West Coast Wonders

I have done a leisurely homeward trek over the past eight days, and have seen many fine things.  I have not been in a city with over a hundred thousand people, and have driven less than two hundred miles on the interstates.  This appears to be a tranquil wilderness forest; but it's right in the city of Bend!  Central Oregon's metropolis (population 80,000, up from 12,000 in 1960) has preserved a lot of open space as it has grown.  Bend today is a mecca for outdoor sports enthusiasts in fields including skiing, rock climbing, cycling, hiking, golfing, white water rafting, and many more.

Tumalo Falls, only about 15 miles west of downtown Bend.  A popular wilderness destination.

As at Multnomah Falls, if you hike to the top of Tumalo and then go a bit farther upstream, you find several other fine cascades.

The view from the deck of my room at the Riverhouse in Bend.  You fall asleep to the rushing sound of the Deschutes, which drowns out the traffic noise on Business 97 very nicely!  This tranquil spot is in the middle of the city, within walking distance of the forest in the first pic.   Bend has a fine network of hiking/biking/cross country skiing paths.

Had a crackling thunderstorm in Bend Sunday night, with a nice rainfall.  The next morning these mammatus clouds appeared near Sunriver.

Now I and the Lizards have advanced to Crater Lake NP.  The Lizards are inspecting the pumice field, still inhospitable to tree growth seven millennia after Mount Mazama blew its top.

Crater Lake is a power spot.  Whenever I visit...and I go almost every year...I find a place away from the road, with a view of the lake, and just chill for awhile.  I'm not the only one who does this.

Crater Lake lends itself to surreal scenes.  Here the tour boat is cutting a wake across wind blown ripples.

Phantom Ship.  Blow the pic up and you can see a tour boat.  The boat is 40 feet long...the island, appearing small, is actually 180 feet high and 500 feet long!

Cumulus congestus build over Mount Thielsen, to the north of the Lake.

This morning I explored Ashland.  I have probably driven by this city on I-5 20 times in the last 50 years without getting off the Interstate and taking a look.  So, this time I stayed overnight and investigated.  Here I'm in Lithia Park enjoying a huge Jeffrey Pine.  Jeffreys look just like Ponderosa pines, but you can tell them apart by their cones..."Gentle Jeffrey, Prickly Ponderosa".  You can hold the Jeffrey cones in your hand and grip them fairly tight...the spines point inwards.  Try that with a Ponderosa cone and you'll regret it...their spines point out...into your skin!

Ducks out for a morning swim in the upper duck pond at Lithia Park.  It's a gem...designed by John McLaren, the main sculptor of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

And on to Burney Falls, in Northern Cali.  Blow up the pic and you can clearly see that the falls get their water from two sources...a surface creek that splits at the precipice, and from underground springs!  Much of the water that goes over the falls flows below ground level, between two basalt layers, the bottom one less porous than the top, until the water reaches the cliff edge.  In fact, the water from the creek (the two largest cascades) often also flows underground until about a mile upstream from the falls, when it surfaces from subterranean chambers.  Burney Falls is most unusual!

Here the Lizards are contemplating Lassen Peak from Lake Helen, 8000 feet above sea level.  The first time I visited here, in early July 1967,  the lake was still frozen!  Now the region is in the midst of a drought and snow and ice are long gone.  How long will the drought last?  Well, the Southwestern US had a 220 year drought and another one lasting 140 years between 1000 and 1500...with a 100 year wet period in between!  Precipitation is dicey in these parts.

Wanderings in the Palouse...and points South

As an old, decadent sloat, I like to get motel rooms with water views.  Here, in the middle of the Eastern Washington desert, I present..the Best Western at Moses Lake!  Pic shot from my balcony, of course with adult beverage in hand.

Washtucna coulee, in SE Washington.  The Palouse River used to run through here, joining with the Columbia near Pasco.  The Missoula floods changed all that.

The floods diverted the Palouse south and east, so it flowed over the tableland into the Snake well upstream from modern Pasco.  Here is Palouse Falls.  Lovely.  Now imagine a roaring torrent of water flooding EVERYTHING in the picture, and bursting over the cliffs as mega rapids, something like at Dry Falls.  That was the Missoula flood scene...the floods carried more water than the flow of every modern river on earth combined.

This plaque tells the story.  Blow it up for more detail...and a look at how this site looked 15 thousand years ago...when the floodwater had started to recede!

Palouse canyon, downstream from the falls.  It only took about two thousand years for the floods to carve this canyon.  The current river has not added appreciably to it in 12 thousand years or so.  This site is of great geological significance, since it was here that J Harlan Bretz' flood theory finally won over his doubters, when they saw how the floods had gouged away the basalt. 

The plunge pool of Palouse Falls.  A legacy of the floods.  Not enlarged since.  Good sized waterfall...200 feet high.

The falls from above the top.  Notice the basalt spike in the upper left of the picture (blow pic up for best resolution).  In the previous pic you can see the basalt to the left of the top of the falls.  This was harder than normal rock that was not carried away by the floods.  Another couple of floods (there were over 50) and that rock might too have wound up downstream.

The confluence of the Palouse and the Snake.  At first, the floodwaters roared over cliffs at this spot, but over the course of a couple millennia, the basalt was eroded 10-12 miles north, to where the falls are today.

Wallula Gap, on the Columbia near the OR/WA border.  When the Missoula floods roared through here, the constriction of the terrain caused water to back up to the north of the gap.  An ancient, temporary lake, called Lake Lewis, formed on dozens of occasions.  It only lasted a few weeks at most before the floodwater drained through the gap.  At its peak, Lake Lewis extended to Yakima, close to 100 miles northwest of here.

Hat Rock is another piece of flood resistant basalt similar to that just to the left of the top of Palouse Falls.  It's now a pleasant Oregon state park.  Oregon does state parks very well...if you're traveling thru the state, stop and have a picnic at a state park...you'll enjoy it.

After another pleasant night at a nice riverfront motel in Boardman...good food too!- I continued south.  It wasn't long before I encountered these industrial raptors confronting a grain elevator near Lexington OR.

The Morrow county courthouse in Heppner OR.  The courthouse, built in 1902, survived a catastrophic flash flood in 1903 that killed 247 people, nearly a quarter of the town's population.

Geology to da max!  This is in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Eastern Oregon.  It was dicey in these parts during prehistory.  At the top of the pic are layers of basalt that erupted from the earth 61 times in about a million years ending 15 million years ago.  Each flow covered thousands of square miles with dozens or even hundreds of feet of lava.  Blow the pic up and see the layers...each layer is one flow.  The green rock in the foreground was laid down 29 million years ago when a superheated cloud of ash and gas swept into the area.  The hot material fused to form a hard rock layer.  Below and above this layer, many fossils have been found, and discoveries are ongoing.  But in the green layer, not much...most critters were incinerated during the cataclysm.

Painted Hills is another unit in the Fossil Beds NM.  The reddish layers are particularly high in iron content.

Another cool pic in the Painted Hills.  Central and Eastern Oregon are fascinating...geology and volcanology are big here, and the diversity of terrain, vegetation, and wildlife are awesome.  I love it here!

Missoula Floods '14

As a meteorologist, I'm also interested in many of the other 'ologies.  Today, class, it's geology...with the Ice Age thrown in.  The bible is, as always, David Alt's classic, "Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods".  I have the book with me and am referencing it constantly as I drive through North Central Washington.  Yes, I love nurse logs.   Another natural thing I love is glacial erratics.  Here's a nice one, a basalt stone dropped by an Ice Age glacier on the east side of the Columbia River near Lake Chelan.

For the first time I visited a little known gorge in central Washington called Moses Coulee.  When the Okanagan glacier dropped south and blocked the Columbia River about 15 thousand years ago, it dammed the river and at first diverted it into this coulee, between the current river and Grand Coulee.  Moses Coulee thus took the flow from glacial Lake Columbia for a time, and probably for several of the early Missoula floods, which sent huge walls of water through the coulee and sculpted it to its current configuration.  The talus slopes consist of chunks of basalt that have peeled off the cliffs since the end of the floods in the coulee.

The huge layers of basalt that make up the walls of Moses Coulee are products of catastrophic events themselves.  15 to 17 million years ago, much of Oregon and Washington were overrun by massive basalt flows, which deposited hundreds of feet of lava over thousands of square miles in months or a few years.  Imagine if something like that happened now...wow!  It would be massively disruptive and dangerous.

Blow up this pic for better detail.  Here the columnar basalt in Moses Coulee has been contorted by movements in the earth, and of course battered by the Ice Age floods.

Eventually the glacier that blocked the Columbia River infiltrated Moses Coulee, blocking it and diverting the Columbia yet farther east into Grand Coulee.  Jameson Lake here developed in a depression just behind the snout of the Ice Age glacier in the coulee. 

The tan colored ridge is the glacial moraine in Moses Coulee, about three miles north of US highway 2.  It's composed mostly of small rocks.  This ridge marks the farthest advance of the Ice Age glacier in the area.  Hard to envision a massive wall of ice on an 87 degree day, surrounded by sagebrush.  But it happened...only about 15 thousand years ago, which is yesterday in geologic time.

The Lizards are into geology!  After all, their fossil ancestors are found in the ancient rocks.  Here they're contemplating erratics near Dry Falls.

And here is Dry Falls, in Grand Coulee.  The falls developed when the Columbia River was blocked by glacial ice farther west, creating Glacial Lake Columbia, which rose over 500 feet above the riverbed, then flowed into Grand Coulee and thence over the falls toward the south.  Under normal conditions, the Falls were impressive enough...3 1/2 miles wide, 400 feet high, dwarfing Niagara.  But when the Missoula Floods came down, the volume of water was such that Dry Falls became a mega white water rapids!  About a class 40 on the scale of 1 to 5.  Over several thousand years the falls eroded about 20 miles of basalt from south to north, winding up here.  What a spectacle that must have been!

I saw a film at the Dry Falls visitor center, and the scientist was talking about the massive erosive power of the water from Lake Columbia and the Missoula floods, and wondering where the rocks wound up after being carved off the edge of the falls.  They wound up here, near the modern town of Soap Lake, just south of the mouth of Grand Coulee, where the floodwaters fanned out.  Of course, as they fanned out, they became shallower and moved more slowly, and the rocks they were carrying came to rest.  Blow up this pic and you can see many medium sized rocks lying in the field.  Most are basalt, and were probably moved only 30 miles or less.  The lighter colored rocks are granite, and were swept from near the site of Grand Coulee Dam down here, a good fifty miles.

Vancouver Island Excursion

I always enjoy going to Vancouver Island.  It's a mini-continent!  Packed into 12 thousand square miles are rainforests; sunny beaches; mountains; lakes; glaciers; fine cities; and wilderness.  The northern part of the island is mostly a big tree farm; the southern part has many wineries.  You can ski, surf, sail, and golf...perhaps all in the same weekend!  My friends Dick and Wilma and I took the venerable MV Coho over to Victoria from Port Angeles last week; here's a totem pole in Victoria.

Victoria is a centre for tourism, recreation, and government.   This is the British Columbia parliament building, right across the street from the harbour.

An hour north of Victoria (in good traffic), the town of Chemainus has become a tourist attraction for its murals.  There are about forty of them, painted on building walls, depicting the history and culture of the area.  Here a local woman watches the first British ship arrive at Chemainus.

The west coast of Vancouver Island is wild and remote.  It was not connected to the rest of the island by a paved road until 1972.  This shoreline shot is along the fine Wild Pacific Trail at Uclulet.  We stayed at a fine lodge, in very pleasant rooms, with decks in the forest and peeks at the sea below.  A resident bald eagle chattered above us.

Pacific Rim National Park, on the west coast, has two loop trails of just over a kilometer each.  They wind through the rainforest, mostly on boardwalks.  We climbed-and descended-about 300 stairs by walking both trails.

The moss kingdom in the rainforest.

Massive cedars grow on Vancouver Island.  This was the big kahuna on the nature trail!

We drove back to Victoria and departed on the MV Coho, leaving the city behind.

There are numerous housing options on the Victoria waterfront.  If you don't want a swish condo, maybe a houseboat?

The harbour bustles with traffic ranging from seaplanes to kayaks to yachts, as well as ferries and cruise ships.  Here a pilot boat passes a coast guard patrol craft.   Blow the pic up for better resolution.

Once back in Port Angeles, we checked into a motel on a bluff overlooking the downtown area and the strait of Juan de Fuca.  A sunbeam lit up the spit protecting the harbor.

At dusk, the trusty MV Coho lands at Port Angeles, while the Norwegian Star heads for the open sea.  The cruise ship had been in Victoria.  From our motel, we descended a 108 step staircase to downtown and had a great dinner at Bella Italia...highly recommended!  The next days brekky at FIrst Street Haven was also fine.

Back in Puyallup last Saturday, the sun set with a fine display of crepuscular rays.

Dick and I went to the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, and encountered this congenial puffin.