Yes, this is Beth "throwing me some shade" at dinner one night while we were in southwestern Washington! One little comment on the delicious seafood fettuccini alfredo they served us...
We spent one of our days in the Portland area exploring the Columbia River valley down to where it meets the Pacific Ocean...This, of course, became famous for where the Lewis and Clark expedition spent a long, miserable, rainy winter at the farthest extent of their famous expedition. We visited this site (on the Oregon side of the river) and a reconstruction of their Fort Clatsop, part of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Park:
While the original fort had long since rotted away, the new-ish interpretive location presented a lot of great material, and really helped give a sense for the challenging conditions this expedition faced. Below is a picture of the inner area of Ft. Clatsop:
Below, the kids seemed to really sympathize with the cramped quarters of all involved, especially the enlisted men and junior officers on this military expedition:
Hope is trying to figure out if she would have been able to handle the challenges faced by Sacagawea, sculpted in bronze below (with her baby strapped to her back):
One of the things we've always enjoyed at these national historical parks are the many living history interpreters we've met, such as the woman below who was explaining to the crowd how many ways western redcedar was used by Native Americans for their daily lives in this area:
While we ate a very nice seafood lunch at a riverside restaurant in Astoria, Oregon, we were entertained by the large ocean-going ships we saw in the channel, including this one carrying giant windmill blades up the river towards Portland (we would see this exact same ship that evening in Portland!):
While driving back to our hotel, I stopped the car multiple times to take pictures of the industrial timberlands along our route. The Pacific Northwest is a major timber producing part of the country--not as big as the south, but still very important. The picture below is of some of the stumps from the original virgin forest that would have been cut down many decades ago--they just decay slowly. The stand had recently been cut of the 40-50 year old second-growth timber that had come back after the last cut...which may have been about the same amount of time since the first cut. I cannot be sure, but I suspect this stand will be planted with Douglas-fir (or may have just been planted):
The clearing of the dense forests almost always leads to an explosion of stunningly beautiful wildflowers, such as the purple foxglove shown below that we saw all over the recently cut areas and along the roadside ditches:
After several really good days in the Portland area, we had to finally roll back east towards northern Idaho and the business meeting I was to participate in for most of the following work week. We got an early start and en route we stopped to see Multnomah Falls, where a small tributary falls 620 feet into the Columbia River:
This gorgeous waterfall is literally just off of I-84--the parking area is also a rest area for the interstate! We got there early enough to beat the crowds. Afterwards, we continued driving eastward on the interstate until we got to an area where the interstate dipped further south into Oregon, and we wanted to travel east through Washington towards Idaho. So we got off along a US highway and started heading towards Walla Walla...with a couple interested stops along the way. One was Hat Rock State Park, named for the curious-looking rock formation (a eroded volcanic plug) right off the highway:
As we neared Walla Walla, we came to another national historic site we had never heard of before...and given that we had a little time to kill before lunch, we decided to check it out. Whitman Mission National Historic Site is an old mission (1830s and 1840s) to some Native American tribes in the area that, after a quick start, had a tragic end:
The monument above is dedicated to the Whitmans, the missionary married couple who came to this part of Washington with high hopes and ended with their killings at the hands of disgruntled tribal members who blamed their tribe's huge losses to disease on the Whitmans. Again, so much death and despair marred the West during this period!
Even though we had a long day's drive, we still found time to stop and see some more big trees! The next old-growth grove we visited, in the mountains of northern Idaho, was a "blast from the past" for us:
As college students back in the late 1990s at Utah State, hope and I visited Hobo Grove en route to a professional meeting in Spokane, Washington. After a long and dusty drive down gravel Forest Service roads with poor markings, we finally found Hobo Grove again, and spent some of the last good moments of that day's light checking out these giant trees:
Hobo Grove is a bigger if probably somewhat younger example of western redcedar forests (recall that is the same species we saw at Ross Creek in northwestern Montana). This stand of timber has a nice trail that winds through it, with multiple interpretive signs:
We didn't have a lot of time, so we just went through the trail pretty quickly, although Stephen and I lingered longer, taking lots of pictures, such as the couple below showing large tumors or "burls" on a couple of these big cedars:
And, of course, one of those great looks up into a canopy that extends 150 to 200 feet over our heads!:
We pulled into our hotel in Kellogg, Idaho, just as the sun set. My meeting started the next day, and so for that first day of the conference (Tuesday), I attended a large number of talks while Hope and the kids rested and did some local sight-seeing. The second day of the meeting was an all-day field trip, which involved taking three large tour busses packed with foresters up narrow winding mountain roads!:
What a sight we were! These forestry tours are often the best experiences of these conferences, as you get to see how forestry is done in other parts of the country, and hear about their particular challenges and opportunities:
In this part of the northern Rockies, introduced and local fungal diseases are a major problem for forests of all kinds. Below is a picture of us in a pretty stand of mature timber that had a lot of dead western white pine in it...killed decades earlier by the white pine blister rust, an introduced fungal disease that also has caused problems for the eastern white pines in the Lake States where I grew up. The logs we are sitting on and the standing dead tree ("snag") in the foreground of this picture are almost all western white pines:
This disease hasn't killed all of these western white pines, as you can see by the large specimen in the picture below:
If the tree above looks familiar, it is because western white pine is a very similar, if somewhat larger, cousin to the eastern white pine found across most of the eastern US! A lot of the clearcut areas we saw (including those pictured below) are an attempt to reduce the impacts of this pathogen and other root diseases that affect most of the conifers species in this area:
Although not very popular with many people, clearcuts are a viable management tool and important to create the large openings the dominated preferred tree species require to regenerate.
After a great all-day tour, we returned to our conference location to prepare for the evening banquet, during which I was to receive an award from my agency. However, as we started heading back I started to realize I wasn't feeling great...and given the bad cold Stephen had had earlier in the trip, I figured that that illness was finally catching up to me. However, just to be one the safe side, I took a rapid covid test when I got back to the room...and it came back positive! So, the banquet was off, and my talks the next day were off, and we cancelled our last night in Kellogg for a stay in Wyoming--we would now begin our nearly 2000 mile, 3 day journey back home with me sick (and the rest of the flock soon to join me)!
As we headed east the next day across Montana, I let Hope and Kenny handle the driving, and I sat in the back and rested. I actually didn't feel horrible, and so we did make a few stops at isolated locations where contaminating others wasn't a risk. These stops included the Madison Buffalo Jump in Montana:
This very interesting state park preserves a bluff line along the edge of a large plain that prehistoric Native Americans used for thousands of years to scare herds of bison into running off of the cliff, injuring themselves (if not outright lethal) at the hard stop at the bottom of the fall...after which the Native Americans would finish them off and then butcher the kills:
We also swung through Little Bighorn Battlefield National Historical Park in southern Montana just before the park closed (and just before a nasty thunderstorm hit). Kenny had never been here before, so we stopped for him to see at least some things:
The rest of us largely stayed in the car, avoiding the light rain that had started to fall:
It seems like just about every time we've been to this battlefield, the drama of the skies further highlights the drama of the landscape, dotted with the white marble markers of the fallen 7th Calvary...
The next day we continued our drive west...I felt well enough to resume driving, which was good because Hope was starting to feel poorly (she was the next to get sick!). Before we left Wyoming, we stopped and visited another historical site called "Register Cliff" because many early settlers carved their names into this soft rock wall as the headed out west. Unfortunately, most of these early signatures have been covered by more modern grafitti:
Another feature at this location is the old wagon trail, which was worn deep into this soft bedrock by countless wagons over the years:
Our final tourist stop this day (and, really, for the rest of the trip) was a quick pull-out to see Chimney Rock, the famous landmark along the Oregon Trail:
We would arrive safely back in Arkansas about a day and a half later. What an adventure! While getting sick at the very end was less than ideal--and we all came down with covid (and since have all recovered nicely)--we saw so much and had so many great experiences, good food, and entertaining company. I know we put in more than 5000 miles on the road during that two-week trip, but it was so worth it to help broaden all of our experiences! For those who have never traveled out west, it is a must!!!
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