to know if the living cambium layers under the big fir’s thick bark had been destroyed by the heat of the burn. That would have to wait until the next spring, when the stress of producing new growth would test the its ability to survive.

By the fall of 2018 — one year after the fire – the situation was discouraging. The old tree had put out very little new growth on its remaining green limbs in its first growing season after the fire. And while it retained many of its surviving limbs over the course of that year’s summer drought, many had dropped their needles and died back (below), leaving the tree with less than half its canopy intact. Still, it had managed to survive the first year following the fire.

Looking up at the badly scorched canopy of the big fir in 2018, one year after the fire

The group of younger Douglas fir around the big tree didn’t fare as well. Some had been immediately killed by the fire, while others that survived the initial blaze seemed to have lost too much living canopy to recover from the fire (below). During that first summer, the combined loss of green canopy and stress from the annual drought season was too much for many of these trees to survive their first year after the fire.

The scorched big fir and its smaller companions in 2018, one year after the fire

As the big fir at Shepperd’s Dell entered its second winter season after the fire in 2018-19, it wasn’t looking good at all. It has put on almost no new growth that year, and the annual needle drop that fall left even more blackened, bare limbs exposed.

Worse, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) was cutting down what it deemed to be hazard trees along the historic highway in the wake of the fire. This included scores of trees around Shepperd’s Dell, some of them living trees that were impacted by the fire, but still surviving. Its haggard appearance at the time (below) put the big fir at great risk of being defined a “hazard” by highway crews, but thankfully, it was spared from the chainsaws.

The Shepperd’s Dell fir in 2019… with less than half its canopy intact, the old tree was still hanging on…

Then, in the spring of 2019, the big fir pushed out a modest flush of new growth on its surviving limbs in its second season of growth following the fire. It wasn’t much, but it did signal that the tree was finally starting to rebound from the fire. It was no longer losing ground in its recovery.

As the spring of 2020 unfolded, our world seemed to stop as the COVID pandemic swept the globe, but for the big fir at Shepperd’s Dell, things were clearly looking up. The tree put on another flush of new growth in its third year following the fire, then another flush of new growth followed in the spring of 2021. While we hunkered down in the pandemic, the big fir was making its comeback (below).

The big fir makes a comeback: three growing seasons between these images show significant recovery of the crown and middle canopy

[click here for a larger version of this comparison]

Looking up into the canopy in 2021, the change in just three years of gradual recovery is dramatic (below). The big fir has been rebuilding its living canopy and thereby restoring its ability to actively grow, once again. Surprisingly, some of the new growth was also emerging from limbs that seemed to have been lost in that first year after the fire, but apparently had just enough living cambium layer left to allow new growth to emerge through the blackened bark.

Looking up into the recovering canopy of the big fir in late 2021

Today, the future of the big fir at Shepperd’s Dell seems much brighter. Its recovery is remarkable, considering how many of its neighbors were lost to the fire (below). But that’s no accident. Our largest conifers — Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine and Western Larch — typically drop their lower limbs as they grow. This adaption focuses growth at the top of their canopies, where they can absorb the most sunlight, but it also helps protect their living crowns when fires sweep through by denying a “ladder” of lower limbs that allow fire to climb up the tree to the main canopy.

Low intensity fires reinforce this adaptation, with the lowest limbs of moderately burned trees often succumbing to the fire, even as the tree survives, placing its crown still further above the reach of future moderate intensity burns. These “cool” fires are beneficial, helping thin the forest, remove accumulated fuel, invigorate the leafy understory and allow the largest trees to live on to continue anchoring the forest. Combined with thick, fire-resistant bark, these big conifer species define the “fire forests” along the east slopes of the Cascades, where fire is an essential part of the ecosystem, though Douglas Fir grows throughout the Cascades.

The big fir survives! But some of its companions did not…

While some of the area burned in the 2017 Eagle Creek fire fit the definition of “beneficial”, vast areas burned far too hot for any trees to survive, requiring whole ecosystems to restart from bare soil, and in turn, exposing bare soil to serious erosion. Today, modern forest management is increasingly embracing prescribed burns with moderately hot fires to mimic the frequent beneficial burns that were common before modern fire suppression began in the early 1900s. While still controversial for the risk that prescribed burns can potentially bring to rural property, their overwhelming benefit to the forest and role in preventing catastrophic fires is unquestionable.

Look closely at the burn patterns following the Eagle Creek Fire, and you will also see big conifers growing in moist canyons or shaded north-facing slopes were more likely to survive the fire. This has to do with the timing of the blaze. When the fire swept through over Labor Day weekend in 2017, Oregon’s forests were at their most stressed point in the growing season, with several months of drought and hot weather drying trees out and making their extremely vulnerable to fire.

Yet, trees with better access to moisture during the annual drought cycle are able to stay fully hydrated, and are much less vulnerable to the intense heat of a forest fire. This is also why some of our largest trees are found where summer moisture is available. Look at the bark on many of these trees, and you are likely to see ancient burn marks, often from multiple fires that these trees have survived over their long lives. As our forests cope with a changing, warming climate, these conditions favorable to survival will become increasingly important if we hope to continue to have big trees in our forests.

Aerial view of Shepperd’s Dell from 2019 showing the historic highway curving gracefully around the shaded hollow holding the big fir (ODOT image)

What does the future hold for the big fir at Shepperd’s Dell? In the near future, this old tree suddenly has less competition for water and nutrients from nearby trees that succumbed to the fire. For the longer term, it enjoys an excellent location for survival, growing in a shaded, moist bowl surrounded by protective cliffs that buffer it from the seemingly perpetual Columbia Gorge winds.

Douglas fir can live for centuries, and there’s no reason this old tree can’t outlive every human being walking on the planet today – and their children and grandchildren, too! Its most lethal threat is probably us. So, hopefully we will continue to give it the respect and space to grow that Sam Lancaster provided with his curving highway design more than a century ago, allowing many future generations to marvel at this old survivor, just as we do.

Previous WyEast Blog articles on the remarkable George Shepperd:

The Farmer and h is Dell

Heirs to George Shepperd’s Legacy

2022 Campaign Calendar!

December 12, 2021 / Tom Kloster / 1 Comment

If you have followed this blog for a while, then you know I gather up my best WyEast images each year and publish them in the Mount Hood National Park Campaign Scenic Calendar. They are available online, and all proceeds from the calendars go the Trailkeepers of Oregon (TKO), a non-profit trail advocacy and stewardship organization that I’ve volunteered with since TKO formed, way back in 2007.

I’ll post more on how to order the 2022 calendar at the end of this article. But first, here’s a preview of the images, along with a few stories behind the photos.

The January image (below) and cover shot (top) in the new calendar were taken on the same magical evening at Lolo Pass, just a few weeks ago. The clouds framing the mountain were condensing right above me on this clear, cold evening, as they often do here, when moist Pacific air is compressed as it pushes over Lolo Pass on Mount Hood’s northwest shoulder. In winter, this geographic phenomenon can create a localized freezing-fog event at Lolo Pass, though it might be sunny and dry for miles in every direction!

January features Mount Hood alpengow from Lolo Pass

I’ve spent many evenings at Lolo Pass photographing alpenglow on the mountain under these conditions, and the fun (or frustration!) comes with the mountain peeking through the clouds, then quickly disappearing, once again. Because the prime evening light lasts for only a few minutes, those moments when the clouds suddenly part to reveal alpenglow on the mountain are a real thrill for photographers. On this evening, I was joined by another photographer, and we both cheered when the clouds opening up to reveal not just the mountain, but also the moonrise appearing over his shoulder! The moment was over after just a few seconds, but it is captured in the cover photo for this year’s calendar. It was the also the last time WyEast revealed himself on that memorable evening.

For February, I chose an image of Cedar Island, a botanical anomaly located in the heart of the Deschutes River canyon. This article from earlier this year tells the story of this odd group of Incense Cedar trees mysteriously growing far outside their normal range and habitat and somehow thriving in the middle of desert country, thanks to a confluence of unique conditions.

February features mysterious Cedar Island in the Deschutes River Canyon

These trees are truly oddities, but as described in the article, they’re also doing quite well. They have now established a satellite colony on the shoreline opposite the island, where a combination of shade and underground springs has allowed them to thrive. You can visit this grove by following the Deschutes River access road north from Sherars Falls for a few miles, just beyond Beavertail Campground.

As the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire begins to fade into our collective memory, and the post-fire recovery of the Columbia River Gorge continues to unfold, there are plenty of surprises. Perhaps most startling are the twin cliff collapses at Metlako Falls and nearby Punch Bowl Falls, along Eagle Creek. The Metlako overlook collapse occurred about nine months before the fire, but the Punch Bowl Falls event followed the burn. Some speculate the latter event was triggered by changes in runoff and the water table resulting from the burned forest. It’s an intriguing theory, though we may never really know for sure. What is certain is that both events are part of the ongoing evolution of the Gorge landscape, though we tend to think of it as static.

A similar collapse on a much larger scale occurred at nearby Tanner Creek in 1973, temporarily damming the creek and forming a lake that persisted for several years. The March calendar image features Wahclella Falls (below), framed by house-sized boulders that mark the many cliff collapses that have occurred here over the millennia.

March features Wahclella Falls on Tanner Creek

The Eagle Creek Fire burned lightly in the lower section of the Tanner Creek canyon, sparing many of the big, old trees here. However, the story in the upper Tanner Creek canyon is starkly different, with much of the overstory completely killed. Though just four years have passed since the fire, hundreds of logs from trees burned upstream have already collected in the side channel just below Wahclella Falls (below), forming a huge log jam that spilled onto the trail! Volunteers from TKO had to saw a path through the debris to reopen the trail in the winter of 2020-21.

What will the post-fire future bring to Tanner Creek and Eagle Creek? A LOT more logs, that much is certain. Some logs will make it downstream to the lowest stretches of the Tanner Creek, where biologists once placed logs and boulders in an attempt to improve salmon habitat. Now, the Eagle Creek fire is about to provide a major assist in that work by delivering a lot more logs in coming years.

Panoramic view of the new log jam below Wahclella Falls

The logs in Tanner Creek (and other major streams in the Gorge affected by the fire) may be new to us, but they are really just a return to what used to be, before fire suppression, when the Gorge was much less forested and the streams were filled with a lot more logs. That’s good news for the health of the forest and the endangered salmon and steelhead that rely on log-filled streams to spawn, as well as wildlife that depend on a forest with a mosaic of old growth forests, recovering forests and open patches created by fire.

For April, I chose a somewhat deceptive image from a spot called Fairbanks Gap (below), in the eastern Columbia River Gorge. One deception comes from the fact that Interstate-84 is not only out of sight, but also out of hearing range from this spot, despite being directly below the cliffs that frame the gap. Another is that this scene is on private land, and thus a reminder that without the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area protections, a lot more places like this would have vacation homes (or worse) constructed on them. Instead, this remains a working cattle ranch – though I hope someday it will make its way into public ownership for permanent protection.

April features Fairbanks Gap and the east Columbia River Gorge

You can follow a nice backroad loop past the Fairbanks Gap by taking Fifteenmile Road out of The Dalles, and turning sharply uphill onto gravel (and signed) Old Moody Road at the rural crossroad community of Fairbanks (which features a lovely one-room schoolhouse). From here, Old Moody Road climbs to the gap, then traverses high bluffs above the Columbia River, with many spectacular views, before descending to Deschutes State Park, along I-84. My favorite time to visit this area is in late spring, when wildflowers line the old roads, and the eastern Gorge is verdant green.

The May image also features the eastern Gorge, this time at Rowena Plateau during the annual wildflower show. Yellow-flowered Arrowleaf balsamroot and blue-blossomed Lupine are the showy stars here, but the plateau is home to dozens of wildflower species, some found only in this part of the Gorge.

May features Rowena Plateau (and the town of Lyle, across the river)

In recent years, Rowena Plateau and the trail to McCall Point have been “discovered”, and the place is often crowded with adoring visitors. To address some of the impacts of all those feet on the trails, TKO has been working on some realignments and repairs to the McCall Point trail, with an eye toward improving the grades and drainage in a way that makes the trails more resilient to both weather and boots.

The Nature Conservancy owns much of Rowena Plateau, and continues to allow visitors to their preserve. This is a real gift for the public to enjoy, and while the vast majority come to enjoy (and revere) the scenery, big crowds inevitably mean a few thoughtless people. So, while I was frustrated to see tagging on a boulder along the lower part of the McCall Point trail on this trip, I also wasn’t surprised.

Tagging on a boulder on Rowena Plateau – a growing scourge in the Gorge

Tagging has become a problem throughout WyEast country, and especially in the Gorge. It’s especially frustrating at Rowena, where a private non-profit has shown the generosity of allowing us to visit their preserve. We probably can’t stop tagging, but you can support the Nature Conservancy of Oregon with a donation for the excellent work they are doing in the Gorge.

Our early and unusually warm spring this year came on the heels of an excellent snowpack, and that translated into heavy runoff and an impressive scene at White River Falls State Park, in the desert country east of Mount Hood. The June calendar image features a raging White River Falls (below), framed with bright green Cottonwood trees. The park encompasses the two-tiered main falls and a lesser-known lower falls, along with the fascinating ruins of a turn-of-the-20th Century hydroelectric project that once powered The Dalles.

June features White River Falls during spring runoff season

Only photographers would notice this aesthetic improvement to the main falls overlook – but sometime over the past years, a pair of long-dead Cottonwoods that partly blocked the view finally collapsed… or were perhaps were removed by park officials? The latter explanation is quite plausible, as the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department has stepped up their efforts to maintain this somewhat remote park, including buttoning up the historic powerhouse, where vandals had covered some of the walls with tagging and damaged some of the old machinery.

Snaggy former view of White River Falls… these dead trees are gone!

In the years I’ve spent visiting this little park, it has gone from very obscure to quite popular, and even the boot path to the once little-known lower falls is now well-worn. In a coming article, I’ll post some trail concepts for improving some of these boot paths and adding new trails to better manage some of the human impacts as visitation continues to grow.

Lower White River Falls and Gorge

For July, I chose an image from a favorite spot along the Cooper Spur Trail, overlooking the mighty Eliot Glacier, largest of Mount Hood’s glaciers. Our long spring and record-setting summer heat were hard on Mount Hood’s glaciers, and by late summer the Eliot Glacier was looking especially beleaguered. This image (below) was captured in late September, after an early snow had given the glacier a new coat of white, and the annual summer melting had finally slowed for the year.

July features the still-magnificent Eliot Glacier

As I was shooting this image of the mountain and the Eliot Glacier, I spotted a mountain rescue team training at the base of the lower icefall. There was a time not too long ago when the seracs (or ice pinnacles) in the lower icefall with turquoise-blue and a prime ice climbing area.

Climbers training in mountain rescue below the lower Eliot Glacier icefall

But the continued retreat of the Eliot Glacier has now moved the firn line above the lower icefall in recent years, and the seracs are now dark with glacial till and rock. The firn line is where a glacier is losing more ice than it is gaining, so as the glacier recedes the firn line gradually moves higher.

This is pair of images (below) that I’ve taken over the past decade from this spot, and I post them not to make readers feel sad or discouraged, but rather, to underscore the sense of urgency we all must feel in our collective response to global warming.

The Eliot Glacier has receded markedly over just the past decade

[click here for a much larger version of this comparison]

The accelerated Eliot Glacier retreat over the past two decades has had all sort of impacts, but near the top of the list of concerns is the impact on downstream fisheries that depend on cold, dependable runoff from the glacier. A more visible impact has been the deep erosion and periodic floods and debris flows that have reshaped the Eliot Branch canyon, below the glacier.

Though I know both the science and politics are challenging, I’m hopeful that we’ll find a path toward a worldwide shift away from carbon pollution in my lifetime. Future generations may not see the Eliot Glacier as I once knew it, but hopefully there will be a smaller Eliot Glacier they can stand in awe of, still tumbling down the slopes of Mount Hood.

At the opposite end of the glacial spectrum, the August calendar image features the icy stream that flows from Mount Hood’s tiniest living glacier, the tenacious Glisan Glacier, located high on the northwest shoulder of the mountain. For some reason, this glacial outflow was never given a proper name by early mountain explorers, despite many smaller streams on the mountain being named. The oversight is a bit of a mystery, as there were several well-documented trips to this side of the mountain in the early 1920s and 1930s by the Mazamas for the very purpose of mapping and naming the features here.

August features “Glisan Creek”, the glacial outflow from the tiny Glisan Glacier

As a default, many call this “Glisan Creek”. That’s not a bad option, since there’s a good chance the glacier, itself, will fall victim to global warming in coming decades, and only the creek will remain. The Glisan Glacier was named for prominent Portlander Rodney Glisan in 1938. Some of the history of all of Mount Hood’s smallest glaciers is included in this earlier article on Mount Hood’s Pint-Size Glaciers.

After an especially long and dry spring and summer in WyEast Country, fall brought early snow and some of the best fall colors in memory to the mountain. The scene below, at the McNeil Tarns, was captured after the first dusting of snow in late September, and it’s also the calendar image for that month in the new calendar.

September features the McNeil Tarns on Mount Hood

This is a well-known spot along the Timberline Trail, as it is located along the approach to popular McNeil Point on the northwest shoulder of the mountain and visited by thousands of hikers each year. While most hikers know of the pair of McNeil tarns located immediately adjacent to the Timberline Trail, few know of the third, lesser-known tarn in this trio. It’s located just off the Mazama Trail (below). Thanks to a dense veil of trailside Huckleberries, Mountain Ash and young Mountain Hemlock, this beautiful tarn is known to surprisingly few, but it is no less lovely than its more popular siblings.

The Mazama Tarn near McNeil Point on Mount Hood

Over the past five years, I’ve posted several articles about Punchbowl Falls Nature Park, the newest public lands in WyEast Country. The new park is the product of determined volunteers at Thrive! Hood River and Trailkeepers of Oregon (TKO), and features a surprising abundance of forest types, river scenes and waterfalls. Dead Point Falls (the October calendar image, below) is among the park highlights, especially in fall when Bigleaf Maple, Vine Maple, Western Dogwood and Oregon White Oak light up the surrounding forest in shades of orange, yellow and red.

October features Dead Point Falls and the West Fork Hood River

Meanwhile, higher up on the mountain, beautiful Heather Canyon on Mount Hood’s southeast flank is especially lovely in fall, when Huckleberry and Mountain Ash turn the canyon into a brilliant watercolor of orange and yellow. Lower Heather Creek Falls (below) is the featured image for November in the new calendar.

November features Heather Creek on the southeast slopes of Mount Hood

There are a couple ways to hike into Heather Canyon, but I always opt for the Newton Creek Trail approach, mostly to avoid walking through the Mount Hood Meadows ski resort. In the coming year, I hope to post a long-planned article with a somewhat radical proposal for rethinking Mount Hood Meadows – something we should all be considering as climate change threatens to put ski resorts as we know them out of business in coming years.

Anyone visiting Lookout Mountain on Mount Hood’s east side has probably noticed this beautifully framed view from Lookout Mountain Road (below), and I chose it for the December image in the new calendar. If the conditions are right, early snow on the mountain appears just as the Western Larch trees are turning to yellow and gold, and such was the case this year!

December features Mount Hood framed by Western Larch

I’ve photographed this spot too many times to count over the years and I’ve always thought of it as a scene only hikers knew about. However, a couple of days after capturing the calendar image, I was walking through my neighborhood grocery store and did a double take when I saw the scene on the cover of a nationally marketed calendar!

This looks vaguely familiar…

The photographer (and I’m not sure who it is) captured a less snowy version of Mount Hood, though it remains a beautiful image, and it’s great to see this lesser-known view of the mountain in wide publication.

Finally, the back cover of the new calendar features wildflower highlights from around WyEast country, ranging from the elegant Mount Hood Lily and Pacific Rhododendron to our state flower, the Oregon Grape (below).

The back cover of the calendar features a selection of wildflowers

There you have it! If you’d like to purchase a calendar, it’s easy to order direct from Zazzle:

2022 Mount Hood National Park Campaign Calendar

Each page in the calendar measures 11×14 inches (or 22×14” unfolded on the wall) and I’ve designed this as a functioning calendar, with date squares that you can actually write in! Zazzle prints these with exceptional quality and ships them carefully packaged with a backer board and moisture seal.

For another week or so, the calendars will sell for $29.75, but after December 20 that price will bump up to $34.95, with the additional five dollars of markup also going to directly to TKO, bringing the total to about $10 from each calendar to TKO for the great work they do. Zazzle typically ships these within a few days of ordering, and I usually receive orders within about 10 days.

Thanks for reading this far, and as always, thanks for visiting the blog – I hope to see you here and on the trail in the coming year!

Tom Kloster • December 2021

The Noblest of Firs

November 26, 2021 / Tom Kloster

Forests of Noble fir forests spread out to the horizon along the crest of Waucoma Ridge, just north of Mount Hood (Mount Adams in the distance)

We’re coming into another holiday season when millions of Americans will set up a Christmas tree cut in Oregon. There’s a good chance it will be a Noble fir, long prized as the most beautiful and durable of Christmas trees, representing about a third of the cut tree industry here.

There was a time when Noble fir grown as holiday trees were left in their natural state, which features elegant tiers of symmetrical branches and soft, deep green, upwardly curving needles. In recent years, Nobles grown for mass-market consumption have increasingly been sheared to produce a densely branched, unnatural thicket (acknowledging my bias, here!) in the same way that Douglas fir have long been cultivated in the Christmas tree trade. Still, the un-sheared Nobles remain the gold standard, and they sell for gold-standard prices at tree lots, too.

New grown emerging on Noble fir boughs

Noble fir cones

In Oregon, families also have the option of cutting their own Christmas trees at U-cut tree farms, a popular benefit of living in a region that produces millions of holiday trees for the nation. It’s also possible to cut your own tree on National Forest land, a tradition that dates back a century or more. Though more regulated today by the U.S. Forest Service, families looking for a more adventurous option than local tree lot can head up to designated areas on the mountain (typically powerline corridors or recovering clear cuts) and bring home their own cut tree.

The author at age 11 (second from left) with family and friends on a 1973 trip to Lolo Pass to cut Christmas trees. Noble fir were always the goal, but in those days of heavier mountain snows, simply reaching the Noble fir zone in December was an adventure!

Christmas trees are pretty much the extent of public knowledge of the noblest of our true firs. As the common name might suggest, noble fir is the largest of all true firs. Their name was given in the fall of 1825 by botanist David Douglas when he ventured into the high country above the Columbia River River Gorge, in the vicinity of today’s Cascade Locks. Though he wasn’t specific about the peak he climbed on the north side of the river, it is believed to be today’s Table Mountain. A few days later, he climbed to a high point on the Oregon side, most likely today’s Benson Plateau.

On this pair of climbs, he came upon magnificent, old-growth stands of Noble fir, and gave them their well-deserved name. While they are undeniably beautiful as young trees, old-growth Noble fir are a sight to behold. Like many of our Pacific Northwest conifers, these trees grow to be giants, with the largest on record reaching nearly 300 feet in height and nearly 10 feet in diameter.

Old-growth Noble fir forests near Mount Hood’s Bennett Pass

An ancient Noble fir giant towers above the surrounding forest canopy near Bennett Pass

Noble fir are also unique to the Pacific Northwest, with a range that extends from just above of Snoqualmie Pass in Washington south to the Siskiyou Mountains in Southern Oregon and the Trinity Alps region along the northern edge of California. In their southern extent, they are known to hybridize with California’s Shasta fir, a variety of the Red fir that grows in the Sierras and extends into the southern fringe of the Noble fir range.

Despite their willingness to grow in planted rows as farmed Christmas tree seedlings in the hot, dry summers of the Willamette Valley floor, Noble fir are a subalpine species. They typically grow at elevations of 3,500 feet to 5,500 feet, where they are long-lived and acclimated to the harsh winters of our mountains. Not surprisingly, they grow more slowly under these conditions, but they are tremendously adaptable, and often grow on very steep mountain slopes and exposed, rocky ridgetops.

Centuries-old Noble fir giant near Bennett Pass

Noble fir is a sun-loving pioneer species in our forests, quickly colonizing in burn areas to form pure, long-lived stands. Hike through one of the towering old-growth stands found in the high country of the Columbia Gorge or on the peaks surrounding Mount Hood, and you’re likely walking through an old burn, with the age of the trees as a good indicator of when fire last roared through, long ago. That’s because they are not only post-fire colonizers, but also highly susceptible to fire as mature trees, as they lack the protective bark of fire-adapted conifers like Ponderosa pine and Western larch.

This cycle of burn-and-rebirth in our Noble fir forests is on full display today on the north slopes of Mount Hood, where the 2011 Dollar Lake Fire burned through sprawling stands of subalpine Noble fir. These forests were almost entirely killed where the fires swept through, yet today, the forest recovery is already well underway, with young Noble fir seedlings leading the way among other post-fire pioneer species.

Ghost forest of Noble fir skeletons where the Dollar Lake Fire swept through a decade ago

Ancient Noble fir killed by the Dollar Lake Fire will provide wildlife habitat for many decades to come as a new forest grows here

Noble fir seedling emerging from the charred ashes of the Dollar Lake Fire

Meanwhile, across the Clear Branch canyon on the north of the mountain, the forests along the crest of Blue Ridge and at Owl Point (along today’s Old Vista Ridge Trail) are made up almost entirely of Noble fir that had colonized an earlier burn there, one that occurred sometime in the early 1900s. This pair of photos (below) from Owl Point shows how the foreground was burned and just beginning to recover in 1952, while 70 years later the scene is reversed: the forests along Blue Ridge and Owl Point have largely recovered, while the north slope of the mountain is just beginning its recovery from the 2011 Dollar lake Fire.

When our Noble fir forests are spared of fire and logging, individual trees can easily live up to 400 years. The oldest known Noble fir have reached 600 to 700 years, though trees of this age are exceedingly rare after more than a century of commercial logging in the Pacific Northwest.

In the early days of extensive logging, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, true firs were considered a lesser wood, so the timber industry marketed the massive, old-growth Noble firs as “Larch”. This explains two Larch Mountains in the Columbia River Gorge, one on each side of the river, and each the site of extensive turn-of-the-century logging in the early 1900s. The better-known Larch Mountain is on the Oregon side, and its broad, high elevation slopes provided a perfect habitat for Noble fir.

Loggers felling a massive Noble fir on Larch Mountain in 1905

By the early 1900s, the Bridal Veil Mill on the Columbia River had established an upstream sister mill in the heart of these Noble fir forests, where the trees were hundreds of years old, having been spared by fire for many centuries. The upstream mill was known as the Palmer Mill (and later, New Palmer Mill, after the first mill burned), and a road on Larch Mountain still carries its name.

Loggers carried giant Noble fir cut on the slopes of Larch Mountain to the New Palmer Mill on logging railroads. This scene is from 1905

Old-growth Noble fir logs were milled at the original Palmer Mill site on the north slope of Larch Mountain. This scene is from 1896, when logging of the virgin Noble fir forests there was in its heyday

Palmer Mill was attached to the main mill by a long flume that followed Bridal Veil Creek, and it was the hub for a massive logging enterprise on Larch Mountain that felled most of the virgin Noble fir forests. Huge logs were first sent to Palmer Mill on a branched system of logging railroad spurs, then milled into rough lumber that was floated down the flume system to the Bridal Veil Mill for finishing into construction grade lumber.

Today, all but a few traces of the Palmer Mill are gone, and many of the Noble fir forests on Larch Mountain are approaching 100 years in age. The area somehow dodged the 2017 Gorge Fire that swept through vast areas of the Gorge, burning through thousands of acres of Noble fir forests in the Gorge high country.

Noble fir in the age of Climate Change

Today, Noble fir country in the western Oregon Cascades is a checkerboard of clear cuts that mark the advent of National Forest logging that began on a commercial scale in the late 1940s. When these trees were cut, the catch phrase used to justify logging ancient forests was “sustained yield”, though sustained yield forestry never envisioned restoring ancient forests to their natural state. Instead, the management philosophy was to provide a continual supply of 60-100 year-old trees from plantations that could be repeatedly logged via a vast network of logging roads built in our forests from the late 1940s through the early 1990s.

When 7.5 minute USGS maps were created in the 1950s and early 60s, there were already thousands of clear cuts on Forest Service lands that showed up on the new maps as a checkboard in heavily logged areas like Mount Hood’s Blue Ridge (shown here). Many more clear cuts followed, and sixty years later, these clear cuts are often overcrowded plantations of conifers that the Forest Service is now thinning through new timber sales

Despite the early bias against true firs, the wood produced by Noble fir eventually came to be valued for being light and strong, and was used during World War II in aircraft, as well as more common construction uses in windows, doors and paper production. This led to aggressive logging in the later years of the commercial timber boom of the 1950s-90s, when lower elevation forests had already been logged over, and high-elevation Noble fir forests were increasingly targeted.

The Pacific Crest Trail follows the crest of this ridge near Lolo Pass, where heavily logged, high-elevation Noble fir forests have been slow to recover. These clear cuts are now 40-50 years old, and yet the stunted, crowded young plantation trees are still dwarfed by the groves of big, old-growth trees that were spared the chainsaw

Clearcutting on the steep, mountainous terrain where Noble fir grow was never sustainable, at least as measured in human lifetimes. The big, high elevation Noble fir forests sold off by the Forest Service were often hundreds of years old, with even the smaller-diameter trees well over a century old. There was never a chance to produce a rotating “crop” of trees at these elevations large enough to justify logging for generations to come, but that didn’t slow the rush to log these forests.

Instead, the logging boom finally peaked with the listing of the Spotted Owl and subsequent “timber wars” in the early 1990s, and it has never fully recovered, though some logging on our national forests continues today.

This Noble fir fell across the Timberline Trail recently, and was sawed out by trail crews. While it is only about 15” in diameter, a count of the annual growth rings revealed this tree to be over 160 years old, demonstrating how elevation and mountain conditions slow the growth of these trees

It’s easily to lose perspective on just how old the trees in our mountain forests really are. The above is a timeline of human events that unfolded since this tree took root as a Noble fir seedling on Mount Hood until a windstorm knocked it down in 2020. This tree is approximately 14 inches in diameter and 160 years old.

These stumps near Bennet Pass mark some of the oldest and largest Noble fir ever logged near Mount Hood, with some of these trees approaching 300 years old when they were cut. These stumps look like they might be a couple years old, with bark still intact. In fact, these trees were logged about 30 years ago, yet the Noble fir seedlings growing in this recovering clear cut are barely six feet tall

This is the same stump that appears in the foreground in the previous photo, with approximate dates according to tree rings. When it was cut, it has lived through more than a quarter of the first millennium.

The Bennett Pass clear cut (shown above) might look recent, given the intact condition of the stumps and the young Noble fir trees just getting established. Yet, this forest was cut nearly 30 years ago, as shown in the aerial photo pair (below). Thanks to its high elevation at over 4,000 feet, and resulting slow forest recovery, this logged area is still just beginning to reforest.

After nearly 30 years, this clear cut in an old-growth Noble fir forest near Bennett Pass is only beginning to recover

These examples are typical of logged Noble fir forests throughout the Mount Hood National Forest. They simply haven’t recovered at the pace the Forest Service assumed when logging was still king. Noble fir seedlings in these cut-over areas have often grown very slowly, reaching just 6 or 8 feet in height after 30 or 40 years of post-logging recovery. The slow recovery has also compounded the fragmentation effect on wildlife that depend on uninterrupted old-growth forest habitat.

Today, the Forest Service is grappling with the perfect storm of an aging, overbuilt system of spur roads from the heyday of commercial logging coupled with increasingly catastrophic forest fires resulting from climate change and a century of fire suppression. This is especially true in high-elevation Noble fir country, where clear cut plantations are especially vulnerable to summer drought and fire, and logging roads are impacted by severe winter conditions.

To meet these challenges, along with Congressional quotas for timber production that have always been unsustainable, the Forest Service has pivoted to forest thinning the thickets of young plantation trees in previously logged areas. It’s arguable that this strategy will help restore forests to a healthy state, but sadly, the Forest Service mission isn’t to restore a mature, healthy forest. Their goal is to bring more marketable logs to maturity, the primary management objective for much of Mount Hood National Forest.

Forest thinning operation on Butcher Knife Ridge, north of Mount Hood, where roughly one third of the trees have been removed from a clear cut plantation to encourage a more diverse forest structure

Forest thinning typically produces massive piles of woody debris, as seen here on Blue Ridge, just outside the Mount Hood Wilderness. Logging debris was historically burned as “slash”, though new uses are under development to make better use of this material as we enter the age of widespread forest thinning

The jury is out as to whether forest thinning improves the health of crowded plantations better than simply doing nothing, given the impact of heavy equipment on tree root systems and the forest understory. The science does suggest that thinning can help as a preventative means for reducing forest fire severity, since it removes potential fuel from the forest. The benefit of thinning Noble fir plantations is less clear, however, since the species is already more vulnerable to fire than other conifers, and seldom survives fire.

Noble fir also tolerate crowded conditions better than other conifers, presumably because these trees are so effective at colonizing burns and often form nearly pure stands in the process. Young Noble fir forests often have little understory beyond a carpet of beargrass because the trees are so closely spaced. But these pure stands have also evolved to self-thin over time, maturing to a more open canopy that allows huckleberry, rhododendron and other mountain understory species to thrive among more widely spaced, mature trees. In these forests, young Noble fir are also part of the understory, as the forest canopy continues to regenerate.

The following images show self-thinning in a young (about 80 years old) Noble fir forest on Bald Mountain, along the Timberline Trail. A recent windstorm selectively toppled the weakest among these trees, a timeless process that Noble fir don’t need our help with.

Recent downfall in a young stand of Noble fir on Bald Mountain are part of an ongoing, self-thinning process these trees have evolved for

Recent self-thinning event in a pure Noble fir stand on Bald Mountain. If it doesn’t burn, this protected forest inside the Mount Hood Wilderness will continue to self-thin, becoming an old-growth Noble fir forest in time

With logged high-elevation forests recovering very slowly, and high-elevation spur roads failing especially badly, and the mounting negative impacts of clear cutting, continued logging of our Noble fir forests simply isn’t a sustainable practice. A new management philosophy that centers on forest restoration and climate adaptation over timber extraction is long overdue.

Instead of waiting a century or more to produce marketable Noble fir saw logs, these recovering forests could be sold for credits on the carbon market, using their gradual recovery as carbon offsets for polluting industries. Over the long term, Noble fir have immense capacity for carbon capture and storage. Scientists studying the ancient Noble fir forests at the Goat March Research Natural Area, near Mount St. Helens, have determined this forest to have a biomass second only to the coastal Redwood forests of Northern California.

A mature, thriving Noble fir forest at the 4,000 elevation on Mount Hood, with a diverse mix of mature and younger trees, and a few wildlife snags

Such a shift in Forest Service philosophy would not only help the global response to climate change, it would also yield a host of other benefits that high elevation forests in our region provide – a list that include critical wildlife habitat, cooler and more stable stream runoff for endangered salmon and steelhead and crucial water supplies for nearby communities that depend on mountain snowpack that forests help retain.

Mature Noble fir forest on Mount Hood, with towering old-growth trees mixed with younger trees and a dense understory

Such a shift in focus would also allow for the Forest Service to retire many of its deteriorating logging spur roads, and revenue from the sale of carbon credits could provide needed funding to do the work. Beyond the escalating cost to maintain them, these roads are notorious for triggering landslides and dumping sediments into streams when cut-and-fill roadbeds fail from plugged culverts or landslides. They also represent an increasing hazard in the form of human-caused forest fires and illegal dumping, as some of the worst lawless activity occurs on these remote roads where law enforcement simply cannot have a meaningful presence.

This road decommissioning work has already begun in the Mount Hood National Forest, though only in fits and starts, as it has thus far been driven by declining agency budgets more than an eye toward forest recovery and restoration. A focus on the broader outcomes of climate, water quality and fish habitat could speed up this important work with a new sense of urgency.

Where to see Noble fir

Want to see some of these trees close-up? One of the best and most accessible places is the short trail to Sherrard Point, which is the rocky summit pinnacle of Larch Mountain. The road to the summit picnic area and Sherrard Point trail is gated in the winter, but usually opens by early June. An easy, paved trail and series of stairsteps leads to the viewpoint.

Noble fir giants at sunset in WyEast country

If you’d like a longer hike, the short, steep climb to the summit of Bald Mountain, near Lolo Pass, leads through some of the best old growth Noble fir in the Mount Hood area:

Bald Mountain from Top Spur

For an even longer hike, start from Lolo Pass and follow the Pacific Crest Trail to Bald Mountain, with much of the route through Noble fir forests:

Bald Mountain from Lolo Pass

Perhaps the best Noble fir forests in the Cascades are at Goat Marsh, near Mt. St. Helens. A short trail takes you into this fascinating research area and some of the largest known Noble fir trees in the world:

Goat Marsh Lake

Bald Mountain and Goat Marsh are snowed in during the winter months, but typically open by early June.

Enjoy!

_________________

Tom Kloster | November 2021

Elk Cove Avalanche!

August 31, 2021 / Tom Kloster / 5 Comments

Mount Hood from Elk Cove in 2021

When it comes to bucolic alpine scenes on Mount Hood, it’s hard to beat Elk Cove. From the spectacular wildflower gardens that line ice-cold Cove Creek to the sweeping views of Mount Hood and the mighty Coe Glacier, the cove serves up one postcard scene after another.

But behind the mountain scenery are some very wild winters. The same steep walls that give Elk Cove its alpine beauty are also a setup for powerful avalanches. These mostly originate on the lower slopes of Barrett Spur and sweep across the cove with surprising regularity.

Mount Hood in 1931 from the same spot as the previous photo, when trees were more sparse at Elk Cove

Early photos of Elk Cove suggest that avalanches were once even more devastating than what we experience today, and probably more frequent, judging by the advancing stands of Mountain Hemlock that have since spread across the cove. The change is most likely a reflection of our warming climate and declining snowpack in recent decades, but winter continues to take its toll. Major avalanches still roar into the cove with regularity, leveling trees and leaving piles of debris in their wake.

The shell of the old CCC stone shelter at Elk Cove as it appeared in the early 1960s, after being hit by numerous avalanches over the prior 30 years

When the Timberline Trail was built through Elk Cove in the early 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s legendary Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) constructed one of their many iconic stone shelters here, one of six that were built along the trail. They couldn’t have known the site they picked was perhaps the most exposed to avalanches of any spot within the cove, and by the early 1960s, the shelter had already been badly damaged. Today, only a few rocks mark the shelter’s former location.

The 2021 Elk Cove Avalanche

Sometime last winter, yet another avalanche swept off the lower slopes of Barrett Spur, once again landing very near where the old stone CCC shelter had once stood. The debris field left behind by the avalanche was easily spotted by hikers ascending Barrett Spur over the summer, and it is also visible from the Timberline Trail where it enters the Elk Cove.

The following schematic shows Elk Cove and the path of the 2021 avalanche in relation to Mount Hood:

[click here for a larger version of this schematic]

This schematic gives a more detailed view of Elk Cove and the approximate path of the 2021 avalanche, including the steep wall along Barrett Spur that is so prone to avalanches (the Timberline Trail is shown in dashed yellow):

[click here for a larger version of this schematic]

From the ground, the debris field left where the avalanche came to rest is striking. This series of views looking down from 99 Ridge (which forms the west wall of Elk Cove) show where the avalanche stopped, and the debris it left behind:

Mount Hood and the 2021 Elk Cove avalanche site

Closer view of Elk Cove and the avalanche debris field

More detailed view of the avalanche debris field

This detailed view from above gives a sense of scale to the hundreds of trees that were caught up in the avalanche and swept into Elk Cove

The debris comes into view where the Timberline Trail curves into the west meadow of Elk Cove, along beautiful Cove Creek. Most hikers were likely too busy looking at the wildflowers along the trail this summer to notice the pile of logs just around the bend, but for regular visitors, the avalanche debris was startling!

Elk Cove avalanche and Cove Creek from the Timberline Trail

The origin of the avalanche can be read from the orientation of the many trees caught up in the wave of snow and ice, as they generally point in the direction of the flow. The schematic below shows the path the avalanche took into Elk Cove before the snow and debris finally came to a stop last winter:

[click here for a larger version of this schematic]

Up close, the awesome power of the avalanche becomes apparent. Whole trees were snapped off and stacked like cordwood in a debris pile as much as 20-foot deep.

The avalanche swept down from the slopes of Barrett Spur (to the right in this view), as indicated by the felled trees pointing to the left, in the direction of the flow

In a typical winter, Elk Cove might have 15-20 feet of snow on the ground, and this snowpack is why small trees on steep mountain slopes are often spared from avalanches, since they are buried under heavy snow in winter. In the view below, the winter snowpack also protected the lush wildflower gardens that line the upper reaches of Cove Creek (seen in the distance), with the avalanche sweeping across these gentle slopes before finally settling on the floor of the cove.

The beautiful wildflower meadows in the upper reaches of Cove Creek were spared from the debris thanks to being on gently sloped terrain and under a blanket of winter snow when the avalanche swept through

Large trees aren’t so fortunate. If they’ve managed to escape avalanches along the base of Barrett Spur long enough to grow taller than the winter snowpack, it’s only luck. In time, most of the taller trees in Elk Cove will be swept away by future avalanches.

This panoramic view of the 2021 avalanche gives a sense of the scale of the event, with the sprawling pile of debris covering roughly 2-3 acres:

Panoramic view of the 2021 Elk Cove avalanche

[click here for a larger version of the panorama]

By early August, when these photos were taken, it would be easy to think the avalanche was just a pile of trees roaring down the mountain, but in fact, this debris is what’s left now that most of the snow and ice has melted away. Look closely, and you can see that a layer of snow and ice has yet to melt away from under the pile when this photo was taken:

6-10 feet of snow still remains under the debris pile as of early August

The 2021 avalanche dumped part of its debris on top of Cove Creek, but the stream made quick work of the pile over the winter. By summer, it had already melted an extensive tunnel under the mountain of snow, ice and debris (below).

Cove Creek carved this snow cave under the debris pile following the avalanche

The huge pile of snow left in Elk Cove by the avalanche brought another surprise: some of the earliest blooming wildflowers were still just emerging in early August, thanks to the extra snow depth left behind by the avalanche. Among these was Western Pasque Flower, a species of Anemone that blooms within a couple weeks of snowmelt, and therefore rarely see by hikers. In fact, most know this beautiful wildflower by its whimsical seed heads, and by the name “Old Man of the Mountain”. The opening image in this article shows a field of Western Pasque Flower gone to seed.

Normally an early bloomer, this Western Pasque Flower was in bloom in early August, thanks to the late-melting margins of the avalanche debris field

How often to avalanches like this occur at Elk Cove? Probably every winter, though events large enough to topple trees seem to occur every 10 years or so, depending on snowpack and weather conditions. Avalanches are most common in mid-winter, when weak snow layers and heavy snowfalls can cause snow to begin to slide on steep mountain slopes. Once they begin, avalanches can travel nearly 60 miles per hour, giving them the destructive force to level forests and buildings in their path.

Ghosts Hiding in Plain Sight

While the 2021 avalanche at Elk Cove is impressive, it is by no means unusual. A look at aerial photos between 2010 and 2021 shows that another avalanche swept through the same area in about 2015. Based on the orientation of downed trees from his earlier event, it originated on some of the same slopes on Barrett Spur that produced the last winter’s avalanche.

In the air photo comparison, below, the location of the new, 2021 avalanche debris pile is marked in yellow. When the 2010 air photo was taken, the forests at the center of the image were intact, but by the summer of 2016, an avalanche had clearly swept through the area. Based on the lack of reddish/orange debris in the 2016 image – the color of recently killed trees – suggests that this avalanche occurred at least a year earlier. So, for the purpose of this article, I’ve described it as the “2015 Avalanche”, and marked its extend in green.

Air photos show the signs of a roughly 2015 avalanche that swept through the same part of Elk Cove as the 2021 event

In both the 2016 and 2018 views, the path of this earlier avalanche is clearly marked by downed trees that point in the direction (right to left) of the moving snow and ice. Though it impacted a larger area in the cove than the 2021 avalanche, the 2015 event brought less woody debris into the cove, suggesting that it originated on a less forested part of the west wall of Elk Cove. In fact, some of the trees in its path on the floor of the cove survived the avalanche, suggesting that the lack of woody debris in the 2015 event made it somewhat less destructive where it finally came to a stop.

While both of these avalanches are awesome reminders of the power of the elements in alpine country, Elk Cove has a few ghosts from the past that suggest much more fearsome events. Tucked into one of the mature, forested “tree islands” at Elk Cove is a ghost tree that give mute testimony to just how powerful an avalanche on Mount Hood can be. The stump of this ghost tree (below) is nearly four feet in diameter and was toppled many decades ago.

This giant ghost tree at Elk Cove was toppled long ago by a very large avalanche

This old ghost was once a very large Mountain Hemlock before it was toppled. Today, its broken remains could easily be 100 years old, marking an avalanche that might have preceded the arrival of the Timberline Trail and those 1930s CCC crews on Mount Hood.

How do we know this old tree was destroyed by an avalanche? The telltale sign is where the tree was snapped off, marking the level of the winter snowpack when the avalanche swept through, and its top is pointed downslope, in the direction the avalanche was moving. Thanks to long, cold winters and dry summers, the shattered remains of this old tree (and several others like it in the cove) have survived to tell the story.

Since that big avalanche, several good-sized trees have grown up around the old ghost tree, helping put an approximate date of 70-100 years since any avalanche of this scale has swept through the heart of Elk Cove. And though it has been many decades since that event, the days of these younger trees are surely numbered, too, as another epic avalanche in Elk Cove is inevitable.

How to Visit

If you’re an able-bodied hiker, you can visit Elk Cove most easily from the Vista Ridge trailhead. It’s a 9-mile hike round trip, but with well-graded trails and no glacial streams to navigate. If you visit the avalanche debris field, please tread lightly, as the rustic path that once led to the upper reaches of Cove Creek was partly buried with debris, and the surrounding area is covered with a fragile meadow of Western Pasque Flower.

You can find a trail description here in the Oregon Hikers Field Guide. Why, you might even know the author of this field guide entry..!

Tom Kloster | August 2021

WyEast Bats Last: The White River Saga Continues!

July 31, 2021 / Tom Kloster / 4 Comments

Mount Hood and the White River as it appeared early in the summer of 2020

Mount Hood’s glaciers may be retreating, but if anything, the melting ice and more extreme weather that climate change is bringing to the mountain have only made the streams that emerge from its glaciers that much more volatile.

Glacial streams are inherently intimidating: ice cold and rising dramatically within hours when glacial melting accelerates on hot summer days to become churning river of mud and silt. They can make for terrifying fords for Timberline Trail hikers and wreak havoc on downstream roads and streambanks. But the worst events typically come in fall or late spring, when sudden warming and heavy rain can trigger rapid snowmelt on the mountain, turning these streams into unruly torrents.

Highway 35 was buried under a sea of boulders in the November 2006 White River debris flow (ODOT)

Such was the setting in November 2006, when a warm front with heavy rains pounded the mountain, rapidly melting the first snows of autumn that added to the explosive runoff. The worst damage to infrastructure came from the raging White River and Newton Creek, two glacial streams that emerge from the southeast side of the mountain. The streams also happen to flank the Meadows ski resort, so when both streams effortlessly swept away whole sections of the Mount Hood Loop highway (OR 35), the resort suddenly found itself cut off from the rest of Oregon.

The 2006 floods washed away the bridge approaches and stacked boulders eight feet deep on top of the former White River Bridge (ODOT)

Highway worker posing with a boulder dropped by the White River on the centerline of Highway 35 during the 2006 floods (ODOT)

Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) crews quickly restored temporary access to the resort, but the damage to the highway was profound. Newton Creek had simply swept away the roadbed along an entire section of the highway, while the White River had swept away the bridge approaches on both sides of the concrete span over the stream – then proceeded to pile a collection of boulders on top of the stranded bridge, just for emphasis!

This overflow culvert at the east end of the old bridge approach was overwhelmed in the 2006 flood, as the White River spilled over the top of the highway, instead (ODOT)

Undaunted, the highway engineers at ODOT and the Federal Highway Administration turned to a recently completed 2003 study of design solutions for several flood-prone spot along the Highway 35. From these, a pair of projects totaling $20 million were proposed to finally tame the two streams – a “permanent” fix, as the study described it.

East of the White River, the 2006 floods also sent a torrent of water and debris down Newton and Clark Creeks, erasing sections of Highway 35 near Hood River Meadows (ODOT)

Once again, the plan was to go bigger. For Newton Creek, the now rebuilt highway includes a massive, 30-foot wide, rock-lined flood channel running parallel to the highway, with box culverts periodically spaced to allow floodwaters to cross under the road. For the White River, a series of option were considered, including a tunnel (!) and completely relocating the highway. But in the end, the option of simply replacing the older span with a much larger bridge was selected. The new bridge was completed in 2012.

Options considered in the 2003 study of possible Highway 35 crossings of the White River

[click here for a larger version of this table]

The preferred option for the White River also included a second span over Green Apple Creek, a small stream located just east of main crossing, and a feature that would serve as an overflow for the White River. Between the bridges, the new highway crossing is constructed on a high berm of fill, twenty feet above the expanse of sand and boulders that make up the White River floodplain, and berms also support the approaches to both bridges on either side of the floodplain.

When they were completed in 2012, six years after the floods that had swept away sections of the highway, these structures seemed gargantuan compared to the previous incarnation of the highway. Yet, looking down upon the new White River Bridge from higher up on the mountain, it is really nothing more than a speed bump for the raging monster the White River is capable of.

The White River has been moving east for several years. This view is from early summer 2020, when the upstream section of the river had already moved almost to the east canyon wall

For the past decade, the new structures seemed to be working as planned by the highway engineers. The White River continued to meander about in its wide flood channel, as it has for millennia, but it still found its way to the newer, bigger bridge opening. Until last winter, that is.

Sometime during the winter of 2020-21, the river abruptly formed another new channel along the east side of its floodplain, beginning about one mile above the new highway bridge. In recent years, the river had been gradually moving in this direction, including a smaller flood event in the fall of 2020 that spilled debris into the White River West SnoPark. Today’s radically new channel is a continuation of this eastward movement, almost to the east wall of the canyon.

This view from the fall of 2020 followed a debris flow that sent rock and gravel into the White River West SnoPark and set the stage for the big shift in the river’s course that would follow over the coming winter. The river was actively meandering across the latest flow in this view, settling on a new course

The berm in the center of this view was built after the 2006 floods to project the White River West SnoPark parking area (on the right) from future flooding (the White River floodplain is on the left). The fall 2020 debris flow managed to breach the berm, spreading rock and gravel across the southern corner of the parking area (the third car and most distant car in this photo is parked on the debris). The new (and now dry) White River Bridge is in the distance

By the spring of 2021, the White River had completely abandoned the main floodplain and now flows beyond the row of tress in the far distance

Looking downstream from the new White River Bridge in 2021, the former riverbed is now completely dry, with the river now flowing beyond the band of trees on the left

The White River Bridge is only a few years old, but now spans only a dry streambed

This decision to include a second bridge in the new design turned out to be fortuitous over the last winter, at least in the near term. This “overflow” bridge is now the main crossing of the recently relocated White River. Had ODOT opted to simply replace the culverts that once existed here, the river would have easily taken out a section of the berm that supports the highway between the two new bridges, closing the highway, once again. However, the second span is much smaller than the main span, so it is unclear whether the river will continue to cooperate with the highway engineers and stick to this unplanned route.

This view shows the new channel carved by the White River sometime during the winter of 2020-21

The White River carved a 20-foot-deep riverbed through loose floodplain material to form the new channel

The new bridge design included this secondary opening as a backup to the main bridge, though it is now the primary crossing of the relocated White River. The highway slopes downward as it moves east of here, dropping below the elevation of the White River floodplain, and thereby creating the potential for the river to migrate further east, threatening the fill section of the highway in the distance in this view

The channel shifts on the White River might seem to be sudden, but in reality, they are perpetual. The White River (along with the rest of Mount Hood’s glacial streams) bring tremendous loads of rock and silt with them. This has always been the case, with melting glaciers releasing debris caught up in the river of ice, some of it building piles of rock called moraines, and some carried off by the rivers that flow from the glaciers.

In the past few decades, the cycle of glacial erosion has been compounded by the retreat of the glaciers, themselves. All of Mount Hood’s glaciers are rapidly losing ice in the face of a warming climate, and the retreat of larger glaciers like the White River, Eliot, Sandy and Coe leaves behind bare ground once covered in ice.

When this happens, and erosion shifts from slow-moving ice to fast-running water, the amount of debris and water moving down the glacial streams grows dramatically. The following diagram (see below) explains this relationship in the context of the rapidly retreating Eliot Glacier, Mount Hood’s largest body of ice, located on the mountain’s northeast side.

[click here for a larger version of this schematic]

Glaciers plow wide, U-shaped valley as they grind away at the mountain, whereas streams cut deep, V-shaped canyons. When glaciers like the Eliot retreat, they expose their u-shaped valleys to stream erosion, and their outflow streams (in this case the Eliot Branch) immediately go to work cutting V-shaped canyons into the soft, newly exposed valley floor, resulting in much more material moving downstream in more volatile events.

In the schematic, the lower part of the Eliot Glacier is somewhat hidden to the casual eye, as it’s covered with rock and glacial till. This is true of most glaciers – the white upper extent marks where they are actively building up more ice with each winter, and the lower, typically debris-covered lower extent is where the ice is actively melting with each season, leaving behind a layer of collected debris that has been carried down in the flowing ice.

The terminus of the glacier in the schematic marks the point where the Eliot Branch flows from the glacier. As the terminus continues to retreat uphill with continued shrinking of the Eliot Glacier, more of the U-shaped glacial valley floor is exposed. At the bottom of the schematic, the floor of the valley has been exposed for long enough to allow the Eliot Branch to already have eroded a sizeable V-shaped canyon in the formerly flat valley. This rapid erosion has fed several debris flows down the Eliot Branch canyon in recent years, including one as recently as this month, abruptly closing the road to Laurance Lake.

The Eliot Branch continues to spread debris flows across its floodplain, burying trees in as much as 20 feet of rock and gravel. This section of the Eliot Branch flooded again earlier this month, closing the only road to Laurance Lake

We’ve seen plenty of examples of this activity around the mountain over the past couple of decades, too. In 2006 the mountain was especially active, with flooding and debris from the Sandy, Eliot, Newton Clark and White River glaciers doing extensive downstream damage to roads – this was the event that removed the highway at the White River and Newton Creek. Smaller events occurred in 1998, as well. In the 2006 event, the Lolo Pass Road was completely removed near Zigzag and the Middle Fork Hood River (which carries the outflow from the Eliot and Coe glaciers) destroyed bridges and roads in several spots.

Even in quieter times, the White River has moved its channel around steadily. That’s because the heavy debris load in the river eventually settles out when it reaches the floodplain, filling the active river channel. This eventually elevates the river to a point where it spills into older channels or even into other lower terrain. Because of the broad width of the White River floodplain at the base of the mountain, this phenomenon has occurred hundreds of times over the millennia, and the river will continue to make these moves indefinitely.

To underscore this point, the 2003 highway study of potential solutions for Highway 35 includes this eye-opening chart that shows just how many times the White River has flooded the highway or overtaken the bridges – nearly 20 events since the highway was first completed in 1925!

[click here for a larger version of this timeline]

Therein lies the folly of trying to force the river into a single 100-foot opening (or even a second overflow opening) on a half-mile wide floodplain. The fact that much of the floodplain is devoid of trees is a visual reminder that the river is in control here, and very active. It has a long history of spreading out and moving around that long precedes our era of roads and automobiles.

But the White River has an added twist in its volatility compared to most of the other glacial streams that flow from Mount Hood. The vast maze of sandy canyons that make up the headwaters of the White River are quite new, geologically speaking – at least as they appear today. This is because of a series of volcanic events in the 1780s known as the Old Maid eruptions covered Mount Hood’s south side with a deep blanket of new volcanic debris. The same gentle south slopes that Timberline Lodge and Government Camp sit on today didn’t exist before those eruptions, just 240 years ago.

The White River Glacier (center) flows from near the crater of Mount Hood, and rests upon soft slopes of rock and ash debris that were created by the Old Maid eruptions of the 1780s. The large rock monolith poking up from the crater (left of center) is Crater Rock, an 800-foot lava dome that formed during the Old Maid eruptions

The Old Maid eruptions created other new features on the mountain – notably, 800-foot Crater Rock, a prominent monolith that was pushed up from the south edge of the crater. Meanwhile, the eruptions also generated lahars, the name given to sudden, massive mudflows that can range from ice cold to boiling, depending on the origin of the event. These flows rushed down the White River, Zigzag and Sandy River valleys, burying whole forests under debris ranging from mud and silt to boulders the size of delivery trucks.

The Old Maid eruptions take their name from Old Maid Flat, located along the Sandy River, where a new forest is still struggling to take hold on top of the volcanic debris, more than two centuries later. At the White River, trees buried by the lahars can be seen in the upper canyon, where the river has cut through the Old Maid eruption debris to reveal the former canyon floor, and trees still lying where they were knocked over (more about those buried forests toward the end of this article).

From high on the rim of the White River canyon, the endless supply of rock and ash from the Old Maid deposits is apparent – along with the impossibly tiny (by comparison) “bigger bridge” over the White River

This telephoto view of the new White River bridge from the same vantage point in the upper White River canyon reveals the structure to be a mere speed bump compared to the scale and power of the White River

For this reason, the White River has an especially unstable headwaters area compared to other glaciers on the mountain, with both glacial retreat and the unstable debris from recent lahars triggering repeated flash floods and debris flows here. That’s why the question of whether the new, bigger and bolder highway bridge over the White River will be washed out is more a question of when. It will be, and in our era of rapid climate change, the answer is probably sooner than later.

Is there a better solution? Perhaps simply acknowledging that the river is perpetually on the move, and designing the road with regular reconstruction in mind, as opposed to somehow finding a grand, permanent solution. That’s at odds with the culture of highway building in this country, as it could mean simply accepting more frequent closures and more modest bridge structures – perhaps structures that could even be moved and reused when the river changes course?

The 2003 Federal Highways study actually acknowledges this reality, even if the brawny, costly designs that were ultimately constructed in 2012 do not:

“It is imperative to remember that geological, meteorological, and hydrological processes that result in debris flows, floods, and rock fall have occurred for millions of years, and will occur for millions of years to come. They are naturally occurring phenomena that with current technology cannot be completely stopped or controlled. Thus, the best that can be hoped for is to minimize the destructive, highway– closing impacts of events at the study sites.” (FHWA Highway 35 Feasibility Study, 2003)

The White River seems to be enjoying its new channel and change of scenery…

In the meantime, the newly relocated White River an awesome sight. We’re so accustomed to bending nature to our will in this modern world that it’s refreshing to see a place where nature has no intention of being fenced in (or channeled, in this case).

Do rivers have a sense of humor or experience joy? As I looked down upon the White River sparkling and splashing down its new channel this summer, it seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the pure freedom of flowing wherever it wants to. It’s yet another reminder that “nature bats last”, and in WyEast country, the mountain – and its rivers — will always have the final word.

For us, it’s that strangely comforting reminder that we’re quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things, despite our attempts to pretend otherwise.

How to visit the White River

If you’re interested in experiencing the living geology of the White River, an easy introduction is to park at the White River West SnoPark area and trailhead, then head up the trail toward the mountain for a quarter mile or so. From here, the river has moved to the far side of the floodplain, but for the adventurous, it’s cross-country walk across sand and boulders to reach the stream. There, you can soak your feet in ice cold, usually milky water and watch the river moving the mountain in real time, pebble-by-pebble. The main trail is almost always within sight, so it would be tough to get lost in the open terrain here.

Look closely – those tan stripes near the bottom of the White River canyon mark the pre-Old Maid eruption slopes of Mount Hood, now buried under ash and debris from the lahars. Several preserved trees that were knocked down by the eruption can be seen along these margins. This viewpoint is along the Timberline Trail, just east of Timberline Lodge.

To see the relocated White River, park at the White River East SnoPark and walk to the east bridge – now the main crossing of the White River. The view upstream includes the top of Mount Hood, but watch out for speeding traffic when crossing the highway!

To see the buried White River forest, you can park at Timberline Lodge and follow the Timberline Trail (which is also the Pacific Crest Trail here) east for about a mile, where the trail drops to the rim of the upper White River canyon. The views here are spectacular, but if you look directly below for a waterfall on the nearest branch of the White River, you’ll also see the reddish-yellow mark of the former valley floor and the bleached remains of several ghost trees buried in the eruptions 240 years ago. Watch your step, here, and stay on the trail – the canyon rim is unstable and actively eroding!

___________________

Tom Kloster | July 2021

In the Realm of St. Peter

June 27, 2021 / Tom Kloster / 8 Comments

St. Peters Dome rising above the January 13 Bucher Creek debris flow that swept across I-84, killing one person (ODOT)

It seems a world away as we enter yet another summer drought, with record-breaking heat waves and an early wildfire season in WyEast country. Yet, just a few months ago, on January 13th, the tragic story of a Warrendale Resident being swept away in her car by a winter debris flow in the Columbia Gorge filled our local news. The event closed a 10-mile section of I-84 from Ainsworth State Park to Tanner Creek and the area was evacuated after the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning.

Some of the local media coverage also connected the dots, reporting on the long history of dangerous debris flows in this part of the Gorge. This was not a freak tragedy, but rather, a completely predictable event. The well-known hazard zone stretches from Ainsworth State Park on the west to Yeon State Park, five miles to the east, encompassing the hamlets of Dodson and Warrendale in its path. While the steep walls throughout the Gorge are infamous for producing rockfall and landslides, this stretch is notoriously active. Why?

Slip-sliding away…

Geoscientists don’t have a particular name for this geologically active area, but the unifying feature is a near-vertical wall that I will call the Nesmith Escarpment for the purpose of this article. The name that comes from Nesmith Point, which has the distinction of being the tallest feature on the Gorge rim, rising nearly 4,000 feet from the banks of Columbia River. The Nesmith Escarpment was largely created by the ancient, catastrophic Missoula Floods that shaped much of what we know as the Columbia River Gorge during the last ice, more than 13,000 years ago. These floods repeatedly scoured the Gorge with torrents hundreds of feet deep, often enough to overtop today’s Crown Point and Rowena Plateau.

Tumalt Creek is the largest of the volatile streams that flow from the towering, over-steepened Gorge walls of the Nesmith Escarpment(ODOT)

As the massive Missoula Floods cut into the slopes below Nesmith Point, the over-steepened terrain began to collapse into the river. It’s a process that continues to this day, gradually expanding the escarpment and leaving behind sheer basalt towers of resistant bedrock along the lower slopes. Of these, St. Peters Dome is the most prominent, along with Rock of Ages and Katanai Rock (the informal name for the impressive monolith that rises just east of St. Peters Dome).

The headwaters of Tumalt Creek flow from the highest walls of the Nesmith Escarpment, where the red, volcanic layers of the Nesmith Volcano that rests on the Gorge rim have been exposed by erosion (ODOT)

Adding to the geologic uniqueness of the Nesmith Escarpment is Nesmith Point, itself. Located at the top of the escarpment, the familiar layer-cake stack of basalt flows that make up so much of the Gorge geology gives way at Nesmith Point to bright red and yellow layers of clay and cinders that reveal the uppermost part of the escarpment to be the remains of a volcano. The northern half of the volcano has been torn away over the millennia by the growing escarpment, leaving a visible cross-section of the volcanic dome. The surviving, southern half of the Nesmith volcano is gently sloping, like other dome volcanoes that line the Oregon side of the Gorge (the familiar peaks of Larch Mountain and Mount Defiance among them).

[Click here for a large version of the schematic]

The result of all this erosion is a 3-mile-long amphitheater of collapsing layers of volcanic debris and basalt walls resting uncomfortably and over-steepened upon ancient sediments at the base of the cliffs that make for a slippery, unstable foundation. Rain, winter freezes and gravity will therefore continue to chip away at the escarpment for millennia.

Over the many centuries since the Missoula Floods, this relentless erosion has built a huge apron of what geoscientists call an “alluvial fan” at the base of the Nesmith Escarpment. This name describes the flood debris that accumulates where canyon streams prone to flash-flooding suddenly reach a valley floor, slowing and depositing debris over time. The resulting layers typically form a broad, gently sloped wedge shaped like a fan. For the purpose of this article, the fan at the base of the Nesmith Escarpment will be referred to as the Nesmith Fan.

(Source: State of Wyoming)

(Source: City of Scottsdale)

One of the defining features of an alluvial fan is the erratic, constantly shifting course of the streams that create them. Because of their shallow slope and the accumulation of debris, these streams continually change course as they spread their loads of rock and gravel on the fan.

If the Nesmith Escarpment and debris fan were located in a desert environment, these defining features would be exposed and easy to see. But in the forested western Gorge, the dense rainforest vegetation quickly covers debris flows with new growth, often within five or ten years, making it hard to recognize how active the geology really is. It’s therefore easy to understand why settlements like Dodson and Warrendale were built upon on the Nesmith Fan, where the fertile ground and gentle terrain were friendly to farming and home sites. The spectacular cliffs of the Nesmith Escarpment simply provided a beautiful backdrop for these communities. Yet, it’s also an increasingly hazardous place for anyone to live.

The image below shows the Nesmith Escarpment and debris fan in a way that wasn’t possible until LIDAR technology was developed. LIDAR allows highly detailed images of topography even in areas like the Gorge, where dense forests cover the terrain. The LIDAR view shows the steep walls of the escarpment in stark relief, including the hundreds of steep ravines that have formed along the escarpment.

Lidar view of the Nesmith Escarpment and debris fan

The LIDAR view also reveals the alluvial deposits that make up the Nesmith Fan to be a series of hundreds (or even thousands) of overlapping debris flows from the roughly dozen streams that flow from the Nesmith Escarpment, each helping to gradually build the enormous alluvial fan. The wrinkled surface of the fan reveals the hundreds of flood channels that have developed over the millennia as countless debris flows have swept down from the cliffs above.

This view (looking east toward Dodson from Ainsworth State Park) shows the vulnerability of I-84 and the Union Pacific Railroad where they cross the 3-mile-wide expanse of the Nesmith Fan. The 2021 debris flows and flooding damage to the Ainsworth interchange can be seen at the center of the photo, where the interstate was temporary closed by the event (ODOT)

[Click here for a large version of this image]

During the very wet winter of 1996, a series of major debris flow roared down from the Nesmith Escarpment, sweeping cars off I-84 and closing the freeway for several days. A train on the Union Pacific line was knocked off its tracks and many home were damaged.

During the event, debris from Leavens Creek, near St. Peters Dome, swept toward the Dodson area, eventually engulfing the Royse house, which was located near the Ainsworth interchange. The scene was shocking, burying the home in debris that rose to the second floor and destroying outbuildings on the Royse farm. You can read Carol Royse’s riveting account of the event on Portland State researcher Kenneth Cruikshank’s excellent web page describing the 1996 debris flows here.

The Royse House in Dodson (with St. Peters Dome beyond) after a series of debris flows on Leavens Creek engulfed the structure in 1996 (The Oregonian)

The Royse home stood half-buried and visible from the freeway for many years, becoming a prominent reminder of the power of the Gorge. By the mid-2000s, a new forest of Red alder and Cottonwood had already enveloped the debris path and the Royse home, eventually obscuring it from view until the Eagle Creek Fire destroyed both the structure and newly established forest in 2017.

The more recent debris flows in January of this year struck some of the same spots that were impacted in the 1996 and 2001 events. The Tumalt Creek drainage was once again very active, sending debris onto I-84 and closing the freeway. To the west, the Leavens and Bucher creek drainages also sent debris onto the highway and the site of the former Royse home.

As jarring as these changes are to us, this cycle of destruction, rebirth and more destruction has unfolded hundreds of times on the Nesmith Fan. It’s simply part of the ongoing evolution of the landscape.

How do they start?

Debris flows are a mud and rock version of an snow avalanche. They typically begin with oversaturated soils on steep terrain that suddenly liquifies from its own weight. Once it begins to move, the flow can incorporate still more oversaturated soil as it gathers speed, just as a snow avalanche triggers downslope snow to move. The steepness of the terrain is a key factor in how fast a debris flow can move, and on very steep slopes they can reach as much as 100 miles per hour, though they typically slow as the debris reaches the base of the slope and spreads out to form alluvial fans.

These towering twin cascades where Bucher Creek originates along the Nesmith Escarpment rival Multnomah Falls in height. The impossibly steep terrain here is the source of both the debris and sudden flash floods that have helped build the Nesmith Fan, far below (ODOT)

A heavy rain event can also trigger a debris flow by creating stream flooding that erodes and undermines stream banks, causing debris to slide from canyon walls. This form of debris flow is common in the larger canyons in the Columbia Gorge, but less so on the Nesmith Escarpment, where most of the streams are small and only flow seasonally. Here, it’s the steepness of the slopes and the unstable geology that makes the area so prone to debris flows.

Debris flows are different from landslides. A debris flow is typically quite liquid and fast moving, like cake batter being poured into pan. Landslides are typically slow, with a large mass sliding as a whole, like an omelet sliding from a skillet onto a plate. In the Gorge, landslides are common and mostly occur where the underlying geology is oversaturated and allows the overlying terrain to move. The upper walls of the Nesmith Escarpment are scared by hundreds of landslides, and in the right conditions, these slide can trigger debris flows that spread far beyond the landslide.

What about fires and logging?

A third trigger for debris flows is the sudden removal of the forest overstory. The big trees in our Pacific Northwest forests capture and hold a tremendous amount of rain on their surfaces that never reaches the ground, with some of the moisture directly absorbed by the trees and much of it simply evaporating. Clear cut logging removes this buffer, allowing much more precipitation to suddenly reach the soil, triggering erosion, landslides and debris flows.

Logging roads are especially impactful by cutting into the soil profile on steep slopes and allowing runoff to infiltrate under the soil layer and destabilized soils. This is well-documented as a source of major landslides in heavily logged areas. Thankfully, most of the forested western end of the Gorge is protected from logging, including the Nesmith Escarpment (though early white settlers logged these areas of the Gorge extensively)

The 2017 Eagle Creek Fire has not only destabilized steep slopes throughout the burn by killing the protective forest cover, it also revealed the tortured landscape of braided flood channels on the Nesmith Fan once hidden under dense vegetation. This image from just after the fire shows a volunteer trail crew scouting Trail 400 where it crosses the fan. The route curves in and out of the dozens of channels and debris piles formed by past flood events

Fire can have a similar effect on runoff when the forest canopy is completely killed. This is why new research shows that attempting to log recently burned areas can have serious effects by disturbing newly exposed soils and worsening the increased erosion that would already result from fires.

In the Gorge, the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire burned most of the Nesmith Escarpment, raising serious concerns about the debris flow activity accelerating here in the coming decades. The debris flows earlier this year may have been the first major events to have been triggered as much by deforestation from the fire as by oversaturated soils. The following photo pair shows the extent of the burn on the Nesmith Escarpment, with the first photo taken just a few weeks before the fire in 2017 and the second photo taken in 2018, when the fire’s impact was clearly visible.

The January 2021 debris flow

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has been making regular flights over the Eagle Creek Fire burn since late 2017 to monitor for potential flooding and landslides. While the main purpose of these surveys is to anticipate impacts on the highway, ODOT is also amassing an invaluable library of historic photos that document the fire and resulting geologic events in a way that has never been done before.

Their most recent flight includes photos from the January 2021 debris flows that tell the story in a way that words cannot match:

This view looking west toward the Ainsworth Interchange shows how Bucher Creek had completely covered the south half of the interchange and sent mud and debris flowing east on the freeway, itself. The 1996 and 2001 debris flows impacted much of the same area (ODOT)

A closer look at the 2021 debris flows where the Ainsworth interchange was overwhelmed with debris. A green highway sign marks what used to be a freeway on-ramp (ODOT)

Bucher creek briefly pushed the lobe of mud and debris in the lower right of this view directly toward the home in the first photo, before changing direction to the path the creek is following in this photo. This is a good example of how accumulated debris regularly forces the streams that carry the debris into new channels. (ODOT)

This view looking back at the Bucher Creek debris flow lobe shows just how close it came to the home and outbuildings shown in the previous photo (ODOT)

The view down Bucher Creek debris flow toward St. Peters Dome and the Columbia River from near the crest of the Nesmith Escarpment (ODOT)

Landslide in burned timber near the crest of the Nesmith Escarpment. This landslide fed debris directly into the Bucher Creek debris flow, and onto the freeway more than 3,500 feet below (ODOT)

What to do?

It’s tempting to wish away future geologic hazards by taking comfort from what we perceive to be more predictable past. After all, the modern Gorge we know has been evolving for more than 13,000 years, and long periods of slope stabilization have marked recent centuries. But can we count on periods of stability in a future that will be shaped by global climate change?

Almost surely not. All indications are for more volatility in both weather and flood events like those that have built the Nesmith Fan. Recent evidence increasingly supports the reality that our landscapes are changing along with the climate. In a 2016 report on landslide risks by Multnomah County, the number of events escalated over the past 25 years, including at the Nesmith Escarpment (see table, below).

The best path for adapting to this reality and becoming more resilient in response to future events is to accept the ongoing risk from the Nesmith Escarpment. In the near-term, this means regularly repairing I-84 and the parallel Union Pacific railroad after flood events that will become increasingly common and disruptive. It also means installing early warning systems along these routes for the traveling public and commers, as well as the residents of the area who live in harm’s way.

The 2021 debris flow along Tumalt Creek during this year’s series of flood events on the Nesmith Fan was a textbook example of why adapting in the near-term to protect existing infrastructure is a tall order. The following images show just how unpredictable and unmanageable this steam has become for ODOT.

Once Tumalt Creek reaches the foot of the Nesmith Escarpment and begins to flow across the fan, its course continually shifts and changes, making it very difficult to predict where each debris flow event might be headed (ODOT)

A single culvert (above) carries Tumalt Creek under the freeway and frontage road, but the Nesmith Fan is a maze of shifting streambeds by definition, making it nearly impossible to force streams to obey culvert locations (ODOT)

The channel carrying the debris flow on Tumalt Creek that overwhelmed the frontage road and I-84 in February later dried up, with the creek shifting to another channel after the flood (ODOT)

This screen was installed at another culvert that Tumalt Creek has swept through in past debris flow eventsl. While this device might keep small debris flows from overwhelming the culvert, it has no chance against the increasingly large debris flows that we can expect on the Nesmith Fan (ODOT)

This is the view from the frontage road looking upstream at the large, main culvert intended for Tumalt Creek – though it had shifted out of the channel when this photo was taken a few months after the February event. The flatness of the terrain on the Nesmith Fan is evident here, with no obvious stream chanel except for the grading and contouring by highway crews (ODOT)

Adapting to a new reality

In the long term, coping with debris flows also means facing some tough questions for those who live on the Nesmith Fan. For some, it’s a place where families have settled for generations. For others, it’s a dream home they’ve put their life savings into on the Columbia River in the heart of the Gorge. But for anyone who lives here, the risks are real and growing – as the death of a local resident in this year’s debris flows reminds us.

Across the country, climate change and rising sea levels are impacting millions of homes and businesses built in floodplains formerly classified as “100-year”, but now seeing regular flooding. In the past, the U.S. Government has provided public flood insurance for those living or operating a business in a flood zone, but the increasing frequency of catastrophic events in flood and hurricane-prone regions like the Mississippi Valley, Texas, Florida and Carolina coasts is pushing federal flood insurance premiums sharply up. This does not bode well for those living and working in hazard zones in the Pacific Northwest, including the rural communities scattered across the Nesmith Fan.

Notices like this will become a way of life for Nesmith Fan residents in coming years

In some places along the Mississippi Valley, the federal government has begun simply relocating homes, and even whole towns, rather than rebuilding them in harm’s way. Could this be a model for the Nesmith Fan? Possibly, though most of the private homes in the path of debris flows are not in the flood plain, and may not be eligible for any form of subsidized federal insurance or assistance, short of a disaster.

A more direct approach that could be taken at the state level is a simple buy-out, over time. Where flood-prone areas in other parts of the country might simply have value as farm or grazing land, the Gorge is a world class scenic area, and both public land agencies and non-profits are actively acquiring land for conservation and public use. As Gorge locations go, it’s hard to find a spot as spectacular as the Nesmith Fan and the escarpment that rises above it.

Already, the Forest Service and Oregon State Parks have acquired land on the Nesmith Fan for recreation and to provide habitat under the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area provisions, including at least two parcels with coveted river access. Permanent funding of the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund last year should also help jump-start public acquisitions in the Gorge that have stalled in recent years, and could help spur land owners considering their options.

Katanai Rock (left) and St. Peters Dome (right) rise above orchards at Dodson in this 1940s view from the old Columbia River Highway

Recent events are surely changing the dynamic for landowners in the Gorge, as well. Would some residents living on the Nesmith Fan be more open to a buy-out after witnessing the devastation of last year’s debris flows, knowing that more are likely to come in the wake of the Eagle Creek Fire? Probably. Others – especially the string of luxury homes along the Columbia River – might be more motivated by legacy, and for these folks, non-profit conservation trusts and easements could be a tool for transitioning private land into public ownership over time.

In the meantime, expect more flooding, debris flows and periodic closures of I-84 during the rainy months. And probably more fires in summer, too. This is the new normal in the Realm of St. Peter, after all, and it’s a cycle that will continue for all our lifetimes, and beyond.

Gorge Roundup (addendum)

May 29, 2021May 29, 2021 / Tom Kloster

Tribal fishing platforms line the Columbia River as Mount Hood floats on the horizon at the proposed Columbia Hills pumped energy project site

A few folks had questions about the Goldendale Energy Project (what I called the “Columbia Hills Energy Project” in my last post), so I thought I’d post some resources for anyone looking to learn more about the project and how to help the coalition of opponents.

______________________

Recent coverage by Northwest Public Broadcasting:

‘It’s Irreversible’: Goldendale Green Energy Project Highlights a History of Native Dispossession

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February 2020 letter to Governors Jay Inslee and Kate Brown from the coalition of opponents:

RE: Opposition to Rye Development’s proposed Goldendale Energy Storage Hydroelectric Project

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Columbia Riverkeeper statement and Q&A on the project:

Stand in Solidarity with Tribal Nations

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November 2020 announcement of acquisition of the project by foreign investors:

Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) Acquires Pumped Storage Project

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Washington Department of Ecology website for the project:

Industrial Facilities Permits: Goldendale Energy

Gorge Roundup: The Great, The Sad… and The Ugly

May 24, 2021May 24, 2021 / Tom Kloster / 3 Comments

Do you take scenes like this in the eastern Columbia River Gorge for granted? Read on…

As we slowly emerge from a year of pandemic, three milestones in Columbia River Gorge news are noteworthy for those who love WyEast Country. What do they have in comment? In each case, the multi-layered governance (or lack thereof) in the Gorge continues to be a hurdle, even when the news is very good… or even great!

The Great: Mitchell Point Tunnel Project

For many years the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has been quietly moving toward actually replacing the legendary Mitchell Point “tunnel of many windows” with a new windowed tunnel. The new tunnel is along the bike and pedestrian trail that ODOT has been building to reconnect the original Historic Columbia River Highway, and construction began this spring. It’s a bold and visionary project, and another dramatic nod toward historic restoration along the old route. The former Oregon Highway Division destroyed the original tunnel in the 1966, when it was deemed a hazard to traffic on the modern freeway being constructed directly below, and it has been a dream for many to see it restored ever since.

The new 655-foot tunnel will have five arched windows, roughly patterned after the original Mitchell Point Tunnel. When completed, the tunnel will become the crown jewel of the larger Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail, a concept 35 years in the making, with just five miles of trail remaining to be constructed. When the last five miles are complete, the trail is destined to become a world-class cycling destination that will allow visitors to ride from Troutdale to The Dalles without traveling along the modern freeway.

The iconic Mitchell Point Tunnel was completed in 1915, but it was destroyed by freeway construction just 51 years later in 1966. It lives on in our collective memory as the greatest engineering marvel of the original Columbia River Highway

This 1920s view of the original Mitchell Point Tunnel from the Washington side of the Columbia River shows both west viaduct that led to the tunnel and the famous series of windows (on the left). Freeway construction at the base of the cliffs in the 1960s destroyed both the tunnel and viaduct

The new Mitchell Point Tunnel will enter the basalt walls of Mitchell Spur, the smaller, northern offshoot of Mitchell Point, proper, and connect the existing Mitchell Point Wayside on the west side of the spur to a future trail and historic highway alignment east of Mitchell Point. Between the two new tunnel portals, five windows will frame Gorge views and light the way for visitors, providing an experience similar to what early motorists enjoyed from their Model-Ts in the early 1920s.

ODOT has posted a video on YouTube with drone footage and more background on the new tunnel:

While the new tunnel is certain to draw visitors who simply want to walk its length and enjoy the views, it also offers a terrific opportunity to create loop hikes that build upon the existing Mitchell Point Trail. This steep and difficult to maintain route is more like a goat path, but has become an increasingly popular viewpoint trail as placed like Angels Rest become overwhelmingly crowded. The Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation (OPRD) has already adopted a new loop trail concept for the west side of Mitchell Point that also would provide a better graded approach to the summit, and a loop for those willing to return along the existing, very steep route.

This ODOT rendering shows the planned approach to the west portal of the new Mitchell Point Tunnel from the perspective of the Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail, which currently stubs out at these cliffs (ODOT)

This rendering also shows the new west portal that ODOT is constructing for the new Mitchell Point Tunnel. A bump-out viewpoint (on the left) is also included in the design (ODOT)

This concept shows the design for five windows that will be incorporated into the new tunnel at Mitchell Point. ODOT describes the tunnel interior as “modern concrete”, so the exposed rock surface in this rendering and visible in the previous portal rendering may not be part of the final plan (ODOT)

This view shows the existing overlook at the Mitchell Point Wayside, where the paved trail stubs out at berm at the base of Mitchell Spur’s cliffs. The west portal to the new tunnel will enter the cliff visible just beyond the berm, at the right in this photo. The berm will be removed to extend the trail to the new tunnel portal.

The west portal design for the new tunnel preserves this relatively new (2013) overlook at Mitchell Point, already a popular stop for Gorge visitors

The new tunnel also offers a loop trail opportunity from the east side of Mitchell Point, with the tunnel providing a return to the main trailhead. Loop trails are popular with hikers because you get to see more scenery for your effort. But they can also be managed as one-way trails where crowds are a problem, greatly lessening the impact of passing hikers on heavily traveled trails. The OPRD plan for the Gorge also includes a loop trail concept for Angels Rest with this exact purpose in mind. From a hiker’s perspective, one-way loops also mean encountering far fewer people along your hike, so it can greatly improve the outdoor experience.

[Click h ere for a larger Mitchell Point West map]

[Click here for a larger Mitchell Point East map]

Will Mitchell Point become as crowded as Angels Rest? Maybe someday, though not anytime soon, simply because it’s much farther from Portland. But it will certainly become more popular than it is today, as foot traffic here has steadily grown over the past decade or so. With this in mind, one of the disappointments of the Mitchell Point project is the failure to plan for future crowds, and especially to differentiate between visitor types in the planned parking improvements. In the past, most visitors to Mitchell Point were there to walk to the existing overlook at the wayside, spending just a few minutes there while on their driving tour of the Gorge. Hikers, meanwhile, can spend several hours laboring up the steep path to the summit.

Currently, both kinds of visitors compete for the same limited number of parking spots at Mitchell Point. As with unmanaged waysides elsewhere in the Gorge (Latourell Falls, Wahkeena Falls, Starvation Creek are just a few examples), hikers are now filling all of the spots at Mitchell Point on weekends, leaving touring families with no place to park. The new ODOT plan will create 18 parking spaces (including one disabled spot) compared to 16 today (including two disabled spaces). The net increase of two parking spaces is a drop in the bucket for this increasingly popular trailhead.

The existing parking area at Mitchell Point is relatively new – completed in early 2013, when this photo was taken. It provides a total of 16 parking spots, including two disabled spots. The construction of the Mitchell Point tunnel includes a complete reconstruction of the existing parking area

There are a couple of solutions that ODOT and OPRD could easily incorporate into the current construction phase without rivisitng the basic parking plan. First, mark a few parking spots for short-term, 30-minute parking for touring motorists to visit the wayside viewpoint and walk the new tunnel. Yes, it would have to be enforced to be effective, but even sporadic enforcement with a healthy fine would send a shockwave through hiking social media sites.

This is an ODOT rendering of the new parking area at Mitchell Point. While it’s surprising to see the fairly new parking lot being reconstructed so soon, the new design does manage to have a smaller paved area while expanding parking spaces (to a total of 18 compared to 16 today) and has a more efficient circulation design. The areas shown with picnic tables were once part of a very large parking area here as recently as 2012, so it’s disappointing that this design doesn’t better accommodate demand by included more spaces in that area (ODOT)

Second, ODOT and OPRD could take formally advantage of the long access drive to the Mitchell Point Wayside to allow for overflow parking. At a meeting of the Historic Columbia River Highway Steering Committee last summer, I asked if overflow shoulder parking would be allowed along the access road, and the ODOT response was a disappointing “no”.

That’s not only short-sighted, it’s also a state of denial. Already, the nearby Starvation Creek wayside routinely has cars parked along both the access and exits roads, all the way to the freeway, for lack of a trailhead space and an effective parking management plan. As a result, weekend touring motorists hoping to visit the falls or use the restrooms at Starvation Creek have no prayer of finding a spot, as the entire lot is packed with hikers, most of them on hours-long hikes to the summit of Mount Defiance. That gives ODOT and OPRD a black eye, and a similar situation will surely unfold at the new Mitchell Point trailhead if parking isn’t more actively managed.

The Sad: Oneonta Tunnel Restoration

The Oneonta Tunnel in about 1915,, soon after it opened and before this section of the Historic Columbia River Highway was paved

In other tunnel news, ODOT recently (re)completed the restoration of the Oneonta Tunnel, near Multnomah Falls. The agency once again rebuilt the timbered interior of the tunnel, restoring work that was originally done back in the mid-2000 and completely burned in the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire. It’s a beautiful restoration effort, and you should go see it soon, before it is once again destroyed by vandals carving up the restored woodwork. Because that sad fate is all but inevitable.

I wrote about this project recently in A Second Chance and New Vision for Oneonta? While there may be no appetite at ODOT or OPRD to pursue something more whimsical (like the museum proposed in the previous article!), it is frustrating to see the new restoration completed with zero consideration given to protecting the public’s investment from vandals. At the same meeting of the Historic Columbia River Highway Steering Committee last summer, I asked ODOT officials if there was a plan to secure the tunnel with gates of some kind, and the response was “no, because under national scenic area regulations, we can only restore it to its exact condition before the fire.”

Mobs of young people descended on Oneonta Gorge each summer before the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire closed the area. Many made a point of vandalizing the wood interior of the Oneonta Tunnel while they were there

Still more frustrating is the fact that top officials from the U.S. Forest Service and ODOT who oversee funding for Gorge projects and scenic area regulation were part of this virtual meeting, and sat in silence when I asked whether this was a good use of public resources. Another committee member commented that vandalism in the form of tagging and graffiti has always been a problem in the Gorge. Perhaps, but is the point is that we shouldn’t care?

Well, I’m still not buying it. If there is one thing that’s certain for large, well-funded agencies like the Forest Service and ODOT, it’s that where there is a will, there is a way. The cost to install gates would have been negligible compared to what ODOT budgets for the Gorge in a given year, and surely would be less costly than another redo in the coming years. In this case, there was simply no agency interest from the Forest Service or ODOT in protecting the newly restored tunnel, and that’s really discouraging.

ODOT completed the second restoration of the Oneonta Tunnel this spring, replacing the wood lining that was burned away in the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire. Despite its recent history of vandalism, the tunnel is now open and completely unprotected, night and day

So, as lovely as the (second) restoration of the Oneonta Tunnel is, it falls under the column of “sad” for its poor stewardship of both the historic resource and the public funds spent to restore it. But who knows, maybe once the tagging starts up and triggers some unwelcome local media coverage, we’ll see some protection installed? A late response would be better than not at all, and I’d sure like to be proven wrong on the fate of the old tunnel.

The Ugly: Columbia Hills Energy Project

These beautiful, mosaic talus slopes along the Columbia Hills are ground zero for a proposed energy project that threatens to change the area forever. A jarring sea of giant wind turbines were installed along the crest of what is a sacred ridge for area tribes over the past 15 years, and now the turbines are the basis for still more energy development in this unprotected part of the Gorge

I will reluctantly end this article with one of the toughest development proposals to emerge in the Gorge in recent years. As ugly as the project is, however, the picture is not entirely bleak. The proposal is formally known as the “Goldendale Energy Project”, taking its name from what used to be the Goldendale Aluminum Plant, located adjacent to the John Day Dam in the eastern Gorge. But the site is miles away from Goldendale, Washington, and more importantly, it’s within the Columbia River Gorge and centered on Columbia Hills, a place sacred to area tribes. So, I’ve called it the Columbia Hills Energy Project for this article.

The aluminum plant at the John Day Dam went out of business decades ago, leaving badly polluted soils and groundwater behind where smelters once stood. It has since been undergoing a gradual cleanup operation, work that is ongoing. The Columbia Hills “stored energy” project proposes to build a large water storage basin in this polluted brownfield, connected by pipes to a second basin at the crest of the Columbia Hills, 2,000 vertical feet directly above the John Day Dam and the old aluminum plant site. When wind turbines are generating excess energy, water from the lower basin would be pumped to the upper basin, and could then be released back down to the lower basin to power hydro turbines during periods of peak demand (or low wind).

The system on the right is proposed for the Columbia Hills (Rye Development)

To the Ka-milt-pah band of the Yakima Nation (known in English as the Rock Creek Band), the Columbia Hills here are sacred. Their significance goes to the very creation of the Columbia Gorge, itself. Scientists believe the ice age Bretz (or Missoula) floods continued to repeatedly overwhelm the Gorge with hundreds of feet of water for nearly 2,000 years, finally ending some 13,000 years ago. Virtually every aspect of the Gorge as we know it was shaped by the floods, including the steep, exposed cliffs and rock monoliths that give the Gorge its iconic beauty. Their oral tradition tells us that the ancestral Ka-milt-pah people climbed to these ridge tops to escape this series of massive ice-age floods, watching the cataclysm from these high vantage points.

Today, the Ka-milt-pah continue to gather first foods from these same hills, though now with the permission of farmers who own deeds to the ceded tribal lands here. In yet another insult to traditions and the defacement of their sacred places, tribal members now must gather foods under the shadow and hum of giant wind turbines that send “green” electricity to Portlanders. Unseen to urbanites are the miles of gravel access roads that were cut into pristine desert soils along these ridges to build and maintain the turbines, destroying still more of the ecosystem that the Ka-milt-pah people relied upon for millennia. And in yet another cruel irony, the windmills are now are central to the Columbia Hills Energy Project, as well.

The defunct, polluted aluminum plant at John Day dam (seen far below in this view) is proposed to hold the lower reservoir for the closed-loop energy system. This view is from the crest of the Columbia Hills, on sacred tribal land 2,000 feet above the river, where the upper reservoir would be constructed (Portland Business Journal)

The towering wind turbine that now line the Columbia Hills above John Day Dam are aggressively marketed as benign sources of clean energy, and yet each turbine requires a new road to be built, leaving a permanent scar on the land and introducing invasive plants to the largely pristine desert landscape. This snaking section of road in this view is on sacred tribal land near the proposed Columbia Hills Energy Project (Google Earth)

The service roads built for these windmills on the crest of the Columbia Hills resemble suburban cul-de-sacs, each cut into desert ground that had never even been plowed, and has provided tribal first foods for millennia (Google Earth)

Did you know that the stunning stretch of the Columbia River Gorge east of the Deschutes River does not enjoy the protections provided by the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area (CRGNSA) to areas west of the Deschutes? The most jarring evidence of this second-class status are the hundreds of massive, white wind turbines that now dot the Columbia Hills along this unprotected stretch of the Gorge, from Maryhill Museum east to the John Day river and beyond. The visual impact of these turbines therefore wasn’t even a factor when they were constructed over the past 15 years.

It is truly a miracle and testament to the tenacity of Gorge advocates in the 1980s that we even have a CRGNSA to protect the Gorge, yet it’s also true that leaving the eastern portion of the Gorge out of the bill left the area tragically vulnerable to energy and development schemes that continue forever scar the Gorge we shall leave to future generations. The Columbia Hills Energy Project may be the latest scheme, but it certainly won’t be the last (lesser-known fact: the Maryhill Museum was among the opponents of the CRGNSA in the 1980s, which explains the forest of windmills that now mar the Gorge rim directly above the museum and continue for miles to the east).

The ancient and sustainable trumped by the new and industrial: the 1971 John Day Dam dwarfs traditional tribal fishing platforms, located just downstream from the dam

For the Danish corporate investors behind this project, the windmills along the Columbia Hills provide a world-class opportunity for pumped storage development. The hills rise anywhere from 1,200 to 2,000 feet above the Columbia River, a ready source of water to fill storage tanks. That’s probably as much as they know. The fact that it’s also remote from Portland urbanites who might otherwise be shocked to see a development of this scale proposed in “their Gorge” is just good fortune for the investors.

And so, it has fallen to the Confederated Yakima, Umatilla and Nez Perce nations to defend their homelands from yet another assault by Europeans seeking to, once again, commodify their native lands.

Countless generations of tribal fisherman have harvested salmon on these pebble beaches in the east Gorge for millennia. The lower reservoir for the proposed “energy loop” would be a stone’s throw from this iconic scene. Is it even possible to measure economic impacts of energy project against threats to the very culture of indigenous people?

The pace of change in the eastern stretch of the Gorge has been breathtaking in the past few decades. In 1957 – just 64 years ago — the gates on The Dalles Dam closed, drowning Celilo Falls and surrounding tribal settlements under 40 feet of water. This ended a way of life for indigenous peoples who had thrived here for thousands of years. Nine years later, in 1966, ODOT blasted and filled a 4-lane swath through the Gorge to construct today’s Interstate-84, destroying miles of wetlands and beaches along the way, and cutting off access to traditional tribal fishing sites in the process. In 1971, the gates were closed on John Day Dam, at the head of slackwater created by The Dalles Dam. Another stretch of rapids along the once-wild river disappeared, along with more beaches and wetlands.

The vast, colorful pebble beaches in the east Gorge were left here by ice age floods that brought rock from the northern Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River Gorge. This river-worn piece of petrified wood is typical of these deposits

Both dams brought hundreds of steel transmission towers and thousands of miles of electrical cable that now drapes across the once-pristine Gorge landscape. And in the 2000s, big utilities rushed after state and federal renewable energy tax credits to line the Columbia Hills with hundreds of windmills, many built on sacred tribal sites. It’s true, these are all renewable energy sources that our region depends upon to power our homes and industry. Yet, it’s also true that our cheap energy has come at a catastrophic cost to tribal culture and economies, and wreaked havoc on one of the most spectacular natural landscapes on the planet. Isn’t it time to question just how “green” the energy harnessed in the Gorge really is?

Fortunately, a broad coalition of conservation advocates have joined the tribes in challenging the Columbia Hills Energy Project. They include both the Oregon and Washington chapters of the Sierra Club, the Northwest Environmental Defense Center, Columbia Riverkeeper, Food and Water Watch, Portland Audubon and several other organizations. This is encouraging, as corporate energy projects are famously costly and drawn-out battles with deep-pocketed (and often foreign) investors who are willing to ride out the opposition and ingratiate themselves to local elected officials. Witness that Washington Governor Jay Inslee recently signed a fast-track provision for energy storage projects just like this one (though we don’t know his position on this specific proposal).

This lovely desert gulch along the Columbia River is immediately adjacent to the proposed Columbia Hills Energy Project. How will it be impacted? We don’t know yet…

Thankfully, the Washington Department of Ecology has determined the project to have “significant environmental impact”, ensuring that some rigor will be applied in the state permitting review. Whether that review can truly measure the impact of this proposal on tribal rights and traditions remains and open question that courts will likely have to decide.

Yes, stored energy projects are a good idea. They’re a creative, sustainable solution in a world facing a global climate crisis. We should welcome them!

Just not here.

Coyotes in WyEast Country

April 11, 2021 / Tom Kloster / 3 Comments

Killed coyote strung up on a fence along Center Ridge Road in Wasco County this winter

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Author’s note: I’ve gone back and forth on whether to include some difficult images in this article. I hope readers will understand why it’s important to see them once you’ve read the piece.

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As we reach the one-year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic that has turned our world upside down, I’ve been reflecting on how I spent much of my outdoor time over the past year in the desert country east of Mount Hood, where I could spend an entire day without seeing another soul. Along the way, I reconnected with some of my favorite spots, and found many more that were new to me. I was reminded why I fell in love with dry side of the mountains when I lived and worked there for seven magical summers during my youth.

Over the past year of exploring the backroads east of the mountain, I also didn’t see a single killed coyote. Not one! This surprised me. It was once commonplace in sagebrush country to find their carcasses strung on barbed wire fences. Coyotes were vermin to old-school ranchers. Then, just last month, I ran across the familiar, grim scene captured at the top of this article. It was up on Center Ridge, in the rolling wheat country above the Columbia River. And yet, scenes like this that were once routine in ranch country have become rare these days. Why?

The rolling wheat fields on Center Ridge are prime habitat for coyotes (Dalles Mountain, Mount Adams and Mount Rainier are in the distance)

Perhaps because most ranchers today have advanced degrees in agriculture, their knowledge includes a formal science education that gives them an understanding of the benefits of living with predators, not exterminating them. They understand that top predators may be a nuisance to livestock, but they are also the ecological keystone that keeps the rest of the natural system in balance, which, in turn, is of even greater benefit to ranchers and farmers.

So, these days when I run across a shot, snared or poisoned coyote slung over a fence, there’s a pretty good chance that it’s the mark of an old timer — or simply someone who just doesn’t know any better. Old ways die hard. This used to be a standard practice based on the myth that the carcass would somehow cause other coyotes to shy away. That’s a tired idea borne of ignorance and unfounded hatred for the animals, nothing more.

Today’s ranchers in Oregon are far more likely to appreciate the benefits coyotes bring to their bottom line, especially in the wheat country along the eastern Columbia River Gorge. Along with raptors, coyotes keep the rodent population (mostly rabbits, gophers, mice and voles) in check, keep grazing deer on the move and generally mind their own business as they cruise their very large territories. They also feed on snakes and sometimes carrion, as well as fruit and grass in season. Packs of coyotes may even take down young or infirm deer or antelope, though this is uncommon.

This remnant grassland view of Tygh Ridge is what much of the east side looked like before the arrival of settlement farming in the 1800s and it remains prime coyote habitat today

Coyotes often roam in organized packs, led by an alpha male and female pair that often mate for life, and that are the only breeding pair in the pack. The beta coyotes in the pack are non-breeding, and simply help hunt and feed the offspring of the alpha pair. Thus, killing an alpha male or female (or both) simply splits up the pack, opening the surviving animals to pair with lone males to create still more coyote families. For this reason, modern ranchers also understand that killing coyotes to remove them from the landscape can have exactly opposite the intended effect.

Despite over a century of systematic killing, coyotes are flourishing and expanding their territory, and now live in 49 states. This is partly because of the proliferation of new breeding packs from the extermination of alpha pairs, but mostly it’s because they’re very smart. Like the domesticated dogs that we spend billions on each year to pamper and celebrate as companions, coyotes are quick to observe every detail of human behavior and learn our ways. For wild coyotes, that means avoiding people – and our various means of exterminating them. That’s why seeing a coyote in the wild is a treat, and is typically fleeting.

Their ability to adapt has also allowed coyotes to move into urban areas, including Portland, where they have assumed top predator status. We spot them right here in my neighborhood in North Portland, where they roam the large natural areas and prey upon rats, opossum, raccoons and – especially – feral cats. While that last part might be hard for some to accept, the fact is, feral cats are a major problem in urban areas as predators of native birds. The arrival of coyotes is helping mitigate the impact of these non-native carnivore in our cities. It’s also true that coyotes can prey upon small pets in the city, a reminder to humans to keep our pets in enclosed areas and indoors at night.

This young coyote was killed and strung up by a rancher on Dalles Mountain Road a few years ago. This used to be a common sight in the ranch country of the eastern Columbia River Gorge

Coyotes have also responded to our simultaneous war on cougars and wolves that began in the 1700s, and continues to this day. Where wolves and cougars were once the apex species in many parts of the country, and preyed upon or hazed the smaller coyote, it is the coyote that has adapted and stepped into the void left by the disappearance of these larger predators. As cougars and wolves begin to rebound in a few areas in the country, they are reclaiming their top predator role, once again keeping coyotes in check. When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s, the coyote population dropped by 40 percent!

Because of their size and potential threat to humans, wolves and cougars will likely always be less tolerated in our world. Though we’re just beginning to appreciate it, the role of coyotes as the substitute apex species in areas once roamed by wolves and cougars has helped keep natural systems in balance for all species – plant and animal.

Natural Survivors

Coyotes have an enormous range, with packs maintaining highly organized territories of anywhere from five to fifteen square miles – enough to cover multiple ranches, even in the sprawling wheat and sagebrush country east of Mount Hood. Like our domestic dogs, they have well-traveled routes, typically along ridgetops or along the edge of clearings where they can see the terrain and hunt for rodents. Mostly, they seek to avoid people in their rambles, which is understandable, given our history of hostility toward the species.

Coyote pups (Wikipedia)

In the wild, coyotes live short lives of just 5-10 years, though in captivity they can live up to 20 years. Adults in the wild typically weigh from 20 to 35 pounds, about the size of a Siberian Husky, though urban coyotes can reach as much as 45 pounds. Coyote alpha pairs can produce a litter of 2-12 pups annually, with pups reaching maturity in about 6 months. Coyote pups have a very high mortality rate of up to 90 percent, however, and only a few survive to adulthood. Some that survive will stay with their pack, others will roam and join other packs and a few males become lone coyotes, wandering on their own.

If you have the opportunity to see a coyote in the wild, you can’t help but be taken by how closely they resemble our domestic dogs, both in their appearance and behavior. They’re truly beautiful animals, and to watch them sprint upwards of 40 mph, it’s easy to see why native cultures celebrated both their intelligence and athleticism.

If you have the good fortune to hear a pack howling at night, it’s an especially memorable experience. No, they don’t represent a real threat to us, but it’s still quite humbling to hear them in the dark, knowing they are completely adapted to that environment and completely aware of us – even if we can’t see them. At night, we are in their realm.

Adult coyote hunting (Wikipedia)

The main threats to coyotes in the wild include some of the same canine diseases that threaten our domestic dogs, as well as lack of food and winter cold. In many parts of the country, humans continue to be a major threat with competitive “kill contests” still held to exterminate coyotes. In 2017, more than 11,000 coyotes were killed in Utah, alone, for $500,000 in bounties put up by state officials. Over 100,000 coyotes are still killed every year in the United States. Though these mass killings are gradually losing favor as science wins out over folklore, it’s still common for state wildlife agencies to promote methods for exterminating coyotes.

The good news is that ranchers and farmers are increasingly coming around to the benefits of co-existing with coyotes for all the good they bring to the land. This means changing their farming practices, especially during calving and lambing season in ranch country.

In Oregon, coyotes are classified as a non-game predator. What does that mean? It means that anyone can kill a coyote, with no limit or permit required. Thankfully, science is winning here, too. Wildlife agencies and agriculture science are evolving, promoting science-based best practices for farmers and ranchers to co-exist with coyotes. Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife has replaced old-school instructions for coyote extermination on its website with new-school guidelines on how to co-exist. That’s real progress, though regulating coyote hunting will be a tougher political hurdle to clear.

Urban coyote in Lincoln Park, Chicago (Wikimedia)

The more worrisome trend is urbanites moving into farm and ranch country and bringing domestic cats and toy-breed dogs with them. These small pets make for easy prey for coyotes, especially when left to roam. Worse, people moving into ranch country often encourage coyotes to lose their fear of humans by leaving pet food outside and by not treating them as wild animals. Just as urbanities living in the country are a growing nuisance to farmers with their complaints about dust, noise and pesticides that come with farming, these folks may also emerge to be a new threat to coyotes, too, simply by encouraging them to lose their fear of us.

Despite these threats, and our long war against them, coyotes continue to adapt and thrive. Scientists now recognize 19 subspecies of coyote, including urban species that are now common in city parks and preserves across the country. Coyotes have observed us and figured us out, and they are here to stay. Their ability to adapt bodes well for the species, and for the ecosystems that increasingly depend on them as top predators, too.

Epilogue… and Prologue?

Over the winter, I was coming down a gravel road from Center Ridge into a narrow Easton Canyon, just south of The Dalles. I stopped to take a photo of Mount Hood when I spotted a group of Mule deer perfectly silhouetted against the last glow of sunset. I watched this lovely scene unfold for quite a while, until the deer had moved on and stars suddenly began to fill the night sky.

Mule deer silhouetted against Mount Hood in the Center Ridge area of Wasco County

As I was quietly packing up my camera gear in the dark, I was startled by a sudden series of loud, quick yips right behind me! A coyote was in the sagebrush directly above the road, somewhere along the canyon wall. Soon, more yips began to echo from across the canyon, first below me, then from across the canyon, then further up the canyon. The chorus grew until some of the yips turned to howls, then went silent, as quickly as they had started.

It was an eerie experience that made my hair stand on end. I’d heard coyotes many times before, but I had never been in the middle of a pack. Though I knew I wasn’t in danger, the moment still triggered a primal reaction – these were wild predators, after all. I hoofed it back to the car, quickly loaded up my gear and gave thanks for a truly memorable encounter.

So, when I came across that coyote carcass a few weeks ago, senselessly killed and strung up on a barbed wire fence, I couldn’t help but appreciate what was left of this once-beautiful, brilliant animal. Much of its handsome coat was still intact and moving in the breeze, its ears still pointed and perfect. Were it not mangled, ribs protruding, I might have thought it somehow alive.

A sad, senseless practice fading with time, a grim reminder of our ignorance and folly in attempting to control the natural world around us

The sight of this animal brought back that nighttime chorus under the stars from just a few weeks before, just a couple of miles from this spot. Had this unlucky coyote been among those that I heard that night? Quite possibly. It also gave me a deeper appreciation for the resiliency and balance of nature all around us, despite our relentless efforts to upset it. The coyotes are adapting and winning. Thankfully.

As a broader society, we’re slowly changing our thinking about predators, too. We’re getting better at observing and understanding them and beginning to accept their presence – especially coyotes. We seem to be on a path of learning to simply avoid coyotes just as they avoid us, ensuring that they remain truly wild. We’re learning to co-exist.

And that bodes well for all of us.

The Lost Forest on Cedar Island

February 21, 2021February 23, 2021 / Tom Kloster / 8 Comments

The lost forest on Cedar Island in the Deschutes River canyon

Head north from the tiny town of Maupin into the arid desert canyon of the Deschutes River and you will eventually reach a wide gooseneck in the river, where a low ridge that forms the bend is known as the “Beavertail”. As the gravel access road crests the Beavertail, a river island dotted with trees suddenly comes into view. The scene is startling in an environment where even Western juniper struggle to survive, and the few trees that exist are mostly thickets of Red alder hugging the river’s edge.

At first glance, these seem to be Ponderosa pine, a reasonable guess, given that Ponderosa are the most drought tolerant of the big confers in Oregon. But as you approach a few of these trees that have jumped the island and flank the access road, it becomes clear that these aren’t pines at all.

Panoramic view of Cedar Island

[click here for a large panorama]

In fact, this is a lost stand of about sixty Incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens) trees forming a completely isolated colony in the middle of the desert. They have found a way to thrive more than 20 miles east of the nearest stand, in the Cascade Mountain, where these trees grow along the forested southeast slopes of Mount Hood. Here, they survive with just 10-15” of rain per year, compared to the 40-50” their mountain cousins receive.

Incense Cedar (Calocedrus decurrens) foliage – a close cousin to our familiar Western red cedar

The thick, distinctively reddish bark on Incense Cedar gives the tree some insulation from range fires

A closer look at the bright green foliage of these trees shows Incense cedar to be a cousin to Oregon’s Western red cedar, Alaska cedar and Port Orford cedar. None of these are true cedars, but all are related members in the cypress family, and all but the Port Orford cedar grow on the slopes of Mount Hood.

Of these, the Incense cedar is the most drought-tolerant and thrives on the dry side of the Cascades, among other big conifers like Douglas fir and Ponderosa Pine. Incense Cedar tend to grow interspersed among these other trees, and seldom form pure stands. That’s part of what makes the lost grove on Cedar Island unique, though that’s also a reflection of the extreme environment they have pioneered here – one that other big conifers are not able to survive.

Young Incense cedar have a beautiful conical form that makes them popular trees in urban landscapes

Young Incense cedar are prized as cultivated trees for their brilliant foliage and symmetrical, conical shape (above). As they age, Incense cedar begin to look more like a distant cousin to Giant sequoia, with deeply furrowed red bark and tortured, often multiple-trunked forms.

Incense cedar can live for centuries and reach as much as 150 feet in height at maturity. The champion in Oregon grows in the Siskiyou Mountains, and is 150 feet tall with a circumference of nearly 40 feet. Another dual-trunked Incense cedar in Southern Oregon is known as the Tanner Lake Giant (below), measured at 137 feet tall and more than 40 feet in circumference.

A person standing next to a large tree

Description automatically generated with medium confidence

The mighty, two-trunked Tanner Lake Giant in Southern Oregon is more 40 feet in diameter (Wikipedia)

Mount Hood’s Incense cedar stands mark the very northern extreme of the range of these trees, which extends as far south as a few isolated stands in Baja. In California, they grow throughout the Sierras, with big Incense Cedar sprinkled among the Giant sequoia in Yosemite Valley. The trees also grow in isolated groves throughout California’s coastal mountains. In Oregon, scattered stands grow in the Ochoco Mountains and along some of the western ridges of the Great Basin.

Incense Cedar grow from Mount Hood south to the Baja Peninsula, following the east flank of the Cascades to the Siskiyous and along the Sierras

Most of the isolated stands of Incense cedar in dry places like the California coast ranges or Oregon Ochoco Mountains mark places where mountains rise up enough to produce an island of rainfall in an otherwise dry region. The trees of Cedar Island are just the opposite. Their habitat is at the bottom of a rocky desert canyon makes their ability to thrive here all the more remarkable.

Why here?

The Cedar Island lost forest of Incense cedar is truly remote. The following perspective view (below) shows just how far Cedar Island is from the green forests of the Cascades, nearly 20 miles to the west. Why did this grove of just 60 trees make its home here?

[click here for a large map]

Part of the answer is the island, itself. While Incense cedar are most often found on dry sites in their typical mountain habitat, the Cedar Island grove lives on a gravel bar in the middle of the Deschutes River, where trees can touch the water table year-round with their roots. While the winters are plenty cold along the Deschutes – similar to the mountain habitat these trees prefer – the summers are intensely hot and arid. The basalt walls of the Deschutes Canyon also act to contain summer heat, creating a true oven during summer heat waves. The ability of the Cedar Island grove to maintain constant access to groundwater undoubtedly helps counter the lack of rainfall and summer heat they endure.

The Incense Cedars of Cedar Island rise above thickets of Red alder beneath the protective west wall of the Deschutes River canyon

Still, there are plenty of other gravel bars along the Deschutes, and only Cedar Island supports a grove of big conifers. What makes this gravel bar different?

Part of the puzzle is shape of the canyon walls that surround Cedar Island. At the Beavertail Bend, the Deschutes River swings sharply west, then reverses to head directly east, in each case carving near-vertical, 2,000 foot walls of basalt over the millennia. The aspect of these walls helps shade Cedar island by shortening exposure to hot summer sun by several hours per day compared to less protected parts of the canyon.

Cedar Island is protected from mid-day summer sun by towering, 2,000-foot canyon walls to the south and east

The west (upstream) end of Cedar Island seems to confirm the role of the canyon walls in allowing the Incense Cedar groves to survive. This part of the island (below) extends beyond the protective shade of the steep south wall of the canyon, and into the wide section of canyon where it is more exposed to the intense morning and midday sun during the hot summer months.

The west end of Cedar Island seems to be too exposed to summer sun for the Incense Cedars to survive there

Another piece of the puzzle is the gravel that makes up island, itself. While it allows the Cedar Island colony to reach the shallow water table with their root systems, it’s also very well-drained above the water table – something that Incense cedars prefer. At 10-12 feet above the average river level, the gravel bar is also tall enough to avoid being inundated or eroded by all but the worst flood events.

When did the Cedar Island colony become established? That’s unknown, but an image (below) taken from the east canyon rim in 1905 shows the island to be virtually cleared. There are a couple of explanations. First, the photo shows both rail lines that were under construction at the time, a race between two railroad barons that became known as “The Deschutes Railroad War”. It’s quite possible that Incense Cedar on the island were cut by the railroad crews for construction material or simply firewood. It’s also possible that the trees were actually introduced here at the time when the canyon was being intensely developed by the railroads. But the fact that the island was named for its cedars suggests the colony was here when railroad surveyors arrived.

1905 view of Cedar Island from the east canyon rim shows few trees compared to today… why?

Another explanation for the relatively bare island in 1905 could be flooding. Though the Deschutes is not prone to catastrophic floods like rivers west of the Cascades, the upstream dams didn’t exist when the first Incense Cedars pioneered the island. therefore, it’s likely that periodic floods swept across this flat sandbar – which was, itself, created by floods. The colony must have found a way to rebound from these events, assuming the Incense cedar grove has been here for centuries.

The following images (below) from 1911 were taken from the west side of the canyon and confirm that the Incense cedar grove on the island was much smaller at the turn of the century. These later images marked the end of construction of the railroad on the east side of the river. Today, a smaller colony of Incense cedar grows along the old railroad grade (now the access road) in the shade of the eastern canyon wall.

1911 view of Beavertail Bend from the west canyon rim, looking toward Cedar Island

Closer look at Cedar Island in the 1911 view showing just a few Incense cedars growing along the south margin of the island

Yet another explanation for the smaller grove in the early 1900s might be range fires. The sagebrush country of Oregon’s east side burns periodically, and fire is a natural, essential part of the ecosystem. For their part, Incense cedar have fire resistant bark that allows the trees to survive low-intensity fires (similar to Ponderosa pine and Sequoia), but when their crowns burn in more intensive fires, they have evolved to reseed and re-establish themselves quickly on burned ground. It could even be the case that railroad construction triggered a fire that cleared Cedar Island sometime before this photo was taken.

In 2018 a trio of range fires (below) swept through Wasco County, burning much of the lower Deschutes River canyon. The fires destroyed dozens of farm dwellings and outbuildings, too, a painful reminder that fires will always be part of the desert ecosystem here, even with much of the landscape converted to wheatfields. The Longhollow Fire was the middle of the three fires, and burned to the northwest bank of the Deschutes, but apparently did not jump the river to Cedar Island.

[click here for a large map]

Had the fire reached the island, it could easily have crowned some of the Incense cedar trees. The open, park-like forest here has allowed the trees to keep their limbs almost to the ground, where trees in mixed forests typically lose their lower limbs.

A high crown helps protect a mature tree from low-to moderate intensity fires at its base climbing lower limbs like a ladder and potentially engulfing its crown. But unlike the forest fires that occur in the typical Incense Cedar range, range fires in open sagebrush country are generally low-intensity, fast-moving burns due to the lack of available fuels compared to forest fires, so even trees with low limbs can often survive range fires.

A closer look at the island suggests the fire did not cross the river in 2018, nor have fires burned the island in some time. First, none of the trees on Cedar Island shows burn marks on their lower trunks, a telltale sign of range fires that lasts for decades on trees that survive. Second, the presence of downed wood and a few Incense Cedar seedlings (below) confirms that no recent fires have swept the island, as young trees would almost certainly have been killed and dead forest debris completely burned.

The trunks of the Cedar Island grove don’t show burn marks, suggesting that range fires haven’t swept the island in decades

The downed alder logs in this view would almost certainly have burned in 2018, had the Longhollow Fire jumped the river. The small Incense cedar seedling toward the top of this photo would almost certainly have been killed by fire, as well.

Whatever the cause of Cedar Island being cleared at the turn of the 1900s, the grove of Incense cedars is well-established today, with large trees that could have started life soon after these early photos were taken. Yet, the lack of young trees on the island today is also noticeable, with just a few younger trees sprinkled among the mature stand. This could be due to competition, with the spacing of the trees defined by their root systems, and little moisture left for young trees to get established.

Most of the Incense Cedars on the island are mature, with few small seedlings present

Some of the younger trees that do exist are crowded along the river’s edge, suggesting that other young trees farther from the edge of the island simply couldn’t compete with the larger trees for available groundwater with their smaller, shallow root systems.

In their normal habitat, it would be rare for Incense cedars to hug a stream, but on Cedar Island it may be the only way young trees can become established

One of the secrets of the survival of the Cedar Island grove could be the small group of younger trees growing at the shaded foot of the southeast canyon wall. These are the only Incense cedars from the colony that extend beyond the island, and a number of very young trees are getting established here now. It could be that this part of the grove has helped reseed the island after flood events over the centuries.

It’s hard to see if this group of trees existed in the 1905 and 1911 photos, and it’s likely that railroad construction would have erased any trees in this area, anyway. But without any better evidence, it’s also possible that this branch of the colony is relatively new, seeded here by mature trees on the island after the railroad construction ended. If so, why did the colony move there, to steep rocky slopes far above the river and readily available water table?

This view shows a branch of the Cedar Island colony growing along the base of the eastern canyon wall. These trees are younger and seem to be expanding their presence, despite growing on rocky slopes far above the water table created by the river

The best explanation for this branch colony is probably the sun protection provided by the canyon walls, as these trees are growing in an “elbow” where the north and west facing walls meet, creating a relatively cool setting for much of the day during the hot summer season. But another part of the story is likely groundwater seeping through a steep ravine that cuts through the layers of basalt where the branch colony is centered.

The branch colony of the Cedar Island lost forest is thriving on the south wall of the Deschutes River canyon, with many young trees becoming established in this unexpected habitat

Whatever their origin, the younger grove along the canyon wall is a helpful insurance policy for the survival of the Cedar Island colony over the long haul. These are young trees, yet clearly well-established, so in the event the island trees are destroyed by fire or flood, these trees could be a source for re-seeding the island. Likewise, the island might well survive range fires that could destroy the canyon wall grove and help reseed that part of the colony.

This young Incense cedar in the branch colony may someday play a part in reseeding Cedar Island and helping the lost forest here continue to survive

The mystery of the lost forest on Cedar Island brings more questions than answers, and it deserves more study to better understand the phenomenon and help preserve the colony. I’m hoping this article might inspire a local researcher or graduate student (with a passion for rafting or kayaking!) to step up to the challenge. The island is on public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and seems reasonably protected from development, though it doesn’t seem to have any sort of special protection for its unique ecological value.

The lost Incense cedar forest on Cedar Island in the Deschutes River canyon

In the meantime, the island makes for an interesting stop on a tour of the lower Deschutes River canyon, whether by car, bicycle or on the river. The island is located immediately downstream from the Beavertail campground. There are pullouts along the access road with good views of the island, and if you’re up for a walk, you can simply park at a pullout and walk the exceptionally scenic road for a stretch.

Along the way, you’ll pass another coniferous anomaly — the “Big Pine” located just north of the twin railroad bridges at Horseshoe Bend. This old Ponderosa pine grows on a gravel fan at the base of seep that gives it enough year-round water to become quite established here. The BLM has placed a picnic table under the tree and there is a toilet nearby, too.

The “Big Pine” just north of the twin railroad bridges along the Deschutes River access road

From the beginning of the well-marked access road near Sherars Bridge, it’s 17 miles to the end of the well-graded gravel road, so this makes a good adventure if you’re looking for something off the beaten path. Map 6 on the following BLM webpage covers the route from Sherars bridge to Cedar Island and Map 7 covers the remainder of the access road to Macks Canyon:

BLM Maps of the Deschutes River Canyon

Curious about the Deschutes Railroad War? Here’s a short overview that gives some insight into the dramatic rail alignment in the Deschutes canyon:

Deschutes Railroad War (C-SPAN)

For a deeper dive into the Deschutes Railroad War, you can find out-of-print copies of Leon Speroff’s excellent book on the subject, with dozens of historic photos presented in large, coffee-table format.

Leon Speroff’s excellent book covers the surprising railroad history of the Deschutes in detail — plus some of the natural history of the canyon

The Deschutes River access road can be reached by following the Sherars Bridge Highway (OR 216) from where it joins Highway 197 in Tygh Valley. Follow signs to Grass Valley, then turn onto the well-marked access road about a mile after crossing Sherars Bridge. You’ll pass White River Falls State Park along the way, another worthy stop if you’re in the area.

One of the best times to visit the lower Deschutes is in winter and early spring, when campers and rafters are scarce and you will have the place pretty much to yourself. As with all trips to the dry east side of the mountains, ticks, poison oak and even the occasional rattlesnake are residents here, so watch your step and do a tick check when you get home.

Enjoy!

WyEast Blog

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2023 Campaign Calendar!

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The Lost Forest on Cedar Island