…runs through mountains and along rivers and took us from northern New Mexico to Washington state. We drove north from Taos into the San
Luis Valley in Colorado and then over La Veta Pass to Interstate 25 to northern Colorado, a route we've traveled many times. Our household goods are in storage there
and we stopped to swap our summer clothes for warmer jackets and rain gear.
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| Sawtooth Scenic Byway, Idaho |
For the rest of the trip, we planned to visit parts of the country we hadn’t seen before on roads we hadn’t driven before, mostly blue highways. That term appears in the first line of the 1982
book of the same name by William Least Heat-Moon: “On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the
back roads blue.” He was separated from his wife, had lost his teaching job and wanted to change his life. He outfitted a van for camping and drove 13,000 miles around
the country on blue highways writing about people he met and
places he visited.
Least Heat-Moon said that the fourth dimension of travel was not time, but change. Our blog about “traveling into retirement” is really about
change: not going to work every day, and finding meaning and enjoyment while managing
the financial and health issues that come with age. Least Heat-Moon’s journey took
three months – he had to go back to work to support himself. We’ve been on the
road for over two years; we’re lucky not to have to go back to work.
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| Mioplosus, an extinct perch-like fish, from the Green River Formation (NPS photo; link) |
After visiting our household goods, we headed west across Wyoming
on Interstate 80. Near Green River we turned north on U.S. 30 to visit Fossil
Butte National Monument (link). We wandered
through the visitor center marveling at the museum-quality display of 300
fossil plants, insects, fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals from Fossil Lake.
The National Park Service protects less than two percent of the ancient lake,
which is part of the Green River Formation (link) known worldwide for incredibly detailed, 50-million-year-old fossils, including
many fishes, sold in stores and online (link). The weather was cold and rainy and the trails were muddy, so we had lunch in the truck and continued on.
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| Paisley Cone, Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve |
Our plan was to drive west across the Snake River Plain to
Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. The plain, which stretches
400 miles in a southward-bending arc across central Idaho from the Yellowstone
Plateau in Wyoming to eastern Oregon, comprises 57,500 square miles of high-desert sagebrush and grasslands,
lava flows, volcanic buttes and cinder cones (link).
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| Blue Dragon lava flow |
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| Inside Big Craterrs |
The Snake River Plain cuts a 70-mile wide channel
through the Rocky Mountains. It formed as the North American Plate drifted over a
volcanic plume (“hot spot”) that now sits under Yellowstone National Park. The
hot spot was beneath Craters of the Moon 8-10 million years ago. The plain is
the largest continental volcanic plume track on earth, like the Hawaiian
Islands is the largest oceanic volcanic plume track (link; link).
Craters of the Moon, the largest lava flow on the plain, is visible from space (link).
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| Trail to the top of Inferno Cone |
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| North Crater Flow Trail |
At 1,100 square miles, Craters of the Moon National Monument
and Preserve is about the size of Rhode Island. The monument is dominated by 60
lava flows and 25 cinder cones, each a small volcano. The latest basalt eruptions occurred in Craters of the Moon 2,100 years ago
through a 52-mile series of fissures cutting across the Snake River Plain (the Great Rift).
Twenty dated lava flows suggest that similar eruptions occurred
about every 2,000 years over the last 15,000 years (link; link).
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| Lava flow along Broken Top Trail |
We spent the day hiking trails in the austere landscape. Shrubs and trees had colonized the older lava flows, but the more recent ones were barren or only sparsely covered with grasses and flowering plants. Before their flight, the second group of Apollo astronauts to walk on the moon visited Craters of the Moon to study its geology.
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| Entrance to a cave (lava tube) on Broken Top Trail |
From Craters of the Moon, we continued west on U.S. highways 20/93 to Idaho Highway 75, which we took north up the Wood River Valley to Ketchum and Sun Valley. The area is well known for outdoor recreation, including world-class skiing, but neither of us had been there. The road up the valley was bumper-to-bumper traffic. In the evening when only restaurants and bars were open and traffic decreased, driver’s sped through Ketchum with abandon. There were metal stands at the crosswalks sporting brightly colored flags on short wooden sticks. Pedestrians waved them vigorously at oncoming traffic to get across without incident. Ernst Hemingway owned a house overlooking the Big Wood River near Ketchum and committed suicide there in 1961(link).
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| Sawtooth Valley and Sawtooth Mountains from Galena Pass (nine peaks are greater than 10,000 ft) |
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| Salmon River in the Sawtooth Valley |
We left early the next morning. At the head of the Wood River Valley, we crested Galena Pass (8,700 feet) and saw the Sawtooth Valley stretched out below us.
The contrast couldn’t have been more striking. Driving up the Wood River Valley we passed condos, golf courses, ski lodges and tract homes in avalanche zones; we agreed that we were unlikely to return. The Sawtooth Valley was largely deserted and its natural beauty was striking. We both would like to return to explore the area. We were the
only vehicle on the road down from the pass. Near the valley floor, we saw a man crouched in the tall grass. He was on his knees fly fishing a stream not
much wider than a sidewalk. It was the famed Salmon
River and we were near the headwaters.
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| Salmon River in the Sawtooth Valley |
The Salmon River, also known as The River of No Return (one-way traffic only),
flows 425 miles through some of the most rugged country in the U.S.
Historically, it produced 45 percent of the steelhead and Chinook salmon in
the Columbia River Basin (link).
Redfish Lake in the north end of the Sawtooth Valley has a run of sockeye
salmon (a red fish) with the longest spawning migration of any Pacific salmon
– 900 miles from the Pacific Ocean and 6,500 feet above sea level (link). The Salmon River eventually joins the Snake River in western Idaho.
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| Fourth of July Creek, Sawtooth National Forest |
In the motel the night before, I found a day hike on the
Sawtooth National Forest website (link) to several subalpine lakes in the White Cloud Mountains southeast of Stanley. We followed a rough Forest Service road (209) 10 miles up Fourth of
July Creek to the trailhead (8,900 ft) for Fourth of July and Washington lakes. This is a popular day hike because vehicles can access
the high country via the dirt road and the elevation gain of the hike is less than 1,000
feet.
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| Fourth of July Lake |
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| Washington Lake |
The well-worn trail followed Fourth of July Creek through a lodgepole pine forest. Dense stands of fire-killed trees were evidence of intense wildfires
in the past. Lodgepole pines require heat to open
their cones and release the seeds (they are fire-dependent). The trees have thin bark making
them susceptible to wildfires and the forests often suffer severe fires
after years of drought. Native Americans used lodgepole saplings to
construct their tepees, hence their name (link).
We had lunch at Washington Lake (9,400 ft), which we had to ourselves, and
returned to the trailhead as thunder clouds built over the mountains, a 6-mile round trip.
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| Burned area in Sawtooth National Forest |
We spent the night in Stanley (6,250 ft), a crossroads of a
town on the Salmon River where you can get gas, groceries, a place to eat and a
place to stay, but not much more. The population was 63 in the 2010 census (link).
The main attraction is the natural beauty of the Sawtooth Mountains and
year-round opportunities for outdoor recreation (link).
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| Sawtooth Mountains (Williams Peak center) near Stanley |
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| Sawtooth Mountains (peaks L to R: Thompson, Alpine, Regan, McGowan) |
We left the Salmon River at Stanley taking the
Ponderosa Pine Scenic Byway (link) over Banner Creek Summit (7,056 ft). The winding road dropped more than 3,000 feet down a
narrow canyon following Canyon Creek to the junction with
the South Fork of the Payette River. We stopped at an overlook for Grandjean Peak (9,180 ft) on the backside (west) of the Sawtooth Mountains. Emile Grandjean, a Danish immigrant, came to the US in 1883 to mine, hunt and trap. He built a cabin below Grandjean Peak in 1890 and eventually became supervisor of the Boise Natl Forest from 1906 to 1922 (historic sign along ID-21).
We followed ID-52 west to the confluence of the Payette and Snake
rivers at Payette, Idaho. We crossed the Snake River, which is the border
between Idaho and Oregon, and headed north to Umatilla, Oregon on Interstate 84. The
Snake River leaves I-84 south of Baker City eventually joining the Columbia
River at Pasco, Washington, east of Umatilla. By the time we got to Baker City,
the valley was filled with smoke from fires in central Oregon and we drove in
smoke as thick as fog for 30 miles.
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| South Fork of the Payette River west of Lowman |
We spent the night in Umatilla in the cheapest motel of our
trip and had dinner in a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant/butcher shop with
a display of dulces (sweets) that we recognized from our time in Mexico.
We visited the fish ladder at McNary Dam; most of the salmon run had already
passed the dam, but we saw a dozen salmon, a couple steelhead and one walleye. The town was named after the Umatilla Tribe; its largest employer is a “correctional institution” (link).
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| McNary Dam |
The next morning we crossed the Columbia River and turned
west on Washington Highway 14. It would take us 175 miles through the Columbia
River Gorge to Vancouver, Washington. We could have taken I-84 on the Oregon
side of the river, but we chose the two-lane WA-14, also known as the Lewis and
Clark Memorial Highway (link),
and took all day to make the drive.
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| Early morning along the Columbia River west of Umatilla |
In places, the Columbia River is more than a mile wide; it's difficult to comprehend its size if you're not standing beside it. In the picture below, see if you can find the 20-foot fishing boat in the middle of the river (click the picture to enlarge).
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| Columbia River west of Umatilla |
The first 100 miles (to The Dalles, Oregon) is semi-arid
grasslands on low bluffs and terraces, much of it in irrigated agriculture. Average rainfall in The Dalles is
15 inches a year and it rains an average of 93 days. West of The Dalles, the
Columbia River cuts through the forested slopes of the Cascade Mountains that rise 3,000 feet above the river. It is the only natural passage through the
Cascades between California and Canada. Average rainfall in Portland, 80
miles west of The Dalles, is 44 inches and it rains an average of 164 days a year (link).
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| Garden of the Gods Bridge at Cascade Locks, Oregon (1,858 ft long and 140 ft above the river) |
In the parking lot near the truck I passed a man wearing a
Washington Department of Fisheries (WDF) shirt standing next to a van with U.S.
government license plates. He had a table set up to weight and measure fish. We chatted and I learned that he was a WDF
contractor collecting northern pikeminnows from fishermen landing at the public
boat ramp. He pulled a tub of fish out of his van and said that fishermen are paid $5-8
for each fish over nine inches.
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| Pikeminnows caught by fishermen |
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| Fishing platforms at Cascades Locks used by Native Americans |
Pikeminnows, which are native to the Columbia River, eat a lot of juvenile salmon. The Bonneville Power Administration and
the Pacific Marine Fisheries Commission pay a bounty for larger fish to reduce both
the size of the population and the size of individual fish thereby reducing
predation on juvenile salmon (link).
In 2014, 164,000 pikeminnows over 10 inches (11.5% of the estimated population)
were harvested by 950 anglers at an average of 8.4 fish/angler day. The total
payout was $1.1 million and the top angler earned $73,700 (link).
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| Dipmet fishing at Celilo Falls late 1950s (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers). People caught migrating salmon here for over 10,000 years. The falls were about 140 feet wide and were inundated by The Dalles Dam (link). |
In another attempt to reduce predation on juvenile salmon, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began killing double-crested cormorants nesting on an island
in the Columbia River Estuary in 2015. Cormorants eat an estimated 11 million
juvenile salmon each year and the Corps, with a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is reducing the breeding
population from 13,000 pairs to 5,600 pairs (link).
The plan is not without controversy (link).
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| Columbia River Gorge |
How did we get to the point where federal agencies are killing some native
species to protect other native species? Before European settlement, 10-16
million salmon returned to the Columbia River each year; now it’s about
1 million and most of those are produced by hatcheries. In the Columbia
River basin, 55 percent of the original runs of the five species of Pacific salmon are extinct and 13
others are listed as endangered (Bailey 2015). There are more than 60 dams in the Columbia River basin – 14 on the Columbia and 20 on the Snake (link) – and most people believe that they are the root cause of salmon declines (link), but the story is more complex.
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| Columbia River Gorge |
Salmon restoration in the Columbia River basin is one of our
most “wicked” environmental problems: “…difficult or impossible to solve
because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often
difficult to recognize” (link).
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people and tens of local, state and federal agencies
and non-governmental organizations have worked on this problem for half a
century with limited success (link). Federal agencies spent $6.4 billion on salmon restoration from 1982 to 2001 (Bailey 2015). The story of salmon population declines involves interactions among genes, ecology, human behavior and climate change and efforts to fix one problem may create others (link).
- Dams – barriers, habitat destruction,
reduced freshwater flows
- Logging – habitat destruction, increased sedimentation
- Agriculture – pesticides, habitat destruction, increased sedimentation
- Climate change – increased river and ocean temperatures
- Population growth – pollution, habitat destruction,
overfishing
- Other – predation, competition with hatchery fish, loss
of marine nutrients in streams
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| Bonneville Dam |
Man has proved himself fully capable of changing large
ecosystems like the Columbia River basin in negative ways, but not of restoring their functions (link).
We might restore a species here or a habitat there (ecosystem structure) and hope that the functions return, but restoration
of the emergent properties of ecosystems (energy flow, nutrient cycling, species
relationships) may be beyond our understanding.
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| Looking across the Columbia River from Vancouver, Washington to Portland, Oregon |
We passed the Bonneville Dam, Camas and
finally Vancouver, where we left the Columbia River heading north on Interstate 5 to
Seattle. We had to steel ourselves against the inevitable traffic jams, even on a Sunday.
K.M. Bailey. 2015. The Western Flyer:
Steinbeck’s Boat, The Sea of Cortez, and the Saga of Pacific Fisheries. The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 146 pp.
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