After our adventures in the heavily forested mountains northwestern Montana, we made our hotel near Spokane, which is a decidedly drier location. Since our next location--one that we'd be staying at for a number of days--was the Portland, Oregon area, we needed to head southwesterly across the state of Washington. To add some variety to our travels, we avoided taking the interstates as much as possible, and instead took smaller highways through more rural parts of the state. That gave us more chances to stop and enjoy the scenery, such as the river we stopped in the picture above, which wound through a canyon of neat rock formations.
As we crossed the dry plains of eastern Washington for several hours, we were continually amazed by the many pockets of irrigated agriculture in this desert-like region, with acre after acre of grains, hay, fruit trees (apples, cherries, etc.), and as we approached the city of Yakima, this strange-looking crop:
Beer drinkers may recognize it--these are hops, which grow on vines. According to one website, the Yakima County area produces over 70% of American-grown hops and nearly 50% of the world's supply! It was amazing to see field after field of this crop in this area...
From Yakima, we started traveling more northwesterly, with our plan to drive to Mt. Rainier National Park. Mt. Rainier is one of many volcanoes in the Cascades Mountains range of Washington and Oregon, and these volcanic peaks soar above the rest of the terrain. Driving up to Mt. Rainier from the east took us through a gorgeous set of national forests as we climbed higher and higher up a winding highway. We just had to pull over and take in the stunning Clear Creek Falls Overlook on the Wenatchee National Forest:
While the view down the valley was breathtaking, the star of this overlook was the Clear Creek Falls itself, which plunges 228 feet into a canyon that snaked below the overlook:
The fencing helps keep visitors from straying too far in trying to get a better picture--the drop to the bottom of this gorge is immediate and one would fall several hundred feet! Fortunately, our kids have enough common sense to know which side of the fence to be on:
As we continued up this White Pass Scenic Byway, we would get periodic glimpses of Mt. Rainier, but only limited views--at over 14,000 feet in elevation, the summit of this mountain is often shrouded in clouds, which drop large amounts of snow during the course of the year:
Although the highway took us nowhere near the top of these mountains, we did get high enough in elevation to find big piles of snow that had been pushed to this location during the winter by the plow (there was also still 1-2 feet of snow in the shaded forests near this stop):
Nothing like having a snowball fight in July! We soon found ourselves at one of the visitors centers at Mt. Rainier National Park, which had a tree "cookie" from one of the large Douglas-fir that had been cut a few decades ago off of one of the nearby national forests:
You can't read the small brown signs in the picture above, but they are dates with corresponding historic events. According to those signs, this tree got its start about 1293, and was cut in 1963, making it 670 years old! Very few such trees are now cut from public lands in the western US today, but back in the 1960s this would have just been another day on the job for the logger who felled this giant. Below, Stephen hams it up, trying to "right" a leaning western redcedar along one of the trails we hiked:
We didn't have a lot of time to explore the trails at Mt. Rainier; I did take advantage of a needed pit stop to explore one along a small river that had more examples of beautiful old Douglas-fir and western redcedar:
We drove through many national forests on this trip; we stopped to take a picture of Stephen by this particular sign because earlier this year he did a little transcription job for me that had him typing the name of a guy unfamiliar to him, but well-known to all American foresters--Gifford Pinchot:
Pinchot was the first American to receive formal forestry training (he had to go to Europe to do so, as no American universities offered that curriculum in the 1890s after he had completed an undergraduate degree at Yale University). Pinchot became the first Chief of the USDA Forest Service, and his efforts help set the stage for my profession.
After a great day in the mountains, we got to our hotel in Vancouver, Washington, and determined that the following day we'd head up to northwestern Washington to see the renowned temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula--and these did not disappoint! After a several hour drive that took us along parts of the Washington Pacific Coast, we reached the edge of the Olympic National Park near the small resort community of Quinault, where we found this giant:
Stephen and Kenny are standing on the base of the world's largest Sitka spruce, which (according to the sign next to it), is just under 59 feet in circumference (almost 19 feet in diameter) and over 190 feet tall! It is hard to express how big this tree was--a beneficiary of the high rainfall and temperate conditions the Olympic Peninsula receives.
The Olympic National Park isn't just about big trees--it has extensive stretches of beautiful beaches, which were just gorgeous during our visit. After a very good seafood lunch at a seaside restaurant, we stopped at one of these beaches, and spent some time walking the shore, admiring the little critters in the tidal pools:
We also got to see some big critters--whales (species unknown)--about a mile or so off shore! This stop was well worth making:
But it did distract from our exploring of the forests of the area...which we quickly resumed. One of the great things about being the children of a forester is they get to see such great trees--and to become living scales for size! Below, Stephen poses by what I believe is another big Douglas-fir:
And here is Kenny posing as a scale for this large Sitka spruce near the Hoh Rainforest trailhead:
Even the small vine maples that grew under the shadows of these giant conifers presented many photogenic moments:
With all of the rain that this temperate rainforest receives, it is no surprise that there is moss growing EVERYWHERE--and it can be just about as spectacular as the big trees. Below are a couple of pictures of the moss draping over bigleaf maples in this part of Olympic National Park:
It was also fascinating to see how many trees were growing on the decaying remains of long-dead and fallen trees:
While much of Olympic National Park has never been cut, there have been areas where selected trees were logged before the land was set-aside as a national park. Some of these stumps will take decades or even centuries to disappear, to they, too, become the "home" of other trees that germinate on top of them:
We didn't spend every moment of this trip in the car or hiking a forested trail...we did a few other things, such as letting the kids enjoy one of the malls near our hotel for a part of a day... You can see Beth's enjoyed her time at one of her favorite stores and got a classic Orange Julius, too!
Part of why we could spent that half-day at the mall was we needed to do some laundry at the hotel...That afternoon, after a classic mall lunch at their very good food court, when headed back into the Cascade Mountains, in pursuit of another volcano...Mount St. Helens:
While not as tall as Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens also stands high above the surrounding hills, and we weren't sure how much of its top we would see...So the partly cloudy skies pictured above were perhaps as good as we thought we'd get. The road from the west side of this volcano is a fascinating case study of the different approaches to reforestation following the volcano's eruption in 1980. Growing up (I was almost 10 when St. Helens erupted) we had been fascinated by this geological event--I recall finding small amounts of volcanic dust on my parent's car in northern Wisconsin in the weeks after the event. We had always wanted to visit this site when Hope and I were grad students at Utah State, but never seemed to find our way there. We determined that this MUST be a stop on this trip, so we drove up the winding road to the Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument with much anticipation. On this trip, we saw some cool highway bridges:
You'll also note the heavy forests in the past two pictures--most of these lands were owned by timber companies, who made a point of salvaging and replanting the forests on their lands that were devastated by the eruption. Weyerhaeuser has developed a very nice (and definitely pro-forestry) interpretive center (https://www.weyerhaeuser.com/company/values/citizenship/mount-st-helens/) on this highway partway up to the summit. The federal government chose to turn a lot of what had been national forest land (parts of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest) into the national park, which meant that they made no real effort to artificially reforest the land...but rather would let it come back on its own, at nature's own schedule. So, many of the federal lands are still bare earth while almost all of the company lands are back in forests--albeit planted ones--but there is great beauty in even the slowly recovering federal lands (and much science has been done on these areas, too!).
Fortunately for us, the weather continued to improve and the skies cleared even more as we got closer to the volcano, allowing for some spectacular views of this starkly beautiful landscape:
Even though we were a number of miles from the summit, the absences of forests made many of the overlooks feel like you were right there:
Here's a zoomed in view of the crater, showing the blown-out area and the bulging dome of lava has has pushed up and hardened since the 1980 eruption:
As drab as the grey volcanic rock and ash were, the wildflowers were amazing at this time of year:
Well, I'll leave that as a stopping point for this update. Stay tuned for more western adventures with Bragg Family South, coming soon!
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