The Columbia River Gorge

Posted on October 1, 2024 by admin

A happy birthday to Jimmy Carter, president of my adolescence, who some years ago outlasted every other holder of that high office, now reaching 100. I can’t presume to know the secret of his longevity, but can speculate that lasting long enough to vote against you-know-who might have been an inspiration to hang on.

While reading about President Carter today, I came across the conclusion of a speech at the dedication of the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta on October 1, 1986.

I must tell you, Mr. President, that your countrymen have vivid memories of your time in the White House still. They see you working in the Oval Office at your desk with an air of intense concentration, repairing to a quiet place to receive the latest word on the hostages you did so much to free, or studying in your hideaway office for the meeting at Camp David that would mark such a breakthrough for peace in the Middle East. Others will speak today, Mr. President, of all phases of your political career and your policies. For myself, I can pay you no higher honor than to say simply this: You gave of yourself to this country, gracing the White House with your passion and intellect and commitment. And now you have become a permanent part of that grand old house, so rich in tradition, that belongs to us all. For that, Mr. President, I thank you, and your country thanks you.

Who said that? Ronald Reagan.

A month ago today we headed east from Portland on US 30, which soon becomes the Historic Columbia River Highway, beginning at the sizable town of Troutdale, an intriguing place that seems to count as exurban Portland. As highways go, the road is antediluvian, first surveyed in the 1910s, partly following a 19th-century wagon route. Old, but well maintained, it’s a smooth drive in our time, though fairly busy.

The highway’s engineer, Samuel C. Lancaster, got himself a plaque along the way, which calls the road a highway of “poetry and drama.” He collaborated with business tycoon and good roads promoter Sam Hill to get the road built.

That is, he left a legacy of vistas. One could do a lot worse.

At Chanticleer Point.

Further east is Crown Point, a promontory more than 700 feet high, with an even more sweeping view of the mighty Columbia. The builders of the highway knew this too, and included an observation tower: Vista House.

Designed by Edgar M. Lazarus and completed in 1918. Elegant stonework, and an expensive development, I’ve read. I’d say worth it, for providing more than a century of vistas.

Inside Vista House is a small museum, gift shop, and an information kiosk where we got helpful information from the person at the desk. She said that the highway (US 30) was closed for construction a few miles to the east, and that if we wanted to visit Multnomah Falls, we’d need to backtrack a few miles and then take I-84, the modern road that also passes through the Columbia River Gorge.

That we did.

To see the falls, at least on September 1, you needed to book a slot, and we did that as well. Tall falls near a highway draws a crowd, though that isn’t apparent at a distance.

If you edit just so, that isn’t apparent closer up either.

But on a visit to the falls, which drop 635 feet in two plunges, you won’t be alone.

A stone footbridge 100 feet above the lower pool is the place to climb to and point your camera.

“Formed by the cataclysmic Missoula Floods beginning 15,000 years ago and fed mainly by underground springs, Multnomah Falls drops… in two major tiers down basalt cliffs,” says the office of the Oregon Secretary of State. “It ranks as the tallest waterfall in Oregon and is one of the most visited tourism sites in the state.”

Two million visits a year, to quantify that statement. As I’ve noticed in a fair number of other places, that’s not much of an issue, since the crowd is in a pretty good mood.

Missoula Floods?

“After millennia of relative calm, the colossal Missoula Floods crashed through the [Columbia River] gorge several times between 12,000 and 18,000 years ago,” wrote science writer Richard Hill in the Oregonian. “The source of the floods was the 2,000-foot-deep, 200-mile-wide Glacial Lake Missoula. Until the last ice age started to thaw, an ice sheet at the mouth of the Clark Fork River in northern Idaho and Montana blocked it.

“But slowly, melted water cut a channel into or under the ice, collapsing the dam and unleashing the lake’s 500 cubic miles of water. It sped into the narrower confines of the gorge at 75 mph and submerged Crown Point. The ice dam repeatedly would reform, and the flood process would start again.

“Recent studies… found evidence of at least 25 massive floods. They calculated the largest flood discharged roughly 2.6 billion gallons a second — about 2,000 times larger than the Columbia’s 1996 flood.”

1996 flood?

Another one of those things I’m sure I heard about, but memory of it has evaporated as surely as the flood waters. Epic, the Oregonian calls it.

The International Test Rose Garden

Posted on September 30, 2024 by admin

I was expecting to see roses at the International Test Rose Garden in Washington Park in Portland. I wasn’t expecting a bronze Royal Rosarian.

Mainly because I’d never heard of the Royal Rosarians. Reading a bit about them – including on a plaque near the statue – I found that they’re one of those local civic organizations composed of prominent businessmen who dress up for events. Something like the Texas Cavaliers in San Antonio, whose head cheese King Antonio passed out aluminum tokens each year to schoolchildren once upon a time, including me.

“The Royal Rosarians are the official greeters and goodwill Ambassadors for the City of Portland promoting the best interests of the City of Portland and the Portland Rose Festival,” the org’s web site says.

“Royal Rosarians welcome visiting dignitaries from around the world, host hundreds of out-of-town visitors, march in parades throughout the region, and perform ceremonial rose plantings in honor of worthy individuals both in Portland and during Rosarian ambassadorial trips to distant cities throughout the world. Organized in 1912, the Royal Rosarians are a non-profit, civic organization.”

In hilly Washington Park, which occupies more than 450 acres, the seven-acre International Test Rose Garden is directly downhill from the Portland Japanese Garden and, unlike that garden, free to visit. Some 10,000+ rose bushes grow there, representing 650+ varieties. If I hadn’t visited the Tyler Rose Garden earlier this year, I would have been flabbergasted by the profusion. Still, the garden is impressive.

The fact that it is a test garden means that rose growers far and wide send their cultivars for evaluation.

“Test beds are planted with new varieties evaluated on several characteristics, including disease resistance, bloom form, color and fragrance,” says the Spokesman-Review. “ A Gold Medal Garden features previous years’ best selections, and the Shakespeare Garden features roses named after characters in the bard’s works.”

The idea of a test garden in Portland goes back to World War I, when it was seen as a way to preserve cultivars that might otherwise be lost because of the fighting. Portland was already known for its roses by the early 20th century, as illustrated in this article in Oregon Live.

The thing to do at the International Test Garden is wander around, taking in the varieties.

Or –

Create rose-themed art.

Portland Japanese Garden

Posted on September 29, 2024 by admin

The other day I found a web site that promised to provide captions for photos. A very specific set of photos. It said:

Looking for the perfect captions for your photos of Japanese gardens? A well-crafted caption can help increase engagement on your Instagram posts and capture the serene beauty of these stunning landscapes.

We understand that coming up with the right words can be challenging, but don’t worry! We’ve got you covered with a wide variety of caption templates for Japanese garden photos.

Looks like what they’re selling is an AI service that will spit out captions for your pictures. Any kind of pictures. Japanese gardens is just one example. The site had a few captions for Instagram posted images on hand, pre-written, you might say. Such as:

Serenity in every step.

Restoring my inner balance amidst the lush greens.

In awe of the perfect blend of nature and art.

Awfully high-minded sentiments there. I enjoyed our visit to Portland Japanese Garden a lot, Yuriko even more, praising its authentic details and feeling.

But serenity in every step overstates things, and not just because I’d been warned about the possibility of wanker criminals smashing one of my car windows on the Washington Park road where we parked it, a problem we did not need 2,000 miles from home.

In the end, nothing happened, and I managed to keep the idea at the back of my mind most of the time during the visit, so I had serenity in a few steps. Every step is to expect too much, even in a perfectly carefree mood. Curiosity was in other steps, and also admiration, wonder, and oops, don’t want to trip. An entirely normal mix of feelings during a visit to a place with a such special resonance.

Water features.

Paths to follow. Or not. But we did.

Walled in are kare-sansui, and I won’t pretend I didn’t have to look that up. A Zen garden, in other words. Two of them, actually. One called the Sand and Stone Garden.

The other, larger, is adjacent to the Pavilion Gallery. The Flat Garden, it’s called.

I don’t know about restoring my “inner” balance. As I get older, I’m glad to still have the regular old sense of balance. As for the “perfect balance of nature and art,” that’s an advertising-quality meaningless statement. Bravo, AI.

Willie Keil’s Journey

Posted on September 27, 2024 by admin

On the last day of August 2024, we found a set of unusually informative point-of-interest display signs on the side of highway Washington 6, near the town of Raymond. Tucked in the southwest corner of Washington state, that is, out in sparsely populated Pacific County, which encompasses Willapa Bay. Reportedly about a quarter of the oysters eaten by Americans in any given year are from Willapa Bay. And how did I miss this?

The mound is inland some miles, and up top is the grave of Wille Keil.

Officially it’s Willie Keil’s Grave State Park Heritage Site. Willie Keil was an Oregon pioneer settler in the 1850s, but a most unusual one, considering that he arrived in Oregon after he died. The three signs, installed only in 2020, tell the tale, if a little sappily on the third sign.

The Story of Willie Keil

On November 26, 1855, Willie Keil, aged 19, was buried atop the hill in front of you after crossing the Oregon Trail inside a barrel of whiskey. Willie had fallen ill and died 6 months earlier and more than 2,000 miles away in Bethel, Missouri, just days before his family was set to depart. Willie’s father, Dr. Wilhelm Keil, ordered a metal coffin for Willie. It was placed inside a tightly banded wooden vat filled with Golden Rule Whiskey, produced by members of the Bethel Colony. Willie’s casket was placed at the head of the leading wagon and the colonists followed him across the entire trail.

Willie Keil’s Journey

Worth looking at in detail. Nice work. A map to evoke time and place, and detail a curious set of circumstances.

Willie Keil Lives Among Us

In this untimely death, Willie Keil gained eternal life. Over time, he has grown up into a folk hero. As Willie’s story has been told and retold, distilling truth from fiction has become ever more difficult. The strange tale has come to symbolize the sanctity of a promise. Willie’s dying wish, the story goes, was to lead the wagon trail and his father assured him that he would – no matter what. Today, Willie lives among legends. And here, at the heart of the Willapa Hills, the spirit of the Pickled Pioneer” endures.

The Washington State Capitol

Posted on September 26, 2024 by admin

My travels in ’85 took me through Olympia, Washington, for a visit to the Washington state capitol. Thinking back on that, the visit is mostly a blank.

Nearly 40 years will do that. But I remember a lot of other things about that trip. Driving on small rural roads through unfamiliar kinds of woods, dodging log trucks, I admired the brilliant gold Scotch broom in bloom in profusion on the roadside without knowing it is an invasive species in North America. Along a not-difficult hike under the tallest trees I’d ever seen, the trail passed by a van-sized fallen tree trunk marked by graffiti reporting itself to be from the 1930s. Butchart Gardens, gem of parks and light show in Victoria, BC, wowed me completely; so did Victoria and the drive to Duncan, BC where I bought lunch in a diner that immediately reminded me of a favorite diner in Nashville, and acquired a dictionary in a nearby bookshop that promised to be authoritative in Canadian English. Know what else British Columbia had? Really good Hungarian food. I remember visiting the Space Needle on my 24th birthday, watching David Letterman destroy watermelons on late-night TV while staying with my Seattle friends, listening to Laurie Anderson talk-sing on the radio (from United States Live) as we took a ferry to Bainbridge Island, our car the last one shoed into that particular vessel. While on the island we discussed the uses of Slug Death – a product that I’d never heard of, and was glad of it. I heard about geoducks for the first time as my companions tried to dig one up on the beach, fruitlessly.

It so happened that the first two nights on the return from Seattle would be in Portland. It also happens that Olympia, Washington, is pretty much on the way to Portland, just a stop on I-5. Stop we did, arriving late in the morning of the last day of August.

The crowning dome is the tallest self-supporting masonry dome in the United States, and among the tallest in the world, up there with the likes of the famed high points of St. Peter’s Basilica and St. Paul’s Cathedral.

A protest was going on in front, an assemblage waving Cambodian flags and signs in Khmer script. The speech must have been in Khmer. Of course that’s unintelligible to the likes of me, but no language skills were necessary to hear the stridency in his voice. Protesting the current authoritarian government in their country would be my guess.

Forty-two steps to the entrance, Washington being the 42nd state to join the union, in 1889. One of the Benjamin Harrison states. He signed bills for six, more than any other president.

The capitol took a while to build, delayed by the Panic of 1893, a fit of austerity on the part of the executive branch, and other disputes about this and that for a few decades. The domed structure wasn’t finished until 1927, a little late for that style. If the delay had been longer, Washington might have gotten something like Nebraska’s capitol.

Inside.

The chandelier under the dome is by Tiffany & Co. The largest thing that studio ever made, I’ve read, and the last job Louis Tiffany oversaw himself. With 200+ bulbs, it’s a massive thing, dangling up there, full of potential energy at a weight of five tons.

Tiffany also did the Roman fire pots, something I don’t believe I’ve seen in any other capitol, despite how well they evoke republican government. There are four all together, one each at the four corners of the room, and each surrounded by flags from Washington counties. Never actually used to hold fire these safety-conscious (-paranoid?) days.

On the floor, straight below the dome. Roped off from feet that would casually tread on President Washington.

The House chamber.

Him again. Who do they think he was, the Father of Our Country?

The 2001 Nisqually earthquake moved the Washington state capitol dome by three inches or so. Since then anchors besides gravity have been retro-engineering into the dome. The quake also left cracks on the floor stone. A capitol might convey permanence to the human mind, but impermanence has already gained a foothold.

A capitol isn’t built of stone and bronze alone. The Olmsted brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, did the landscaping of the capitol grounds, with earth and vegetation as their raw materials. Anything by father or sons is usually worth a stroll through, especially on a warm summer day with blooms all around.

I knew at once it was a monument to those from Washington who died in the Great War

Sure enough. “Winged Victory,” by Alonzo Victor Lewis (d. 1946), known in the Pacific Northwest for his works.

One more feature of the capitol grounds: a view. Capitol Lake, created by the damming of the Deschutes River in 1951.

One of these days – as a larger movement to de-dam U.S. waterways is under way – the dam might be removed, returning to the estuary it once was. Naturally, there are arguments against taking the dam down. As much as I admired the behemoth likes of Bonneville and Grand Coulee, I could also be persuaded that a lot of the smaller dams were built simply because that’s what you did, and whatever economic justification they once had is long gone.

Archie McPhee

Posted on September 25, 2024 by admin

Words to live by: No home is complete without a rubber chicken. I’m sure Archie McPhee would agree.

Except that he’s a commercial fiction, invented to sell rubber chickens and many other novelty items at a store named Archie McPhee. The place happens to be within walking distance of Lilly and Dan’s apartment in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle, so I walked over and took a look the last full day we were in town.

Archie McPhee is in a basic building, whimsically adorned, on N. 45th St., which is the commercial spine of Wallingford, at least part of its way.

As a novelty store, it’s chock-a-block with novelties.

A lot of Bigfoot items. This is the Pacific Northwest, after all.

The store web site lists the following categories to make your shopping easier: Rubber Chickens, Bigfoot, Unicorns, Cats, Hands, Birds, Squirrels, Bacon & Meat, Zombies & Monsters, Pickles, Underpants, J.P. Patches, Creepy Horse Head, Religion.

Hands? Yes. An oddity I had no idea existed.

J.P. Patches? “The J.P. Patches Show aired on KIRO-TV in Seattle from 1958-1981 and broadcast over 10,000 episodes in its 23-year run,” Archie McPhee tells those of us who grew up in other parts of the country.

“Just about every kid who grew up in the Northwest during that time tuned in as Julius Pierpont Patches, Mayor of the City Dump, entertained them with cartoons, sketches and special guests.”

Besides some postcards, I bought a Meditating Bigfoot. Only $4. A store like this needs support from the public.

I didn’t buy a rubber chicken. We have one already, and Lilly specifically asked me not to buy one to leave at her apartment, because she knows how I think.

The star of the shop is naturally rubber chickens, including (I think) what’s called the world’s largest.

Maybe so. But there might be bigger ones in Guangdong Province, what with its centuries of history as a rubber chicken hub. But never mind, Archie McPhee has a Rubber Chicken Museum.

A gimmick, for sure. But it does have rubber chickens of historic interest on display behind protective glass.

With explanatory notes.

So it is a museum of sorts. More than House on the Rock, I think.

“Our owner, Mark Pahlow, started the business selling rubber lizards and other crazy things out of his house in L.A.,” the store says. “He found that people couldn’t get enough of his collectible junk, but he needed space for his company to grow. Risking it all, he packed his entire inventory into a U-Haul truck and headed for Seattle. In 1983 he set up shop with two employees in Seattle’s Fremont district using the name ‘Archie McPhee.’ ”

Eventually, Pahlow needed more novelties than whoever makes them in (say) Guangdong Province could provide, so he started designing his own. Now the company produces as many as 200 new products a year, or at least he did about eight years ago, according to Atlas Obscura, an article worth reading for its tales of the weirdness involved in making and selling weird things.

Dam It

Posted on September 24, 2024 by admin

Plenty of people visit places simply because they’ve been in some famous bit of entertainment, and can’t say I’m immune to the impulse. Still, my choices are a little more – obscure. Eccentric? I’ll bet the Grand Coulee Dam never appears on formulaic lists like these, mainly because the compiler (he, she or it) has never heard of the Woody Guthrie song of that name.

Or the version I like best, by the King of Skiffle himself.

I’d probably have heard of the Grand Coulee Dam anyway, but would we have gone maybe an hour out of our way in eastern Washington to see it, but for the song? I’m going to say no, because how many dams are there, even very large ones, on the rivers of North America? A lot. How many had skillful publicists like Grand Coulee? Not as many.

The Bonneville Power Administration paid Guthrie to write some songs about the mighty Columbia, and write he did, including “Grand Coulee Dam.” Fairly obscure, maybe, but not unknown more than 80 years later. I’d say the agency got its money’s worth.

They got some extraordinary verse.

In the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spray,
Men have fought the pounding waters and met a watery grave,
Well, she tore their boats to splinters but she gave men dreams to dream
Of the day the Coulee Dam would cross that wild and wasted stream.

The dam doesn’t disappoint, if you’ve a eye for infrastructure.

How is it that human beings can building something that large?

“Grand Coulee Dam, The Eighth Wonder of the World” gets right to the point of awe-inspiring comparisons.

“Holding in check the mighty Columbia, at a point where the river flows through a lava-rimmed, 1600-foot-deep chasm on its way to the sea, the dam dwarfs the efforts of the Builder Cheops, to whom is accredited the largest of the pyramids at Gizah, Egypt,” the booklet says.

“The ancient sepulcher of kings is surpassed in size nearly four times by the Grand Coulee Dam…”

The payoff.

Roosevelt Lake provides irrigation and recreation, but the core function is its hydropower generation capacity, which is 6,645 MW. Number-one in the United States and still among the top dams worldwide, on a list that’s mostly crowded with Chinese structures these days.

By the time Guthrie wrote the song, he was able to include this rousing verse.

Now in Washington and Oregon you can hear the factories hum,
Making chrome and making manganese and light aluminum,
And there roars the flying fortress now to fight for Uncle Sam,
Spawned upon the King Columbia by the big Grand Coulee Dam.

The dam has a visitor center with a mid-sized museum about the dam, including such artifacts as building tools, enormous corona rings, the wheelchair available to President Roosevelt when he came to dedicate the dam, bottles that held water from each state and territory that were used in a ceremony at the dam in 1951, and film and stills from the construction itself. Woody Guthrie and the song get a mention, as did ordinary dam workers and people displaced by the creation of Roosevelt Lake. There is a map illustrating the 31 dams of the Federal Columbia River Power System and a plaque for workers who died on the job.

Grand Coulee wasn’t the only dam we saw. On our return trip, we paid a visit to the Bonneville Dam, also on the mighty Columbia, just further downstream.

Also mentioned in a Woody Gurthrie song, “Jackhammer Blues.” The one I prefer is a late Weavers’ modified version.

Hammered on the Bonneville, hammered on the Butte
Columbia River to the five mile chute…

Hammered on the Boulder, Coulee, too
Always broke when the job was through

One more dam, much smaller, but impressive in its way. The Jackson Lake Dam in Grand Teton NP.

Holds back the Snake River to form an enlargement of a natural lake.

Not mentioned in any song that I know of, but a tip of a massive reservoir system.

Riverfront Park, Spokane

Posted on September 23, 2024 by admin

Until we took a stroll through Riverfront Park in Spokane, I’d forgotten about Expo ’74. Turns out the park is a legacy of that world’s fair.

I’ve enjoyed visiting world’s fair legacies over the years, beginning with the many times I visited Hemisfair Plaza in San Antonio, but also the Expo ’70 Commemorative Park in Osaka, the Biosphere in Montreal, the Unisphere in New York, the Space Needle in Seattle, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, Forest Park in St. Louis, the Parthenon in Nashville, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and even the Eiffel Tower, if you want to go back that far. If the Crystal Palace had been still standing, I’d have gone to see that.

I’m sure I heard about Expo ’74 at the time, but it was in distant Spokane, which I’d only ever seen on maps. With no likelihood of a visit, I probably didn’t give it much thought at 13. Or afterward. Not until 50 years after the event, on August 25, 2024, when we decided to spend a few hours in downtown Spokane before heading to Seattle.

A river runs through it. Namely, the Spokane River, which is a tributary of the mighty Columbia. (Every time I write about that river, I will use “mighty” just as “stately” always comes before Wayne Manor.) The Spokane roars around an island, formerly known as Canada Island, and still called that according to Google Maps, dividing the upper falls.

In 2017, the Spokane Parks Board decided that “snxw meneɂ” (sin-HOO-men-huh), a Salish word, would be a more fitting name. Salmon People, to render it in English. Once upon a time, the Salish caught salmon there.

The river travels over a small dam, then to the lower falls.

Back in the late 19th century, the area was industrial.

The location wasn’t quite as valuable for industry by the 1960s, so it was picked as the site for the world’s fair, whose formal name was the International Exposition on the Environment, Spokane 1974. Some 5.6 million people showed up for it, compared with 6.3 million for HemisFair in 1968 (and I was among those).

The legacy park.

A pleasant place to stroll on a summer Sunday. Lots to see, such as site of the former U.S. Pavilion.

The handsome Washington Water Power Co. building, dating from 1907. Not actually in the park, but highly visible from the park.

A reminder of long-ago native inhabitants of the area.

For even better views of the river, there’s a sky ride. Its course parallels the river near the lower falls, and then turns around and comes right back, taking 20 or so minutes.

We took a ride. Of course we did. That’s how I was able to take photos of the lower falls, posted above.

Going-to-the-Sun Road

Posted on September 22, 2024 by admin

No point in burying the lead. Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier NP is famed for its splendid mountain scenery, and for good reason.

The road is also an epic feat of civil engineering. With its large pullouts for auto tourism, it dates from what you might call the golden age of road building in national parks, which was spurred by the prospect of auto tourism. Beginning about 100 years ago, that is, and a key factor in making Glacier a tourist magnet over the years.

Nearly or over 3 million visitors have visited each year since 2016, except for 2020. In 2022, Glacier was tenth-most visited of the 63 national parks.

On August 24, we drove westward on the two-lane Going-to-the-Sun Road, which winds across Glacier for 50 miles or so. Hard to believe that such a poetic name is government sanctioned, but so it is, named for the nearby Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, which in turn had been named that by the remarkable, and mostly forgotten, James Willard Schultz. Apparently he took it upon himself to name features in the future Glacier National Park long before it was a park, which it became in 1910, with President Taft’s signature on the bill.

The eastern entrance to the road has a visitor center, which flies two flags of nearby nations, along with the Stars and Stripes.

The less familiar one is the Blackfeet Nation.

The Blackfeet Reservation, at 1.5 million acres, is half again as large as Glacier NP, which comes in at about a million acres. The reservation is due east of the park, and in fact they share a border on the eastern side of the park. Indeed, much of the park was part of the reservation until the tribe was obliged to cede the land in the 1890s.

Another digression: “The Chief Mountain Hotshots are a Native American elite firefighting crew based out of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation located at Browning, MT with Glacier National Park as their backyard,” the Bureau of Indian Affairs says.

“The Chief Mountain Hotshots are a highly trained self-sufficient hotshot crew working in wildland firefighting. On average, the Crew works 15-20 large fire incidents and travels 10,000-20,000 miles a year.” More about the hotshots is here.

All good to know, but I’m glad there were no wildfires in the vicinity for them to fight. As the road passes along the north shore of cold-water Saint Mary Lake —

— clearly there has been some wildfire.

The road rises from the lake, elevation 4,484 feet, toward the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, elevation 6,646 feet.

Logan Pass is the kind of place we would stop, but there was no available parking. This pic was taken by a photographer named Ken Thomas, who thoughtfully put it in the public domain.

No trucks or RVs allowed on the road, since they wouldn’t fit in some (many) places. That doesn’t keep drivers off the road, however. During the warm months when it’s open, Going-to-the-Sun is a busy place.

Even so, much of it still has that classic mountain appeal of low traffic.

Except when there are knots of traffic. Just a few.

Mountain scenery has a broad appeal.

Toward the east end of the park, the road parallels McDonald Creek for a number of miles before it connects with Lake McDonald, the larger of the park’s two major lakes, and the lower, at 3,153 feet elevation. Some of the creek has more of a river look.

Closer to the lake, the creek is rocky.

The water is bound for the Flathead River, a tributary of the mighty Columbia. We stopped at a wooden bridge across the creek.

Pedestrians can cross, but a sign warns that horse traffic has the right of way.

Not something you see too often. I assume that’s horses with riders, as part of a horse-riding trail, though maybe wild horses might have the right of way too. Like bears or moose, they’re large and might insist.

Bears!

Posted on September 20, 2024 by admin

Nosing around the other day, I was a little surprised to find a National Park Service web page called “Deaths in National Parks,” which details mortality in the wider universe of NPS properties, which is about 430 locations, not just the 63 formal national parks. For a six-year period including calendar years 2014 to 2019.

Among other factoids, taken verbatim: motor vehicle crashes, drownings, and falls are the top three leading causes of unintentional deaths in parks, in that order; half of medical deaths (50%) occurred while the individual was engaged in a physical activity (e.g., hiking, biking, swimming); suicides account for 93% of all reported intentional deaths.

People die while hiking and walking, and swimming and boating, in other words, but the number-one risk is driving. The graph for Unintentional Deaths by Cause affirms that auto accidents are indeed number one, but drowning and falls are popular ways to die, too. A very rare way to die, on the other hand – only three times in six years – is “wildlife.” Which could involve an angry bear, but maybe not. Could be a mountain lion or even be a poisonous snake.

Even so, we boldly took our hikes out West, at Glacier NP and later Grand Teton NP, armed with bear spray. So did a lot of other people. The distinctive shape of the can, with the spray nozzle up top, was attached to a lot of people’s belts or, as we did, in an exterior pocket of a backpack. Though attacks are very rare, better to have one, I figured. I don’t want my last thought to be about how statistically unlikely my death is. Bears aren’t known to care about statistics. Rather, I want my last thought to be, There, I just sprayed the bear! Doesn’t seem to be working…

This is quite the rabbit hole. (Bear cave?) Bear encounters used to be a worse problem, at least in Yellowstone NP. The site Bear Aware has an article called “History of Bear Feeding in Yellowstone National Park,” which includes some astonishing information.

“In the 1920s, the National Park Service began actively encouraging bear feeding as a way to attract visitors and generate revenue for the park,” the article explains. “Feeding stations were set up throughout the park, and rangers would even bring food to bears in order to ensure their presence in certain areas.

“As the popularity of bear feeding grew, so did concerns about the impact on the bears and their natural behavior. Bears became increasingly habituated to humans and dependent on handouts, leading to a rise in aggressive behavior and dangerous interactions with park visitors.”

By 1970, the NPS had figured out that decades of feeding bears was a bad idea, and ended the practice.

“Since the 1960s, the recorded number of negative encounters between humans and bears has dropped from 48 to 1 annually,” the article notes. I like that term, “negative encounters.” I suppose just seeing the bears at a distance, and safely moving away, as we did at Glacier, would be a “positive encounter,” or maybe neutral.

But do Yellowstone bears, in as much as they remember their history — maybe more that we realize — recall the days of ranger-sanctioned feeding with warm nostalgia? Stealing picnic baskets was no big deal, the older bears tell the younger ones. Yogi was a role model.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling