Don’t Forget the Columbia River Gorge
Ask a Portlander what they like about their city and you’ll likely hear comments about the food and drink, and more than a little something about the natural wonders that surround us. Portland has fantastic outdoor access to the coast, the Cascades, and there’s no place we visit more than the Columbia River Gorge.
In guidebooks and websites you’ll see it described as our backyard. Within a quarter-tank of gas, you’ll find more hikes than your calves can handle. Many of them climb into forest-cloaked slopes; many of them find a waterfall or two, and eventually, a Columbia River view.
But all that you see is not all that there is; there’s also some interesting history.
Multnomah Falls in Spring
Ask a geologist and they’ll tell you about lava flows and the Lake Missoula Flood. Ask a native and they might tell you about the now submerged Celilo Falls, and about how their ancestors used to snag salmon in willow nets. An engineer will pipe right up about the Bonneville Dam. A fisherman might recall the couch-sized sturgeon that yanked his shoulder out-of-socket, and a biologist might shake her head explaining the new habits of the sea lion. And if you talked to all of those people, you’d likely discover more people and more stories about what this place means to them.
The Gorge truly lives up to the Forest Service’s billing as “The Land of Many Uses.” And in the spring, a wonderful way to experience it is on a Sunday drive through the Columbia River Highway.
Built by the National Park Service in 1922, it’s designed to leave destinations behind. It unwinds through an ancient forest of fir and pine. Scores of waterfalls leap into view over the mossy cliffs, stone bridges carry you across swift creeks, and turnouts urge you to slow down, or pull over and enjoy the view.
It’s a pleasure to imagine the pre-dam days when the Columbia was a braid of tangled river channels, but you don’t need to imagine the past to see the beauty of today.
It does help, however, to get out of your car.
A classic spring time hike begins at Oregon’s most visited site – Multnomah Falls. To hike from there to Wahkeena Falls is a 5-mile loop that visits ten waterfalls, not a single dribbler within the group, but Multnomah is the most impressive. Something about the ease of access makes it easy to overlook, but to stand beneath an airborne river, to feel the spray of the mist, the roar of the wind, and to marvel at the perfect stone bridge, makes me think the same thing everytime I visit, “I should come out here more often.”
Thar She Blows!
You don’t need a boat to whale watch in Oregon. All you need is a mountain, and now’s a great time to climb one along the Oregon coast because the gray whales are migrating.
A gray whale shows her tail fluke near Depoe Bay. Photo by Vince Patton
A friend and I went to try to see a whale last weekend. We chose to hike Neahkahnie Mountain just north of Manzanita. It’s a 6 mile loop. From the summit, we hoped for commanding views of the Pacific. We wouldn’t get a close sighting from here, but we hoped the high vantage would improve our overall chances.
We hiked up the southside of Neahkahnie Mountain through salal and scattered fog. At the summit, fog blocked the ocean view. We couldn’t see whales from up here, but in theory, it’d be a great spot.
Whale Search From Neahkahnie Overlook. Photo by Brett Cassidy
You’ll want to scan the ocean until you see a white plume, then glass it with binoculars for a closer look. If you’re fortunate you might even see one breach. There’s just no way to complain about a mundane life if you have recently seen a 35 ft. creature of the sea.
We decided to try again lower down. On our way down the mountain, the sun broke through the fog.
We basked in the sun above Devil’s Cauldron, saw gulls riding the wind, large waves crashing against the cliffs, a barge on the horizon, but no whale plumes, at least not yet.
This week there will be a program to teach you more about the migration that happens right off our coast. The program is called Whale Watching Spoken Here. From March 19 – 26 there will be volunteers at pull-outs all along the coast.
The road hike to return to our car on highway 101 actually had some of the best places to see whales. We tried from there, but still without luck.
So you don’t need a boat to whale watch in Oregon, but it sure would help.
Floating the River Home
Rivers define Oregon. There are 57 so called “wild” ones in the state. Oregon has more Wild & Scenic Rivers than any state in the nation, even more than Alaska and California combined. The Rogue, Deschutes and McKenzie Rivers call out to fisherman and boaters across the country; they make it easy to overlook the sluggish river that flows through downtown Portland.
Portland Skyline Over the Willamette
The lower Willamette River is not on the shortlist for Wild & Scenic Designation, but it has been designated as an American Heritage River, a designation I had never heard of before. It’s defined as a river with exceptional cultural and recreational value.
This past Sunday, two friends and I decided to check it out. We borrowed the neighbor’s metal canoe for a trip down the urban stretch of the river.
We put in at George Rogers Park and paddled downstream, our destination, the Hawthorne Bridge. We paddled past riverside mansions and floating homes. We saw bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, great blue herons and imagined steelhead and sturgeon lurking in the shadowy depths.
Afloat on the Brown Waters of the Willamette
We paddled past a tall cliff where a waterfall poured down the mossy rocks, but I wouldn’t say this stretch of the river was beautiful. The Big Pipe Project and construction cranes don’t fit the description. Nor do ragtag hobo camps, yacht docks, freight ships, or bridge ramparts with graffiti tags. At first, I tried to imagine the scene without them, but realized that’s not the right approach.
The Willamette River is a place with salmon and freighters, bald eagles and skyscrapers, waterfalls and sewage pipes. Seventy percent of Oregon’s population lives within its watershed. It’s amazing that the river still supports the fish and wildlife that it does. It’s not pristine, but it’s where we live.
Photographer to the Stars
Darkness, real darkness, is hard to find in today’s modern world.
A couple of years ago we found ourselves camping out overnight with scientists at Mount St. Helens. It was so warm that August evening we didn’t even bother to pitch our tents. The last thing I remember from that night was lying on my back, looking up at the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon overhead.
We were far enough away from the light pollution of cities to truly see the billions of pricks of light.
Courtesy Tom Carrico
So when I heard about Tom Carrico’s photographs of distant galaxies, I assumed he too had to escape to remote areas to get a clear view.
Nope.
Tom Carrico and his backyard telescope.
He’s managed to take astounding photos of the night sky from his backyard in Corvallis. He turns off the outside porch lights. His kids cooperate and don’t turn on lights in the rooms that face the backyard.
He sits inside with his computer connected to the telescope in the yard and proceeds to take photos that add up to hours and hours of continuous exposure. (Our story on Tom airs on March 3.)
Tom does get away to clear-sky country out east of Bend. There’s no doubt he prefers the clear, dark skies there over Corvallis.
We don’t like to gush over the subjects of our stories. And we know he has plenty company in this hobby. (Check out the hundreds who show up at the Oregon Star Party every summer.) But it really dropped my jaw to see the images he captures which look like something from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Galileo would be astonished.
So where are the best places for truly dark night skies? Do you have a favorite spot for star gazing?
When East coast meets West
I was up at 3am this morning. Not an easy thing for a late-sleeper like me.
I agreed to wake before the birds to be a “live” phone-in guest for WNYC’s (New York) public radio program, The Takeaway. (6.30 EST meant I had to be awake by 3am PST, to get ready.)
OPB featured on The Takeaway
Now, doing an interview at 3am requires some strategy. The penalty of a creaky floorboard or squeaky doorknob in my house means staring down a grumpy wife , or worse, a pair of prematurely awakened toddlers demanding loudly that I get them warm milk while I’m on the phone.
So. Off to the car I went at 3.30 am, hot coffee in hand, heat cranked to high, waiting for the interview to start.
Not a bad morning to be out, overall. Crisp and cold, wispy fast-moving clouds racing in silhouette against the nearly full moon. A good way to relax, actually.
Then came the call. The bustle of New York City flooded my car. Fast-talking producers giving me the countdown and my estimated time on-air. Music blaring. The genial but fast-talking host, Celeste, jumping right in with questions. I fire back with the best I’ve got at this early hour. More music. Cut to break. A quick thank you and I hear something about “good job, now get some sleep.”
Then, silence again.
I get out of the car, sit down on my garden bench out front, take a long, slow sip of Portland’s finest coffee, and stare up at the moon. I laugh… out loud, I think. Because my dirty little secret is that I grew up in New Jersey. I worked in New York City for a few years. I’ve been gone for over 20 years, but I know that sound, that life. And a bit of all that just came flooding back to me while I had my 3 minutes on the air with WNYC this morning.
So there I was after the call ended, standing in my Milwaukie driveway at 3.45am. My neighborhood is completely still. A pair of northern screech owls began calling out. They were close, probably no more than 20 feet away. There is no sound of cars or traffic to ruin the moment. My brief encounter with a piece of New York City hustle disappears faster than the coffee in my mug.
I am in Oregon, and I am thankful.
I’ll take an owl and a coffee in the morning over blaring taxicabs and the urban hustle any day.
Oh, By the way…Thanks for having me on the Takeaway, WNYC! Here’s the story.
My beautiful, sick lichen
Lichens? Are you serious? You’re going to do a story about that green crusty stuff that hangs off trees? These are the questions that ran through my own head as I pondered whether to go ahead with a story about, yes, lichens. I mean, could I really expect audiences to turn from “When Sharks Attack” to “When Lichen Grow!!!”?? I decided I’d give it a crack anyway. And I’m glad I did, because whatever hesitation I had vanished after I met two of the most rockin’ and hilariously enthusiastic scientists I ever met, scientists who gave us the a grand ‘tour-du lichen’ across the Gorge. You’ll have to wait to see the full story, but I promise that after you see the eye-popping close ups of lichens with names like “Wolf Patch”, “Old Man’s Beard” and “Rag Bag”, you’ll never see the northwest forest the same way again.
Of course, seeing the forest with new eyes isn’t always a good thing.
You see, one of those rockin’ scientists was Linda Geiser, who, thanks to decades spent studying lichen, can “read ” lichen in ways you and I can’t. And after we finished shooting I proudly handed over a lichen covered oak branch from my yard. I was proud of all the lichens I had to show her. I expected her to validate my belief that such a beautiful specimen could only be an indication that I lived in a healthy and diverse neighborhood. (hey, we all need a boost now and then!) If only that’s what I got. Here’s what Linda said when she saw “my lichen”:
Laser Photos Reveal Hidden Volcano, Pits of Mystery
Canby farm field. Aerial photo courtesy DOGAMI.
I have to admit I was thoroughly underwhelmed when geologist Ian Madin sent us to Haines Road near Canby. He said he’d found a previously undetected volcano. A perfect cone sat in a farmer’s field. When we got there, all we found was rolling “hills” in a Christmas tree farm. Just not impressive.
Hidden Volcano near Canby
But Ian’s photo showed something far more intriguing. He’s the Chief Scientist at Oregon’s Department of Geology and Mineral Industries and he’s spending a lot of time with the most sophisticated imaging available. LIDAR uses lasers to map the land in stunning detail.
Using LIDAR, geologists can digitally remove every tree, bush and building to see the exact shape of the land underneath. A regular aerial photo shows just a farm field. LIDAR reveals a hidden volcano.
Pits of Mystery near Corvallis. LIDAR Courtesy DOGAMI.
Every more peculiar, Madin has spotted dozens of strange circles. Not crop circles. These are soil circles. The jury is still out what’s leaving these large circular depressions throughout the Willamette Valley. (But they’re never found in Washington County in the Tualatin basin. Odd.)
Just as before, we showed up in person and found a field with hollows that surely fill with water in the rainy season. They’re nothing to write home about until you realize there are nearly two dozen on this one farm and they’re all circular. Watch our story on Oregon Field Guide, Thursday, Feb. 10.
How Unusual was January’s Sandy River Flood?
On January 16 2011, the Sandy River flexed some muscle. Between that Saturday and Sunday night, over 9 inches of rain fell on Timberline Lodge. This decimated the snow pack at the headwaters, and caused a flood. As the Sandy rose it devoured its banks, gobbled up trees, and took a chunk out of the Lolo Pass Road, until it finally crested at 22 feet, nearly 4 feet over its banks. Twenty-six riverside homes took a hit. Residents had to evacuate, and 350 people were stranded without electricity. The total damages for Clackamas County came to $4.1 million.
This stunning video shot by Tyler Malay and Alexandra Erickson highlights the damage in action:
Once the storm cleared and the swollen river subsided, residents and county officials began picking up the mess. They needed to build a new road; Portland General Electric needed to install new power poles and wires, and they needed to put the river back in its original channel.
But we have to wonder, how often is this going to happen?
I called the National Weather Service’s Hydrologist Andy Bryant to find out. He checked the data at the Sandy River and Bull Run gauge that has been in service for 100 years. The flood of January 16 was the third highest in recorded history. Of the eleven flood events the gauge has recorded, six of them have been since 1991.
“The Sandy River is an unusual river for Northwest Oregon because of the amount of sediment and alluvial material in the flood plain,” Andy says. “It’s a much more unstable river channel when compared with the Clackamas River, for example.” Lewis and Clark caught onto this at first sight, and that’s why they named it the Sandy. All the dirt and rocks carried by the current makes it a powerfully erosive river. Some call it hungry.
When hydrologists studied the river’s response to the removal of the Marmot dam in 2008, which is downstream of the flood damage, they were surprised. The river consumed 95 years of sediment without a problem. Unfortunately, the Sandy acts the same towards homes along its banks.
Like so many mountain rivers, the Sandy is deceptively dangerous. The wildness that draws us to live along the river’s edge is the same wildness that destroys our homes and roads. “This is just what the Sandy River does,” hydrologist Andy Bryant says, “If the flows exceed channel capacity, then a lot of infrastructure will be in harms way.”
Sauvie Island: For the Birds
Sauvie Island is one of Oregon’s best places for birding, and it’s right in Portland’s backyard!
Wooden platforms provide excellent birding vantages
Over 150,000 geese, ducks, cranes, swans, and songbirds over-winter on this island smack dab in the middle of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers, and right now is the perfect time and place to learn your birds.
They come from Alaska, Mexico, and the Northern Rockies on the migratory route biologists call the Pacific Flyway. Once settled, there’s no shortage of forage. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife manages a 12,000-acre wildlife refuge that includes fields of millet and corn, ponds and wetlands. It’s a waterfowl paradise, making it extremely popular with duck hunters. ODFW manages it from early fall until January 29th almost exclusively for hunting. When the shotgun blasts subside, however, the refuge is accessible to that strange breed that we call ‘birders’.
If you’re interested, arm yourself with binoculars and a field guide. Head out for the afternoon or weekend. You’ll need to purchase a parking pass at the General Store on the island. It’s $7 for the day, and $22 for the year. Scan the map to find out where to comb the beaches or which path to walk. The best birding spot is around Sturgeon Lake in the waterfowl refuge. You’ll see Canadian geese, sandhill cranes, blue herons, bald eagles, and songbirds. At times, the birdsong is uproarious. If you could discern them, just imagine all the accents! South American, Mexican, Arctic – Sauvie Island is a congregation of the Western birds of the Americas. Even in the worst weather, you can witness this diversity in style and comfort. There are wooden platforms with roofs that have terrific vantages of the refuge.
If you want to learn new birds from the experts, guided tours can help get you started. The Raptor Road Trip on February 5th hosted by the Audubon Society of Portland will be a great opportunity to learn more about the birds on this unique island.
New Evidence: Disease Jumps From Domestic to Wild Sheep
This is tricky. Someone in a crowd carries a germ. Then someone else gets sick. Then another one comes down ill. The disease is so severe, many germ recipients die. But the carrier remains healthy the entire time.
How do you prove, absolutely prove, that the single individual fatal germ came from the carrier in the first place?
That’s been the elusive puzzle for wildlife biologists. For a decade they’ve suspected that domestic sheep carry a pathogen they’re immune to but which is fatal when it jumps to wild bighorns. Two years ago this month we watched a wild bighorn coughing uncontrollably as fluid filled its lungs. Biologists said it would undoubtedly die from pneumonia.
The domestic sheep industry has been fighting this assumption. If it’s true, then sheep ranchers could be barred from even more public grazing land where wild bighorns are known to live. (Watch our previous story here.)
Now researchers at Washington State University-Pullman say their study published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases “unequivocally demonstrates transmission” from domestic to bighorn sheep.
We wanted to know what the Idaho Wool Growers Association would think about that but we received no reply to multiple phone and email messages. Update: See response received 1/25/11 below. Earlier, sheep rancher and association Director Frank Shirts told Reuters, “It’s a bunch of baloney. It’s a shame what’s going on here. They’re going to put the Western sheep industry out of business.”
Using advance microbiological genetic tagging, the scientists took an organism common in the throats of domestic sheep and implanted in it a green fluorescent protein. Then they put the organism back in the four domestic sheep where it started.
For one month, those four domestic sheep were kept in a pen 30 feet away from a pen with four wild bighorns. None of the sheep got sick.
For the following two months, the pens were moved side by side. The sheep could sniff each other. They touched noses. The scientists report that the bright green fluorescent gene then showed up in 3 of the 4 the wild bighorns and 1 developed pneumonia. That nose-to-nose, mucus-to-mucus contact was all it took to transmit the disease.
After 2 months of being kept apart only by a fence, the sheep then were allowed to mingle all together. Within 2 days, one bighorn had died. Within 5 days, two more bighorns were dead. By day 9, all 4 bighorns had died of pneumonia. All of them had that pathogen tagged in bright green. It could only come from one place: the only 4 domestic sheep in the world carrying that disease.
Dr. Subramaniam Srikmaran calls this a “smoking gun study,” which he says proves conclusively that a germ that does not sicken domestic sheep jumps to wild sheep and kills them. “I am not that happy about this finding. Some people’s livelihood depends on domestic sheep,” he told me. But the “organisms did not exist anywhere else. They could only come from one place, the domestic sheep.”
Update 1/25: Professor Marie Bulgin with the University of Idaho Caine Veterinary School contacted us on behalf of the Idaho Wool Growers Association. She praised the latest study as the most sophisticated and most carefully performed study on the subject. ”We knew when you put bighorns and domestic sheep together that bighorns died,” she said. But she still doubts the same thing happens outside of controlled pens. Said Bulgin, “It still doesn’t tell us what we need and that’s how much of this happens out on the range.” She notes the deaths all happened only when the wild and domestic sheep had close physical contact, something she does not believe happens in the wild, even when domestic sheep are grazed on public lands.
Dr. Srikmaran says his study could not be replicated on the open range because he used genetic modification in the sheep, which the government would not allow to be released into the wild.
The Field Journal brings you notes and stories from the environmental beat in Oregon and the Northwest.
