Coyote Wall & the Labyrinth

Nearly everything is closed right now due to the global pandemic, and I'm holed up at home trying to make myself do things besides working and reading the endless bad news. So I'm going to try to put a dent in my endless pile of draft blog posts and unused photosets with some of this unstructured free time; it's obviously not a replacement for going outside, but it's the best available option at the moment.

So here's a photoset from last May, taken at Coyote Wall in the Columbia Gorge, on the Washington side a few miles east of White Salmon and Hood River. Coyote Wall is easily visible from Hood River & Interstate 84; it's the huge rock formation that looks kind of like a flat-topped desert mesa with sheer cliffs, but tilted maybe 20 degrees so that one end meets the river. I only recently realized the place had a name, which was around the same time I learned it has an extensive trail system that I knew nothing about. Turns out that officially there have only been trails here since 2011, when the Forest Service adopted a master plan for the area. Of course there were trails here before that, largely of the outlaw mountain bike variety, but apparently I wasn't part of the right rumor mills or whisper networks or insider cabals or whatever to have known anything about the place. Story of my life, really.

Anyway, if you go at the right time of year -- which I apparently did -- at some point while hiking endlessly uphill you'll hit the altitude where it's currently peak wildflower season. Which is truly amazing. I like to think some of the photos in the photoset approach doing it justice. To give you some idea, my original plan for the day was to do the Coyote Wall - Labyrinth Loop trail, but in reverse order to ensure I at least saw the Coyote Wall part if I decided to bail out early. Then after that I was going to cross the river and go to Rowena Plateau, a place I've repeatedly said is my favorite place in the Gorge and maybe my favorite anywhere, a strongly-held opinion dating back to 1990 or so, mumble-mumble decades ago. And I decided to punt on that whole leg of the trip and wander around here longer instead. Mostly I just wanted to stay longer here, but I had a gut feeling that doing both in the same day would lead to ranking them, and the old sentimental favorite might not win that one, and overall I'd be happier leaving them as separate and unique experiences. I am slightly embarrassed to report this, but while I was wandering around with all the sunshine and flowers there miiiight have been a brief "Sound of Music"-style twirl or two. I say "slightly" because there was no actual singing involved, just the twirl part. And furthermore, I am only telling you any of this because there's a global pandemic now, and everything's closed indefinitely, and I really miss going outside in any capacity. So yeah.

Eventually the trail brings you to a point where the steep slope levels off and the open grassy slope gives way to a mixed forest, and a few trails lead off in different directions. A lot of people turn around at this point, having gotten what they came for, and I probably would have been just fine doing that myself in retrospect, but the loop I was doing kept going, so I kept going, and the next bit was something called the "Crybaby Trail". My memory can be a little sketchy about these things, but my recollection is that this trail is slightly wider than a mountain bike tire, and it's laid out along the very edge of a cliff many hundreds of feet high, and on sunny days it attracts all of the world's snakes to come and sun themselves. Or to hide in bushes right next to the trail, for some of the more easily startled snakes. I may be exaggerating about the width of the trail, possibly. I may have mentioned once or twice that I have an occasional heights issue, or more exactly a not-having-anything-to-grab-onto-around-heights issue. Which I don't like, and I try to poke at it under controlled conditions when I can, in the hope I can get over it or at least mitigate it at some point. This hasn't worked so far, and I have to say the Crybaby Trail was my least favorite part of the adventure, but maybe next time will do the trick, whenever that turns out to be.

The Labyrinth part of the loop takes you through varied terrain to the east of Coyote Wall. Some additional open grassy areas, and sections of forest, and lots of rugged lava rocks, and at least one waterfall. I would probably have more to say about this part if a.) I hadn't just been where I'd just been (both the Julie Andrews part and the cliffside Well of Souls part), and b.) I had written this post in a reasonably timely fashion, when it was easier to remember more than a few key highlights. One key highlight I do remember from this stretch of trail was briefly glimpsing a pika, as it fled thinking I was some sort of horrible predator. I hear them all the time while hiking but I'm not sure I'd ever actually seen one before this one. So that was cool. The cute little squeak sound they make sounds exactly like a family dog's favorite rubber squeak toy when I was a kid. So when I hear pika calls I think I'll always have this mental image of a small dachshund eagerly playing fetch with a large squeaky rubber cheeseburger. Which was exactly as silly as it sounds.

In any case, it's time to wrap this thing up before the clock hits midnight, so I can keep the "at least one post per month since 2005" streak going for another 30 days. I had this idea at the beginning of April that I might have time to do more than one this month given all the working from home and avoiding all human contact and so forth. But it hasn't really worked out that way so far. I'm not sure whether that's because April 1st was just a few hours ago and there simply wasn't time, or because it was two billion years ago and I spent most of the month trying to evolve cell walls, followed by a rudimentary central nervous system. Both of these things seem equally true somehow. But I have high hopes for May. Got a shiny new vaguely-defined time period to work with, that's bound to make me incredibly productive and creative this time around. Please note how I am setting this joke up for future me as I try to finish another post with minutes to spare the evening of May 31st.

White River Falls

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Today's adventure takes us out to White River Falls, an Oregon state park about 30 miles south of The Dalles, on highway 216 between Tygh Valley and Sherars Falls. This spot is out in the middle of Oregon wheat country, with dry, rolling hills, and it's surprising to find a substantial river here, much less a huge waterfall. The name is a clue: The White River flows east off of Mt. Hood toward the Deschutes, and glacial sediment in the water sometimes gives the river a milky look.

I really didn't know anything about this place until a coworker visited early this year. He somehow managed to break an ankle on the trail down to the base of the falls. He insisted it was still worth visiting, broken ankle or no, so I figured it might be worth a look. I wasn't disappointed. It's one of the secret gems of Oregon's state park system, and I absolutely recommend it. It's totally worth the trip. Just don't break your ankle. Or if you do, be sure to have someone else drive you home instead of messing your ankle up even further. Or if you absolutely have to drive home, maybe go see a doctor right away instead of waiting a week or two and self-medicating with cheap vodka. Don't be that coworker of mine, basically.

Anyway, the state park system only acquired the falls in 1969. Before that, the site was owned by a local electric utility, and the falls were home to a small early 20th century hydroelectric plant. By 1960 the plant was considered obsolete (the article compares it to a Ford Model T), and it was taken out of service when the Dalles Dam opened. The old plant was just abandoned in place, though, and much of its infrastructure remains in place, including an old stone powerhouse with several vintage turbines inside. I'm actually saving that for a separate post, simply because I took way too many photos of both the falls and the hydroelectric ruins, and I'm fairly sure nobody would page through that large of a Flickr slideshow. I'm not sure people page through any of my slideshows to be honest, but it felt like a giant 80+ photo slideshow would be overdoing it.

The one unfortunate thing about the park is that the trail down to the river peters out part of the way down. It branches out into a bunch of use paths, and it's hard to tell which path is the right way down to the bottom, and you could easily break an ankle if you aren't careful. I had to backtrack a couple of times before I figured it out. Upgrading it to a proper trail wouldn't be that difficult or expensive, I imagine. The state may have realized that a nice paved trail to the bottom would mean more people visiting the rickety old powerhouse, and sooner or later someone would get hurt there and sue. And renovating and tourist-proofing the powerhouse looks expensive. They'd probably want to put a new roof on the building, and pick up all the sharp rusty tetanus bits lying around, and make sure there aren't any PCBs left over from the old electrical gear, and ideally turn the whole thing into some sort of interpretive center, possibly with a park ranger or at least seasonal volunteers. I think that's worth doing, but White River Falls is far away from the state's major cities and almost nobody has ever heard of it, so it's never gotten the same level of attention that a place like Silver Falls does.

Here are some assorted items about the falls, from across the interwebs:

• Some general articles about the falls, most with the same obvious "hidden gem" angle I'm going with, at OregonLive, the Salem Statesman-Journal, TheGorge.com, and Hikelandia.
• A forum thread at Portland Hikers Field Guide with lots of photos.
• A blog post about the falls by @BJDorr
• From the library's Oregonian database, an 1893 proposed railroad from Portland to White River Falls (and presumably points east), on the idea that this was the only viable route through the Cascades in Oregon. This railroad was never built. The river-level route along the Columbia existed, so I suppose they were looking for a competitor. The current rail route over the S. Cascades from Cottage Grove over to Chiloquin / Klamath Falla came later, if I'm not mistaken.
• A circa-1895 grist mill at the top of the falls, of which no obvious traces remain. It's a logical thing to do here in the middle of wheat country.
• An Oregonian piece from 1903 about an early photographer going on a wagon journey around Eastern Oregon, photographing the area's unknown and overlooked sights, while also making himself available to do portraits. His wagon was outfitted as a complete photography operation, complete with darkroom, and decorated with examples of his work. That was probably quite a sight when it rolled into a dusty ranch town. Itinerant photographers were a staple of old classic Western films, and here we have a little evidence that at least one actually existed just like in the movies.
• Historic Hood River has a vintage photo from the hydropower days, with a forest of wires connecting the hydro plant to the outside world.
• The falls merit an entry in something called the Encyclopedia of Forlorn Places, thanks to the derelict powerhouse.
• A WyEast Blog piece on the falls, concerning a rejected 2010 proposal for a new hydro project here, and a counterproposal for a major expansion and enhancement of the state park.
• Incredibly, the falls appear in a large photoset of people kayaking over waterfalls. So either it's been done at least once, or someone has excellent Photoshop skills.
• A kayak website informs us that the lower (and more kayak-able) cascade of the falls is proposed to be named "Celestial Falls". Which I guess isn't a bad name, assuming the lower cascade needs a name of its own.
• During the 1980s there was a controversy around stocking the river above the falls with hatchery salmon. Apparently the state had decided that a good way to make up for all the habitat destroyed by dams would be to introduce salmon to places they had never been before. The idea was publicly broached in a 1984 Oregonian op-ed. A 1985 study by ODFW & the US Forest Service insisted that introducing salmon was a great idea, even though it would cost millions of dollars and would likely displace native trout species upstream of the falls. 1989 saw the final agreement to begin stocking the river, and that's the last I've seen about the idea. So I don't know whether it actually went ahead or not. The obvious problem, to me, with this plan is that baby salmon would eventually follow their seagoing instincts and head downstream to certain doom at the falls. None of the articles explain how the state planned to get around that little detail.

Sherars Falls

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Today's adventure takes us to Sherars Falls on the Deschutes River, located along Highway 216 east of White River Falls and Tygh Valley. The falls are only about 15 feet high, so they look more like very serious rapids. The Deschutes upstream of here is a popular rafting river, but Sherars Falls is an impassable major obstacle. An article on the history of boating on the lower Deschutes puts it this way:

Sherars Falls will likely always be considered the grand daddy of all hazards on the Lower Deschutes. Sherars Falls is a class VI rapid and considered by most prudent people to not be navigable. However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s a few folks tried, but very few survived. Attempting to navigate Sherars Falls was then outlawed and the falls became forbidden territory for boats.

That said, here's a video from 1972, back before safety was invented, in which a bunch of guys went over the falls in a bunch of inner tubes lashed together, and somehow survived. Legal says I have to caution you not to try this, although if watching the video isn't enough of a deterrent, I'm not sure what would be.

In short, boating is not the reason there's a big parking lot and RV park here. The falls are impassable for boats going downstream, but not quite impassable for salmon headed upstream. Migrating fish stack up here while trying to make their way up the falls, so this has been a productive fishing spot since time immemorial. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and other tribes retained treaty fishing rights here, and wooden platforms for traditional dip-net fishing (video & photos: [1] [2] [3] [4]) line the riverbanks near the falls. This is similar to what was once practiced at Celilo Falls, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The tribes have owned the land around the falls outright since 1980, but continue to allow non-tribal members to fish here, so long as they comply with tribal regulations and state fishing laws. There's a lot of stuff on the net about non-tribal fishing here, which to me (as a non-fisherman) isn't that interesting, though I did bump into a fishing guide's tale about a broken boat trailer and karma at the falls.

While researching this post I also ran across a 1980 Bend Bulletin article about the tribe purchasing the falls. The purchase was mildly controversial at the time, so the article starts with references to "war whoops" and "peace pipes". Apparently it was perfectly fine to print that sort of thing in a family newspaper in 1980. A 1987 article in the same paper about traditional fishing at the falls left out the weird racist jibes. Hopefully they received a few indignant letters after the 1980 article and got a clue or two.

In addition to salmon, the falls are also a traditional fishing site for Pacific lamprey, a much less charismatic fish. Lamprey are a traditional native food that never caught on with the European-American population; a 2008 Bend Bulletin article explains that it has a strong taste, something like a cross between fish and liver, and an even stronger smell, and a very firm texture. Lamprey fishing at Sherars Falls involves a long pole with a hook at the end, which is used to pry fish off of rocks they're attached to. Due to a major population decline in the lamprey population at Sherars Falls (which is almost certainly due to dams) tribal members have taken to collecting lamprey at Willamette Falls instead. Willamette Falls lamprey supposedly has a subtly different flavor, although the man who explained this to the Bulletin didn't go on record as to which one is better.

I was curious about how long people have fished here, but I can't seem find a concrete answer to that question. You'd think there would have been an archeological dig here at some point; fishing platforms themselves would have fallen into the river eventually and wouldn't have left any evidence behind, but presumably people camped here for weeks or months at a time while fishing. Searching for academic articles isn't really my specialty, but I checked JSTOR and Google Scholar and didn't see anything relevant. It's certainly still possible there are old papers that aren't online, or which only exist in specialized databases I don't have access to. I did come across a few Oregon Historical Quarterly articles about the pioneer era and nearby Sherars Bridge, and a lot of papers about fisheries management, but nothing on archeology. A website focusing on Oregon rock art has photos of a few pictographs nearby, which is interesting, but that's about it.

(As an aside, I also ran across a few plant genetics papers about Mimulus nasutus, a small, yellow flower that grows here. Apparently the local population (located right at the falls) is genetically distinctive and has been studied extensively. See for example this study on factors that control the timing of flowering, which I won't even try to summarize. The complete genome of the closely related M. guttatus has been sequenced & released; apparently it has relatively few genes and it's only a 430Mb download, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Anyway, in lieu of having a solid archeological date, several of the previous links in this post speculate that the falls have been used by people for hundreds or even thousands of years. Thousands seems like a very safe guess to me. The standard theory on human settlement of the Americas suggests that people took a roughly coastal route down through Alaska and coastal British Columbia on their way here from the old Bering Land Bridge. Assuming that's the case, more or less their entire route went through prime salmon habitat, and it's reasonable to assume they already knew all about salmon and waterfalls well before they set eyes on Sherars Falls, and likely began fishing here shortly after arriving. It also seems reasonable to assume people first fished here around the same time as at Celilo Falls, where more extensive research has been done. Archeological work at Celilo Village has indicated the site has been continuously occupied for at least 11,000 years.

Mosier Creek Falls

A few photos of Mosier Creek Falls, in the small Columbia Gorge town of Mosier, between Hood River and The Dalles. Mosier Creek and its waterfall are in a narrow canyon on the east side of the town, with houses lining most of the canyon. The setting is unique for the Gorge, and looks more like the Bend area than parts of the Gorge further to the west.

I don't recall there being a sign for the falls specifically, but they're easy to find once you know the trick. If you're heading east on the old Gorge Highway from central Mosier, you'll pass over the historic Mosier Creek Bridge. Immediately across the bridge, on your right is the local pioneer cemetery. Look for a park bench that doubles as the cemetery sign. You want to park somewhere in this area, and then walk through the cemetery, generally following the creek/canyon upstream. Be sure to heed the warning signs about rattlesnakes. I didn't see any when I was there, but they do exist in Eastern Oregon, so better safe than sorry and all that. Before long the trail will lead you to a view of the falls from above.

The falls rush down a steep rock face but don't plummet straight down like some waterfalls do. This means it's possible to raft or kayak down the falls without necessarily crashing bow-first into rocks at the bottom and being horribly mutilated, assuming you're skilled and/or reckless enough to try such a thing. It's not something I have any personal interest in ever doing, but there are insane videos on YouTube if you're curious.

Dry Canyon Creek Bridge

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The Dry Creek Canyon Bridge spans a desert canyon on the Columbia Gorge's Rowena plateau, just southwest of the Nature Conservancy's Tom McCall Preserve. This bridge dates to 1921 and was part of the original Columbia River Highway. It's another of Oregon's many Conde McCullough bridges. He's best known for bridges along US 101 on the Oregon Coast, but as head of the state highway commission's bridge division he was responsible for bridges all over the state. A few have been featured here previously, including the Oregon City Bridge, the John McLoughlin Bridge on the Clackamas River, and the Wilson River Bridge in Tillamook. A couple of others I'm not so sure about: The OR 99W bridge on the Tualatin River, and the Oswego Creek Bridge in Lake Oswego. One problem here is that he was the state's chief bridge designer but not the only one, and other designers tended to work in the same style. A number of Columbia River Highway bridges further west in the Gorge are variations on this style even though they predate McCullough's tenure. So I think "Conde McCullough" is sometimes shorthand for anything done in the early 20th Century Oregon Highway Commission style, regardless of who actually did it. It's simpler that way, and it supports a "lone genius" theory of bridge design that a lot of people seem to find appealing. Supposedly this bridge really is his though, and its setting is a bit more dramatic than most, so if you're collecting the set you really ought to put this one on your list.

I only had this one photo of the bridge on hand, so I thought I'd do something a little different this time and create a Dry Canyon Creek Bridge gallery on Flickr. A gallery is basically a photoset of other people's photos, and there are some rather good ones of the bridge out there. On the above map you might notice a trail leading south from the Rowena viewpoint parking lot, passing close to the head of the canyon the bridge spans. This is probably where the side-facing bridge photos were taken from. It's been years since I've hiked that trail, and the last time was before I was doing this ongoing bridge project, so I unfortunately don't have any photos of my own from that location. Incidentally, I haven't seen any mention of what the canyon itself is called. If the creek is Dry Canyon Creek, it's the creek that flows in Dry Canyon. But if the canyon wasn't already called "Dry Canyon", it's the canyon that Dry Canyon Creek flows in, and thus is "Dry Canyon Creek Canyon". Also, the creek's apparently dry most of the time. Is it still a creek when it's dry? In what sense does it exist if it's dry? And if it's flowing, the canyon isn't dry, therefore the name's an oxymoron.

Anyway, there are some non-Flickr photos out there too. Bryan Dorr has a recent post up about the bridge, and Rick Scheibner historical Oregonian database, a stunning black and white photo of it. And from the library's hist May 1921 photo shows the then-new bridge with a vintage Overland car nearby.

Ginkgo Petrified Forest

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Here's a slideshow from Washington State's Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park, on the Columbia River north of Vantage, WA. The park is famous for the aforementioned petrified ginkgo trees, but I mostly stopped for the view of the river. And, well, the nearby Vantage Bridge, which I've already posted about. This bridge thing is a sickness, I tell you. I was on my way east to Moses Lake at the time and didn't have time to explore beyond the visitor's center, unfortunately. The park is over 7400 acres in size, and features a number of hiking trails. HistoryLink.org, the Washington Trails Association, and a 2008 Seattle Times article all have more info about the various hiking options, if you have more time than I did. The state's Wanapum Recreation Area, just south of the park, includes a campground and boat launch. If I was more into camping I might consider staying there at some point; this area along the Columbia strikes me as a great place to take sunrise or sunset photos, and it's not like there are any swanky hotels nearby to stay at.

For some reason, my mother has always been fascinated by ginkgo trees. Particularly the fact that they used to live in the Northwest but went extinct, but their relatives survived in Asia, and now they've been reintroduced here. That tale seems to be meaningful to her and I've never been sure why. She even tracked down a fossil ginkgo leaf and had it in a display stand on the living room coffee table for a long time. I'm afraid this fascination didn't pass along to me; the trees are attractive and they do have interesting leaves, but they can also create a disgusting mess in the fall when they start dropping their waxy vomit-scented fruit.

Technically you're supposed to pay to park at Ginkgo Petrified Forest. The visitor center was closed, though, and I couldn't figure who or how to pay. So I did this outlaw style, sort of. I did end up buying a parking permit at Sun Lakes / Dry Falls a few days later that I'm not sure I actually needed, so I guess it all balances out somehow.

Dry Falls

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Here's a slideshow from Eastern Washington's Dry Falls, where the Ice Age Missoula Floods once formed an enormous waterfall, 400 feet high and 3.5 miles wide. I discussed the unusual local geology in an earlier post about the Sun Lakes area just "downstream" of here, so I"m not going to recap that at length; this post is mostly just for oohing and aahing over the scenery. Assuming you like rugged desert scenery, and maybe you don't for some reason.

The building perched on the canyon rim in a few of the photos is the state park visitors center. I wasn't in the mood for a visitors center at the time and didn't go in, but I'm told it has some groovy 1960s-era exhibits and a gift shop. In retrospect I probably should have gone in just to chat up the park rangers. In this part of the state, most of their visitors are going to be Tea Party loons in RVs who think Dry Falls somehow proves the literal truth of Noah's Ark, & the commie pinko tofu-eating gay Satanic Soviet Mexi-Kenyan state government (represented by the poor local park rangers) is covering it up as part of an evil plot to ban freedom forever. The rangers might enjoy talking to someone a bit less hostile and more sane for a change, so feel free to go in and say hello. Unless you're one of the aforementioned loons, I mean. I don't get a lot of loons here, and they don't stay long, but every few months someone leaves a hysterical, incoherent all-caps rant, and I have to waste up to 30 seconds deleting it. So don't be That Guy, ok?

Sun Lakes

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Here's a slideshow from Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park in Eastern Washington, about 40 miles north of Moses Lake. The state parks description of the place:

Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park is a 4,027-acre camping park with 73,640 feet of freshwater shoreline at the foot of Dry Falls. Dry Falls is one of the great geological wonders of North America. Carved by Ice Age floods that long ago disappeared, the former waterfall is now a stark cliff, 400 feet high and 3.5 miles wide. In its heyday, the waterfall was four times the size of Niagara Falls. Today it overlooks a desert oasis filled with lakes and abundant wildlife.

These photos are from the park area "downstream" of Dry Falls. (There's a separate post on the way with photos from the overlook above Dry Falls.) It's hard to comprehend the sheer magnitude of the Missoula Floods, but to my non-geologist eyes the the Sun Lakes area (and similar areas around Washington's Channeled Scablands region) really do look like the result of an enormous flood, with piles of rocky debris, and deep gouges now filled by lakes. This sort of terrain is considered to be the closest terrestrial analogue to outflow channels on Mars, like the one visited by Mars Pathfinder in 1997.

The high freestanding rock formation in a few of these photos is Umatilla Rock. I ran across a blog post about it with a lot of great photos, including some from the top of the rock, at a site devoted solely to Ice Age Floods.

I should point out there's more to the park than gawking at geology. A recent Associated Press story about the area goes on about the recreation options here. Beyond the obvious hiking, boating, and fishing options, apparently there's even a 9 hole golf course somewhere in the state park. It seems like a long way to go just to play golf, if you ask me. But then, crossing the street is a long way to go just to play golf, as far as I'm concerned. The park also has mini-golf (aka fun golf), paddle boats, and even a concession selling water balloons at $2 per bucket, so you can have a water balloon fight without the hassle of filling water balloons first. That actually sounds cool.

sagebrush flowers

There are several varieties of sagebrush across the Northwest; the bush pictured here is along the Columbia River near Vantage, WA, and I think it might be Artemisia rigida, going mostly by its similarity to Google image search results. The flowers are usually more colorful than this, so these may be a bit past their prime, I think. I don't live in sagebrush country myself and it's not a subject I know all that much about. I came across an interesting blog post about sagebrush ecosystems that explains the web of species that depend on sagebrush habitat, and details various threats to this habitat, including agriculture and invasive species.

Incidentally, one of the more charismatic species that relies on sagebrush habitat is the adorable pygmy rabbit. They've come up here once before, in an early blog post from March 2006, in case you were curious about either pygmy rabbits, or early blog posts of mine. I don't really do blog posts of the "Here's a jumble of random stuff with a vague theme" variety anymore. That sort of thing tends to go to Twitter now instead. Where, quite honestly, it has a much wider audience than it would on this humblest of humble blogs here. Twitter's probably the right place for it anyway, given how ephemeral the interwebs can be. More than once I've gone back to look at an old jumble-of-knicknacks-and-whatnots post, only to realize the majority of links are now broken. And then I realize the post in question went up seven years ago (!!!) and it's not a huge surprise for a few web addresses to come and go in that amount of time. And then I realize this blog is actually pretty old in internet years. And then I feel very, very old myself. Sigh.

maryhill / stonehenge, infrared

Sam Hill Memorial Bridge

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Today's entry in the ongoing bridge project takes us way east to the Sam Hill Memorial Bridge, which carries US 97 over the Columbia River between Biggs Junction, Oregon, and Maryhill, Washington, home of the Maryhill Museum and a famous Stonehenge replica. The bridge has a Bridgehunter page, and a page about it at Columbia River Images explains the history of the bridge and the ferry it replaced.

A Bend Bulletin story about the bridge dedication gives an inkling of what a big deal it was to finally have a bridge at this location. At one point the US portion of the Alaska Highway was going to be designated part of US 97, and the Bulletin story daydreams that this would make all of 97 part of the Pan-American Highway system spanning North and South America. Which I suppose would help the regional economy, with all the through truck traffic on the lucrative Rio de Janeiro to Fairbanks route. Or something.

Grand Canyon (IV)

Grand Canyon (I)

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I assume the Grand Canyon needs no introduction. I think I'm going to spread the photos across several posts like I did with Yosemite, since a single post with 20+ photos gets to be a bit much. Enjoy!

Grand Canyon (III)

Grand Canyon (II)

spring, mojave desert

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A few photos from the John Wilkie Rest Area, on I-40 near Fenner, CA, in the middle of the Mojave Desert. These were taken in early springtime, and many of the desert plants were flowering at the time. It's hard to tell in these photos since I wasn't really equipped to take close up photos back then, but the scenery was pretty striking and I figured these were worth posting even if you can't really see the flowers very well.

At the time I took these, I didn't make a note about where I was, so that took a little detective work. I rememberd this was at a rest area along I-40 in California, east of Barstow, and it turns out there are only two of those, so I fired up Google Street View and compared scenery with my photos. So I'm pretty sure this is the Wilkie rest area and not the other one, which is just a few miles outside of Barstow. I'd stayed the night in Barstow, so I can't imagine I would have pulled off the highway to take photos so soon after hitting the road for the day.