Since the cave was discovered in 1874, explored and expanded early, humans caused very significant damage to geologic structures making it hard to find beautiful natural features. The ‘cave drapery’ above is at the top of two flights of metal steps up to the Paradise Lost high ceiling above the Ghost Room in the far back of the cave tour. The cave has a stream pouring out from the entrance, and there’s a pretty pool there in front of the Château, which is closed pending renovations. There are also several pretty hikes above ground, including one to a very large Douglas Fir. Easy to get tickets at rec.gov or at the visitor center in Cave Junction, before driving all the way up to the cave itself. Be sure to check in as soon as you arrive at the other visitor center next to the cave, as they often let folks take an earlier tour when space is available, especially in the morning.
John Day was merely an unfortunate trader who got robbed along the river here, but the event was noteworthy enough that this Columbia River tributary was named after him, then the whole region in Oregon. I first explored the area in 2017 when finding a campsite to observe a full solar eclipse, but I skipped the fossils. I really should have visited the museum earlier.
The John Day River flows through a huge volcanic landscape that contains the best Cenozoic fossils discovered in the country. Layers of forests and ash preserved some of the most important fossils used to understand evolution. The Cenozoic is the age of mammals, including the John Day Tiger above and the big entelodont (pig/hippo) behind it on the left. There is a camel skull, a gomphothere (elephant) jaw, mastodon teeth, horns of a giraffe-deer, bones of a short-faced bear previously thought to live only in Asia, rhinos, and some kind of giant dog-bear called a nimravid. There are also fossils of the Dawn Redwood, which still lives in China. The fossils I’ve seen at Fossil Butte, Florissant and Agate are all from periods covered here. If you have time, it’s possible to hike in the three separate remote park units, but the exhibits above are in the Condon Visitor Center in the Sheep Rock unit near the scenic Picture Gorge.
The replica of Fort Clatsop, winter camp 1805-6, above helps imagine the rough conditions for 32 men, a woman, her baby and one dog, when it rained or sleeted 94 days out of 105. Several visitors brought their Newfoundland dogs in a regular event to honor Seaman, the valued, four-legged expedition member.
Jaden and his friend—not yet park service employees—explained the story of the stolen canoe, the eating of dogs and how Sacagawea was purchased and impregnated around age 15 by her ‘husband’ who had other ‘wives’. These facts didn’t make my history book. Jaden’s canoe story was one of the best talks I’ve heard in any national park.
I missed the guided paddle trip, but I walked to Canoe Landing and saw most of the short Lewis & Clark ‘river’ from shore. The pilings in the water here and in much of the Pacific Northwest are old logging organizers.
The park also includes various nearby sites visited by the expedition, including Washington state’s Cape Disappointment—misnamed by someone who mistakenly thought the bay too large to be the mouth of the Columbia River. A Japanese sub briefly bombed Fort Stevens on the Oregon side. The charming seaside town of Astoria, once famous for furs, canneries and TheGoonies, makes a good base to explore with some good restaurants and reasonably priced hotels.
Portland Oregon has always confused me geographically. What kind of port is over 100 miles from the coast on a tributary of a major river? The history of this site explained it. George Vancouver, a British explorer who sailed with Captain Cook, explored the Pacific Northwest coast in the 1790s, and both the both the huge natural harbor in British Columbia to the north and this deep water site to the south on the Columbia River were named after him. Vancouver Washington was perfectly located at the confluence of the Willamette River to be an inland trading post still reachable by ocean vessels. The Chinook have long lived here and traded with other tribes, regularly traveling hundreds of miles by canoe. When the Pacific Northwest was British, this was all one territory from Sitka Alaska to San Francisco. Portland was built later as Vancouver’s port. When it became US territory, Oregon and Washington states split the growing city here on the Columbia. As the Willamette (Wil-AM-it) Valley developed in Oregon, Portland became the city and Vancouver became the tax-dodging suburb (lower income taxes in Washington within easy bridge distance to lower sales taxes across the river in Portland).
The British Hudson Bay Company built its corporate territorial headquarters here in 1825 to capitalize on the fur trade with tens of thousands of local Native Americans and a great many more via their ancient trade routes along the coast, up the rivers and deep into the mountains. The British contracted with many French fur traders who typically married natives. British ships brought workers from Hawaii after rounding Cape Horn. The fort (reconstructed on location above) was the center of a thriving cultural melting pot that developed its own language and challenges. Unfortunately, many natives died of disease, particularly malaria, which the ‘gentlemen’ who lived in the fort knew could be treated with Quinine, which they had in limited quantities. The company man in charge, Dr McLoughlin, was married to a biracial woman, and he was violently furious when newly arrived missionaries spoke derogatorily of her.
McLoughlin nevertheless extended credit to the many destitute white settlers who arrived on the Oregon Trail. He lost money, was forced to retire, became a US citizen and is now considered the ‘father of Oregon’. His house is part of the site south of Portland. White settlers took over and made the state ‘whites only’ by law until 1926, prohibiting others from property ownership etc. It’s worth reflecting honestly on this history when considering the recent Supreme Court decision against affirmative action: white ‘pioneers’ gave themselves every legal and economic advantage possible, from slavery, to the Rogue River Wars against natives, to ‘whites only’, to the Chinese exclusion act, and to taking property during the Japanese internment. It’s shameful that the Court ignored the long history unfair privileges given to white people—many whose families benefited over two hundred years from stolen land, labor and opportunity from so many people of color—and decided against providing a few seats in college in order to enrich the diversity of education for all students.
The visitor center in Idaho is on a hill above where the Lapwai Creek flows into the Clearwater River, which joins the Snake River a few miles downstream in Lewiston. The river banks were an excellent place for salmon, berries, edible flowers, and game, and the Nimiipuu used to arrive in the fall and stay through winter. By summer, they would be hunting up in the hills, forests & mountains. French trappers called the tribe Nez Perce or ‘Pierced Nose’, although that wasn’t a traditional tribal practice. When Lewis & Clark passed through, the Nimiipuu assisted the expedition and helped them make canoes. When the missionaries and other settlers arrived, they were forced to change. Many tried desperately to compromise and adapt. After the nearby Whitman mission ended in a massacre, racist demagoguery fueled far more excessive violence across the west, bringing the US military, war, exile and restricted reservation life, including here around the Spaulding mission, pictured circa 1900.
The affiliated Nez Perce National Historic Trail, which marks the flight of the tribe from the US Army, is now part of the broad official Nez Perce NHP, including Big Hole in Montana, a refuge near Lake Roosevelt, the White Bird & Clearwater Battlefields, through Lolo Pass, Yellowstone, Billings and up to Bear Paw Battlefield. Over the years, I’ve visited these places on roadtrips, read several of the books, from I Will Fight No More Forever to Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce and pondered the mistakes and tragedy. There is simply no excuse for breaking treaties, stealing land, or killing defenseless people, including women, children, the elderly and infants. When leaders take advantage of popular anger to focus attacks against a community, the result is often far more evil than any original sins. I encourage you to learn more, since the problem of demagoguery is still with us.
But the Nez Perce tribe is still here with us, like the flowers they used to cultivate here. They are re-learning the language that they used to be punished for speaking. They self-govern, petition the US government, sing songs, dance, teach their kids to gather plants, hunt, fish and carry on their cultural traditions and exercise their treaty rights. The lessons of their forefathers and their oral traditions continue to be remembered, spoken aloud and passed down to future generations. The park preserves petroglyphs, artifacts and sites of mythology. Their culture is vibrant and contributes a valuable perspective to all of us. They are not doomed to be permanent prisoners of tragedy, and the park film here is a refreshing reminder of the resilience and life of their culture and of the human spirit.
The Cayuse had heard from the east about what happened to natives after settlers arrived, so they predicted death, loss and suffering were on their way. The Whitman missionaries left in 1836, five years before others started arriving overland in Oregon. They were allowed to start a farm here, and with the fervor of the second awakening, they preached that the Cayuse were going to hell after death unless they adopted Christianity. As it turned out, gathering newly arrived settlers and native converts in church weekly to break bread and sing songs together, helped spread diseases like measles that killed most of the native population. So the Whitmans were sort of correct, except for the order: first they adopted Christianity, then they went through hell before finally dying.
Unfortunately for the missionaries, the natives had a tradition of killing bad medicine men. Now, much has been written of the Whitman massacre (especially by the other missionary Spaulding who settled nearby with the Nez Perce), but imagine if immigrants come to your town and demand that you copy their strange new ways and beliefs, with threats if you did not. Many more immigrants arrive each year, talk with the missionary doctor, take over and spread disease. When the doctor treats his own people, they usually survive, but when he treats yours, they die. How many of your friends and relatives would die before some angry grieving parent would try to kill the doctor? I’m not excusing criminal behavior based in ignorance, but similar senseless vengeful murders still occur today.
When half of the Cayuse had died of disease, a group of natives killed Doctor Whitman, his wife and 11 other men. There’s a memorial on the hill in the photo above. 5 natives were later found guilty and hung. The mass murder was a terrible crime, but the response was just short of genocide. For the next 12 years, the Cayuse and many other natives in the territories were hunted down by militias and by the military, driven from their lands, harassed and in many cases slaughtered, including women, children and the elderly. When the dust settled, most of the remaining natives were on small reservations with a few escaped to Canada. For every white person killed, hundreds or likely 1000s of natives died. More lost everything they owned, including their freedom, despite not having anything to do with the original conflict or the Cayuse.
Ross Lake is atop three dams on the Skagit River which provides power to Seattle, but it still has some old growth forest near the visitor center which you can hike through on the River Loop and To Know a Tree Trails. Since the park is managed and surrounded by the North Cascades National Park, they run the visitor center. The Gorge High, Diablo & Ross Dams can all be seen in short hikes, and the good news this year after decades of tribal petitioning is that ‘fish passage’ will be added to all three dams! Hydroelectric power is zero carbon, but it must not be at the expense of salmon and other species that we’re driving extinct.
Anyway, I highly recommend those two hikes which total about three miles, and include waysides explaining the different types of trees, their niches in the forest and the natural cycle of wildfire. Another improvement would be building wildlife bridges along the highway & over the river, so that animals like Grizzly Bears could migrate between north and south sections of the park more easily. Well, in any case, Ross Lake extends to the Canadian border and has many paddle-in campsites for folks who rent gear from the resort or somehow portage their kayak around the Ross dam after paddling across Diablo Lake. Seemed like too much work to me to explore an artificial lake, but maybe if I had more time to try fishing, it would make a nice vacation.
In the 1970s locals wanted to prevent a housing development in this historic area, one of the first settlements in Washington, still mostly unchanged from the 19th century. The result was our first ‘historical reserve’ where all landowners sold their development rights in perpetuity to the government (or a private natural conservancy). It makes for an interesting park, where the town is protected from development, but otherwise operates normally. There’s a good museum in Coupeville, and there are three state parks to visit, Fort Casey with a lighthouse, Fort Ebey with nature trails and a kayak launch, and Ebey’s Landing with a section of beach along the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Jacob Ebey’s blockhouse above is a good place to start a 4 mile hike along the bluffs returning on the beach. Jacob’s son Isaac settled here first, inviting his parents to join him from Independence Missouri, but Isaac was killed by natives in a reprisal for US attacks on native villages. Jacob’s home is open on weekends during the summer, and the staff will tell you the gory details if you ask. The bluffs are not for the feint of heart, but the views of the strait and the mountains are stupendous: Olympic, Rainier and Baker.
Seattle is a fascinating city, and this park offers a free walking tour of the Pioneer Square Historic District which teaches you about how the city overcame various challenges to grow. But the focus here is on the Gold Rush of 1897. To just report the numbers, 100,000 people rushed off to find gold, 70,000 bought supplies in Seattle, 40,000 reached the Klondike (mid-border of Alaska and Canada), 20,000 tried prospecting, 300 ‘struck it rich’ finding over $500,000 in gold, and only about 50 didn’t waste their money away digging for more. So the store above represents the only real winners of the rush, Seattle’s merchants. The stories are fascinating, although darkly tragic in many cases.
There’s another section of the park on Bainbridge Island across from Seattle, which is a memorial to the first US citizens of Japanese descent to be forcibly removed from their homes and sent to Manzanar and Minidoka. There is a beautiful cedar and stone memorial wall there along with names of the ‘interns’ and origami cranes, each representing a fragment of hope that a wish comes true. More than in some other places, many of the victims returned to their homes after the war. The main Klondike visitor center in Seattle also has a small exhibit about this American experience.
The Stehekin River in Washington state naturally formed a lake before emptying into the Columbia River, but a small dam was added to raise the water level. To get to the park, you have to take the 1.5 hour ferry ride from the resort town of Chelan (shuh-LAN, rhymes with man), which can be done as a day trip with layovers from 1.5 to 6 hours, or else you have to hike in on the Pacific Crest Trail or some other route, likely overnight through Grizzly territory. The ferry is the best way to get a look at the whole, long lake, including a large stretch of fire damage. I recommend bicycling, but the ferry company doesn’t allow bicycles on some boats, perhaps to aid their bicycle rental business at the arrival dock. Wenatchee Washington is a 45 minute drive south of Chelan, but its hotels are half the price.
Along with Lake Ross, this park is part of the North Cascades Complex, three distinct contiguous park units established simultaneously, so technically I visited all three by EV when I stopped at the main visitor center. The remote village of Stehekin is worth spending some time exploring, as they have a museum, a lodge with restaurant, a couple gift shops, a traditional apple orchard with free-pick-your-own in the fall, and an excellent bakery. Lodging, campgrounds and seats on the ferry do fill up, so reservations are wise. There are also very scenic hikes along the glacial river and above the glacial lake. Due to lack of easy access, the park has a relaxed old-timey feel to it, where folks wave as they pass on the road and people seem to slow down to enjoy themselves. But don’t miss your return ferry, which leaves promptly.
Zero Carbon Travel 