Josh guided us into the restricted area, explained how to look for fossils and we sat down on a bone bed to look. I saw something with a pretty pattern, picked it up and showed it to Josh. He confirmed that it was part of a T-Rex—Gorgosaurus libratus—tooth, roughly 75 million years old. I just sat there for a while, stunned to be holding a real fossil like that in my hand after picking it up off the ground.
The park is the most productive dinosaur fossil ground on earth. And it’s also very beautiful, with camping and hiking along the river among the Cottonwood trees, some 200 years old. I saw a family of deer on the trail. Even the Badlands in Canada are nicer than the US.
It’s definitely worth signing up for a guided tour, although there’s also a drive with exhibits and places to look for fossils on your own. The above diorama is in the visitor center. Most of the assembled skeletons are at the Royal Terrell Museum a couple hours drive north, but the field work takes place here, especially in summer. Josh even stopped to mark and protect a new find from another group a week before. Impressive!
While hiking the Hoodoo Trail, I turned to a view point above the Milk River on top of the steep cliffs above. I stopped suddenly when I heard native singing, resonating beautifully between the sandstone crevices. Not wanting to disturb the prayers, I stood silently, entranced. Eventually I retreated and continued out to the Battle Scene rock art depiction, one of the highlights of this World Heritage Site in Alberta Canada.
Later I took the guided tour of the restricted area where Blair showed and explained the rock art in this spiritual place of the Blackfoot Tribe. The tour started at 5 pm, perhaps to take advantage of the light as well as coolness. While I disagree with those who look for extraterrestrial interpretations of some of the unusual petroglyphs and pictographs, the details and 2500 years represented here are intriguing and fascinating. Still, for me, I will never forget the living voice I heard echoing among the hoodoos.
While the view from cliff trail is impressive, the interpretive center is the best part of this Canadian World Heritage Site. There’s a graphic film depicting a bison hunt and exhibits about the Blackfoot Tribe modern and prehistoric. Tribal records were kept on Winter Count Robes, and a beautiful one is on display. The tribe got its name from walking through the burnt grasses during the hunts. Before they acquired horses from the Shoshone, the tribe used dogs to help carry their belongings (photo). Wonderful place to learn about the fascinating history of Alberta.
This is the Canadian World Heritage Site, not the American Rocky Mountain National Park. If you don’t like this picture of Emerald Lake, my homepage background photo was also taken in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. The site includes many national and provincial parks including Banff, Jasper, Yoho (above), Kootenay, etc. I visited several of the parks with my son a few years ago, before I converted to electric. Maligne Lake in Jasper is a favorite, along with Radium Hot Springs in Kootenay. I also love the dozens of double arched wildlife bridges that allow animals to cross the highways safely.
Near Banff and Lake Louise it gets crowded. Even though I intended to visit Lake Louise to follow my Uncle’s travel log, I had to skip it. One problem is that the Canadian parks reservation system is not foreigner friendly. If you’re Canadian, you simply sign up for the short shuttle ride on a system you’re likely already using. If you don’t have a Canadian bank account, signing up for the shuttle is an overly complex affair involving copious personal information. Of course, if you spend $900 US for a night at the Chalet, then you can visit at your leisure. The other options are equally troublesome, so I chose Emerald Lake instead, which is very similar and maybe slightly larger.
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.
In 1967 above, Kato and the Green Hornet appeared on TV with Batman and Robin, and they even faced off ready to fight. That was 55 years before Asian Americans finally won Oscars for Everything… All At Once. While the park service affiliated Wing Luke Museum is named for a popular local man who became the Civil Rights AG for Washington state and City Council member for Seattle, at a time when Asian Americans were segregated from white society, the museum celebrates the experiences of all Asian American immigrants and the next generations. So, Bruce Lee, the son of a Cantonese opera performer, who became a superhero, movie star, martial artist and philosopher admired around the world for generations, and who changed the world through determination, is very much at the heart of the story here.
Bruce went to school in Seattle, worked as a busboy, began teaching and opened his first martial arts school here. He also met his wife and is buried here. His favorite restaurant, Tai Tong is down the street from the museum, so feel free to sit in his booth and order his favorite oyster beef dish. But the museum is about more than Bruce Lee or even Seattle’s Chinatown, as it includes specific, community and art exhibits on many different Asian cultures in Seattle and the US. The staff will also recommend Vietnamese, Cambodian, Japanese and other restaurants in the diverse neighborhood. Be sure to take the excellent guided tour of the shop, hotel, mahjong and family association rooms while you’re at the museum.
While I was visiting, there was a special exhibit on the Japanese Internment, which included video testimony of US citizens of Japanese descent who were incarcerated, robbed, lied to and dehumanized by the US government, while their brothers and sons served in Europe in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit of its size and service in US history. One man made the point that although his family opposed reparations, hearing the testimony and sharing his own family history was a necessary catharsis for all of them and for the nation. Another woman, a clinical social worker, explained that her own behavior and those she observed among her friends and family were most similar to battered children, who desperately wanted to love their country, no matter how much damage was done to them, because the US was the only country they knew. Well worth learning from this important history.
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.
A couleé is an old French Canadian word meaning a flow, such as a spring creek that carves out a gully. Roughly 15,000 years ago the giant glacial Missoula Lake melted, ice dams broke and the floods carved a giant gorge here. The Columbia River used to roll on through the grand couleé until the giant dam was built, providing power and irrigation to an extensive area. FDR approved the project, so the man made lake that stretches all the way back into Canada is named after him. The dam has a museum showing old propaganda films about how wonderful dams are. The 12 bands of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation couldn’t stop the dam, but now they own the lake and co-manage it with the park service. They also hold ceremonies to ask for the return of the salmon.
Fort Spokane—rhymes with ‘man’—has an old school built to force Native American children to be like white kids, and it still hosts Buffalo soldier descendant reunions. The fort is also part of the Nez Perce story, as Chief Joseph and refugees were forced to winter here, receiving some emergency supplies from a trading post named Fort Colville after the governor of the Hudson Bay Company, and some Nez Perce are still here. Many Chinese settled here when there were mining camps, but then they were excluded from immigrating by law, driven out of many northwest communities and massacred in at least a few cases.
There’s a scenic drive up the northeast coast of the lake, past farms, a ferry and a few boat launches. The town of Colville is mostly underwater now, but the mission remains on park grounds. I hiked a few miles looking for the remains of the original townsite of Kettle Falls that was moved to accommodate the lake. There was some fire damage and fireweed blooming, and there’s a large plywood operation nearby. I found the wetlands above between the park service campgrounds and a day use area. There were many geese around here, a few hikers, and I disturbed a large white-tail deer on the trail. It was hot in July, but cooler in Washington state than most of the country.
Zero Carbon Travel 