Chapter 60 - Columbia River to Portland
September 28, 2000
9/10 We crossed back into the United States shortly after noon, half way down Osoyoos Lake, the last of the chain of lakes we followed down the Okanagan Valley. We left the lower 48 on May 12, so we've been gone for almost 4 months. It's nice to be back!
The country continues to be a desert. The hills are sparsely covered with sagebrush and sparse tufts of grass. The frequent fruit orchards are irrigated. In occasional patches of flat rich bottomlands, we see truck farming - tomatoes and a variety of vegetables, again with heavy irrigation.
We stopped for the night at Grand Coulee. After looking at a cramped, unattractive, commercial RV Park in town, we drove three miles east along the south shore of Lake Roosevelt, and stopped at Spring Canyon campground in Roosevelt National Recreation Area. The spacious campsites are terraced into the side of a hill overlooking the lake, so that every site has an attractive view.
Grand Coulee Dam is the furthest upstream of the many dams on the United States portion of the Columbia River, and is perhaps the largest of the massive depression-era public works projects initiated by the Roosevelt administration. With subsequent expansions, it now is the largest hydroelectric project in North America, and the third largest in the world. It generates 6,809 Megawatts of power, and can do this almost continuously throughout the year. The lake formed above the dam extends about 130 miles, nearly to Canada, and might be even larger except that international agreements prevent backing the river up into Canada.
It's amusing to realize that the project was originally justified for flood control and irrigation, not for electricity. Integrated into the dam are 12 massive pumps which lift a total of 21,600 cubic feet per second of water up 280 feet to Banks Lake - a huge reservoir which drains to the south into a network of irrigation canals, currently irrigating about 600,000 acres of farmland, with plans to expand this to over one million acres. The pumps have far more pumping capacity than actually needed, which allows them to be used only when the electricity required to run them is not needed for other purposes. Just one of these pumps could supply the daily water needs of Chicago. On average, the irrigation pumps only use a few percent of the dam's electricity output. Six of these pumps are coupled to reversible motor-generators, allowing Baker Lake to be drained back down into Roosevelt Lake to generate an additional 300 megawatts of electricity during peak demand periods.
Although the dam is what brought us to this area, we discovered that the geology of the area is unique and just as interesting. As we drove here, we noticed that the canyons were cut down through many layers of dark basaltic lava. This high plateau was formed during the late Miocene, when lava vented from deep in the earth and flowed out over 200,000 square miles - large portions of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Repeated flows occurred until much of this area was covered with a relatively level layer of basalt over a mile thick. Later, as the weight of all this rock caused the entire area to sink, the rock faulted into huge blocks, which slipped and tilted slightly.
We also had been speculating on the origin of the many house-sized black basalt boulders which are scattered randomly over the countryside, some right next to the highway. Until recently, scientists were also puzzled about other features of the local terrain. There are huge canyons across the high plateaus, but they are dry, and do not show the typical characteristics of ancient river canyons. There are also broad areas of gently and rhythmically undulating terrain, composed of sand and gravel and looking like a giant version of the ripples left on beach sand by wind and waves.
At the Dry Falls Visitor's Center (in Sun Lakes State Park, 35 miles south of Grand Coulee), we discovered the rest of the story. It turns out that during the last ice age a massive glacier dammed a river in western Idaho, creating Lake Missoula, estimated to have contained 500 cubic miles of water. Eventually, the water rose high enough to break though the dam, draining the entire lake in a matter of days, with a flow rate 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world. There aren't enough superlatives to describe this event - one of the biggest cataclysms to occur on the earth. The giant boulders we've been seeing were simply pebbles in the river, ground round as they tumbled along with the flow and left stranded in random places when the flow subsided. There are also less rounded boulders which were floated to their present position, imbedded in huge icebergs.
Coulee means dry ravine. The Grand Coulee is the largest of the canyons cut by the flow of this ancient flood. Dry Falls is midway along the Grand Coulee - a cliff 3 miles wide and 400 feet high, cut by the flowing water. This thing makes Niagara look like a toy waterfall. But during the peak of the flood, it was covered by an additional 800 feet of water and would have made barely a ripple in the surface.
There's much more to this story - we suggest that anyone with in interest in geology should go there and read about it.
9/12 A long stop at Dry Falls (described above) interrupted our southward progress, and we also made many stops to enjoy and photograph the scenery, so evening found us, after wandering westerly along a scenic route, at Chelan. Much of the trip was on top of the lava plateau - through gently rolling recently harvested wheat fields extending out to the horizon in all directions. Plowing and harvesting these fields looks interesting, the plow marks swerve around huge "haystack boulders" and random piles of broken basalt, all left by the flood. There is no evidence of irrigation up here - apparently the plateau (at about 2500 feet elevation) gets a little more rain than the lower country we drove through yesterday.
McNeil Canyon Road, down from the plateau into the Columbia River valley was a bit exciting. It's good quality pavement, but is narrow, winding, and descends 2000 feet in less than five miles - an average grade of over 8%, with some sections considerably steeper. For most of the way, the truck was in low gear with the exhaust brake on, and I still had to ride the brake in the steeper sections. Fortunately, there was only one really sharp switchback. We could have avoided this road, but is would have meant a rather long detour through less interesting country.
The night was spent at Lakeside RV Park - operated by the city of Chelan. It's imbedded in a city park, with a beach and marina along the lake, and lots of grass and trees. It has full hookups - unusual for a city park.
It's summer, finally - sunny and warm. Helen is in shorts for perhaps the first time since we left Florida in March, and we had windows open all night. Wonderful!
9/13 We left Chelan on a small highway which goes west along the shore of huge and attractive Lake Chelan "the deepest gorge in North America", with the bottom of the lake 400 feet below sea level). There is no road along most of the lake, so we eventually turned south, climbing fairly steeply up and over mountain foothills and then back down to the Columbia River. Continuing down the Columbia River, we stopped at Rocky Reach Dam Visitor's Center, which is actually a fairly large museum, focussing on the history of the area and the dam, but also with an excellent exposition of the development of electricity - from the early use of lodestones for navigation to Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment, on up through development of the transistor, etc.
The hydroelectric facility is one of the larger ones in the country and seems fairly typical of the genre. An interesting fish ladder was incorporated in the design, ascending along the downstream face of the dam and then looping out past viewing windows in the Visitor's Center. Interestingly, this dam was built by, and continues to be owned and operated by Chelan County. The power is sold to many public and private power distribution companies, as well as to a local Alcoa aluminum plant which uses 21% of the total output.
A major issue in these dams is in getting the young salmon, swimming downstream to the ocean, safely past the dam. Several schemes have been explored, all involving luring the salmon away from the turbine intakes and into special bypass flumes. They continue to experiment, trying to increase the percentage of salmon which take this route. Many small salmon still go through the turbines, however, and over 95% of them do so without problem (The turbines only spin at 90 rpm.) But some of them are dizzy and disoriented when they come out at the bottom, and are carried to the surface by turbulent water, where they are easy prey for predator fish and seagulls. Various schemes for discouraging the predators are being tried, fairly successfully.
The night was spent at Wenatchee Confluence State Park - a modern, pleasant park with large well-spaced full-hookup sites and hundreds of acres of grass on the bank of the Columbia.
9/14 North Central Washington Museum in Wenatchee is a small general-purpose museum with sections on history of the local native tribes, history of the apple industry, and about early local settlers. There's also a small art gallery featuring local artists. Among the early apple processing equipment in the museum was a clever "apple catapult", used for sorting apples by size. A catapult arm throws the apples, one by one, over a distance of about 8 feet. The distance the apples fly through the air depends on their size, and so each size drops into a separate bin (actually, into a soft canvas chute from which they roll gently into the bin). Sounds like Rube Goldberg - but it works well and was in commercial use for many years.
Wenatchee bills itself as the "Apple Capital of the World", and we drove past many huge apple processing and distribution facilities, as well as thousands of acres of orchards.
Ohme Gardens, in Wenatchee, is an amazing place - as much for its history as for its present beauty. Herman Ohme and his wife came here soon after they were married, with little money, and bought 40 acres of orchards. They picked out a home site on the their property, on the edge of the high bluffs overlooking the Columbia River, just as the 1929 depression hit. They were unable to get a loan to build a house. So they waited, and spent their spare time designing and building the lawns and gardens which would surround their future house. With no money and no power equipment, the work was done slowly, with their own labor plus a mule. They did have a small automobile, and used it to transport loads of trees, shrubs, and ground covers which they personally dug up in the nearby Cascade Mountains.
They picked up flat stones in the Columbia riverbed, and moved many big stones in the gardens, with the help of prybars and the mule. After 10 years, they had several acres of lovely garden, but still hadn't built a house. The gardens were "discovered", and they had to start charging admission to hold down the crowds. Then, Herman had to lease out his orchards and devote full time to ongoing maintenance of the gardens. In 1953, his son took over operation of the gardens and built additional sections. Some years later, the son became terminally ill and sold the gardens to the State of Washington.
The gardens, now including about nine acres, have no annual and few perennial flowers. They are built on a rugged, rocky hillside and consist of meandering flagstone paths, small ponds, varied groundcovers, and native ferns, shrubs, and trees which are now approaching maturity. The charm is in the informal but remarkably pleasing design. Interestingly, there never was an overall plan for the garden. The whole thing happened intuitively and incrementally. The result is spectacular, and the garden is listed among the top gardens of America.
We've been impressed with the attractiveness of Chelan County. We see frequent neat well-maintained public gardens and parks, well-maintained city buildings and streets, etc. We don't know whether this is due to the revenue from the two or three County-operated power dams, or to a strong tax base from the large and prosperous fruit growing and shipping, industry or to other industry, such at the large ALCOA plant.
We had only been able to get a campsite in the State Park for one night, so we pulled out just before their 3 p.m. checkout time and continued on our way - a detour west from the river to Leavenworth, only an hour away. After checking in to Icicle River RV Park (nearly full) and dropping the trailer, we drove 25 miles on up Tumwater Canyon into the Cascades. Lovely scenery!
9/15 Stayed an extra day at Leavenworth to catch up on odds and ends. Leavenworth is a kitschy tourist town with a Bavarian theme. Dinner in town both nights. The Mozart was very nice, an oasis of good taste in an otherwise tacky town - German food on the subtle side, uncrowded, tastefully decorated, with a classical harpist playing quietly in the main dining area. The King Ludwig, on the other hand, had very mediocre food, recorded German oom-pah band music, and an assortment of tacky décor.
9/16 Clymer Museum of Art in Ellensburg: John Ford Clymer was the only illustrator besides Normal Rockwell who had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted for the covers of Saturday Evening Post. The museum contained a broad sampling of his commercial illustration work, and a great many of his paintings of Western scenes. We stopped for the night at Sportsman State Park in Yakima.
9/17 Registered for another night at the state park, and then drove the truck up scenic highway 821, north along the canyon of the Yakima River for 20 miles or so. It's very pretty, with vistas of the blue river, dark volcanic rock cliffs, and golden hills. We turned around and came back down the same road, just to get the view from the opposite direction. Then we headed south to Toppenish to visit the American Hops Museum. Toppenish has a prolific mural painter, who seems to be covering every large blank wall in town with huge murals depicting local history. They are very well done - worth spending some time driving around and viewing them. The museum is even more elaborately painted. The rather plain masonry building has been painted with very realistic architectural details - stone blocks, columns and arches, with murals filling in between. Very clever and attractive.
The museum has a good presentation of the growing and processing of hops. Hop vines were growing in beds between the road and the sidewalk. Hop cones were blowing around in the road and big kegs of dried hops were open for inspection inside the museum. This region is a major supplier of hops to much of the world - 70 countries. Hops is one of the ingredients of traditional beer making, and apparently beer making is its only use. The town holds a "Hoptoberfest" each fall. The useful part is the flower of the female vine (called a "cone", about an inch long, hanging in clusters of a dozen or so). There are a great many varieties of hops, and the choice of variety has a major influence on the flavor and aroma of a particular beer. The hop plant is a vine, which climbs up fiber cords hung from an overhead wire lattice about 18 feet high, supported by permanent poles in the fields. The entire vine is cut down and trucked to a processing plant where automatic equipment separates the cones from the leaves and stems. The roots are perennial, re-sprouting annually for about nine years before being replaced. The cones are dried with hot air and compressed into bales for shipment.
After leaving the museum, we drove out a few miles to the farms where the hops harvest was underway. We met tractors pulling wagons heaped high with green hop vines, vines hanging off every which way. We saw harvested fields, bare except for rows and rows of support posts and wires, and also many square miles of fields of high lush green hops, alternating with fruit orchards and vineyards (this is also a wine-making region). This area is still desert - everything is irrigated.
9/18 This morning, after hooking up, our route was down Interstate 82 for a while, then branching onto scenic US 97, through the Yakima Indian Reservation. Most of the route looks out over golden grassy hills and irrigated green fields, with distant views of the high peaks of the Cascades, including Mt. Ranier, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Hood. We came to the Columbia River at Maryhill, and drove west on SR 14 for a few miles to Maryhill Art Museum.
This museum is a strange place. Originally built about 1926 as a home by a guy with a lot of money and no artistic sense, it is a blocky 3-story poured-concrete structure sitting high on a bluff above the Columbia River.
It could have been an interesting home: Sam Hill was crazy about transportation in general and automobiles in particular. At each end of the house, long concrete ramps lead up from a driveway to the 2nd story living rooms, and directly into the house through huge doors, so that guests arriving by automobile could be dropped off inside the house. On the ground level below each of these ramps is a circular concrete garage designed to hold 24 cars.
Before it was completed, Mr. Hill changed his mind about living there, and had it converted to a museum at the urging of some artsy friends. The art collection is quirky. Several portions of the collection were donated from private collections of Mr. Hill's friends. One friend was also a friend of Queen Marie of Roumania, and had a substantial collection of royal artifacts given to her by the Queen - furniture, a throne, a crown, family portraits, etc.
A mile or two up the river, Mr. Hill also built a full-sized replica of Stonehenge. This was built well before scientists understood the astronomical purpose of Stonehenge, and so the important aspects of the original are not accurately reproduced. He built this structure as a monument to peace, in the mistaken belief that Stonehenge was built as a site for religious human sacrifice. Somehow, the whole thing doesn't make much of an impression.
Maryhill State Park, on the Columbia River, was our home for the night. It is a pretty place, but noisy. Both sides of the river have a major highway, densely populated with heavy trucks. Both sides also have a busy railroad track. The high bridge across the Columbia, just west of us, is also busy with heavy trucks. The wind is living up to its reputation, a constant background roar, and we watched a couple of windsurfers screaming across the water at incredible speeds.
9/19 In poking around the maps, looking for scenery, museums, gardens, etc., we discovered that heading west down the Columbia River gorge looks very attractive, and that Portland, Oregon, has several highly ranked gardens that we haven't seen. So, change plans. We'll go to Portland.
The drive was indeed scenic - this is a very impressive and historic river, and Interstate 84 follows the river closely for most of the distance. Stopped at several pullouts to enjoy the view. Stopped at Columbia Cascades to walk the river bank and read the historical literature. We got to the Portland area just in time for rush hour traffic, of course.
We'd called ahead for reservations at Jantzen Beach RV Park, and found it without difficulty. It's an attractive and conveniently located park, and appeared to be far enough off the highway to be reasonably quiet. But the little side street turns out to lead to an industrial park and a busy General Motors automobile storage lot, so a steady stream of big trucks rolls right past the RV Park. It also turns out to be on the main approach path to the Portland airport, so a heavy jet flies low over us once every few minutes.
A large shopping center is right across the road from our campsite. The usual stores are there along with a few funky ones. One interesting place had an unusual collection of mostly carved wood from Indonesia - cabinets, screens, and tables along with candlestick holders, baskets, etc. A 3' diameter metal gong made a traditional resounding bong that slowly died away. It was on sale for $500. Oh, if we only had a house to put it in!
9/20 Portland's Washington Park is a huge and rambling complex on the side of a steep hill. It includes a zoo, an arboretum, a large Rose garden, and a Japanese garden. We toured the latter two today. The Japanese Garden is large and is perhaps the best we've seen. Almost every vista is pleasing to the eye, and there is much attention to detail. Each of the thousands of trees and shrubs is carefully and authentically pruned and shaped. Of the five styles represented, the dry landscapes were perhaps the most successful, with rocks and green shrubs dotting the raked white gravel. Looking down into one of these from a path high above was a novel experience, and the view was enchanting, better than from the usual bench on the level. It appears that the designer also took inspiration from Mt Hood, clearly visible from the gardens and pleasantly symmetric like Mt Fuji.
Portland bills itself as the City of Roses, and the rose gardens are big and well kept, still blooming vigorously, rather late in the season. Roses are beautiful flowers, but are awkward, ungainly plants that require much care. A common way to make a rose garden attractive is to make it rigidly formal, with rectangular beds and linear paths with fountains or statuary where the paths intersect. All the many rose gardens in Portland were formal. Helen walked and sniffed rose perfume until she was tired.
Leach Botanical Garden, Elk Rock Garden at Bishop's Close and the gardens around the Pittock Mansion, are examples of private estate gardens, eventually opened to the public. All are very different from the rigidly formal rose gardens. Designed by the Olmstead brothers, Elk Rock featured a long grassy sward with views over the Willamette River between trunks of stately trees. The Leach was more intimate, narrow paths through the woods on hillsides. Lots of woodland flowers make this a great spring garden. The Pittock Mansion garden had views of Mt Adams, Hood and Ranier, looming beyond downtown. All three gardens were pleasant.
It is wonderful to see healthy plants and well-maintained hardscape that is not cracked by freezing or eroded by salt. Brick paths that aren't heaved by frost and fountains that are clean and neat and really work are beautiful. Portland is full of these excellent garden details. The Parks department, which maintains all this, must be one of the most well trained and liberally funded municipal crews in the world.
One afternoon, we drove out to the Pendleton Woolen Mills for a factory tour. This is the single facility which dyes and spins the wool and then weaves the fabrics used in all of the traditional wool Pendleton clothing and blankets. It's a very interesting tour. We were able to get up close to most of the machinery, including huge machines which simultaneously spin hundreds of strands of fine wool thread - an amazing piece of mechanical ingenuity. The weaving looms were also huge. After weaving, this premium fabric is inspected inch by inch before being wound on to huge spools for shipping to the clothing factories.
9/24 While Dave worked on maintenance tasks around the trailer, Helen left for an afternoon at the Portland Art Museum. On this sunny Sunday, the streets of Portland were full of pedestrians and it took forever to find a parking spot. The museum is in a grand old established neighborhood, with a wide shaded boulevard in front.
Lots of small collections were on display, each with interesting but second rate works of a few top artists (Moran, Bierstadt and Sargeant, for example in the 19th C. paintings). The most successful collection was 20th C portraits, including works by J Alden Weir, who was a personal friend of a founder, which is probably why several of his excellent works wound up here. Stone art unearthed along the Columbia River and dated to 10,000 years ago was a rare surprise - the very early Northern Americans didn't leave many enduring artifacts. The more recent Native American collection was beautifully done. Mesoamerican funerary pottery from the 1st C. AD was interesting to Helen. Several of the pieces looked very much like Chinese funerary pottery from even earlier centuries, especially the small house models. Such similarity often implies cultural contact, but how? The visit seemed like a quick trip thru art history, probably an excellent teaching collection.
Helen drove up to Council Crest Park, known for its views of Mt Hood, Mt St. Helens, Mt. Ranier, and Mt Adams, all from one spot. These Cascade Mountains are 11,000' to 14,000' high, except for Mt St Helen's, and 50 to 75 miles away, but on a clear day, they show up quite well. If you are in Portland on cloudy days and want to see Mt Hood, head for the art museum which has several paintings of it, including one by Bierstadt and one by Hassam.
9/27 Time to hit the road! There's more to do in this area, but Crater Lake National Park beckons, and may be snowed in before too long.