Rowena Plateau, June 2022 (II)

As promised in part I back in August, here are more photos from the Nature Conservancy preserve at Rowena, OR, taken back in June around the tail end of desert wildflower season. These were taken with an old Sony DSLR from Goodwill and a couple of equally old Sony/Minolta lenses, including a 50mm macro lens that I've decided I'm a huge fan of. If there's a trick to taking sorta-ok macro photos, without a tripod, on a windy day in the Gorge, I guess it would be to just take a ton of photos to boost the odds you'll get some decent ones between wind gusts. If I was actually trying to make money off this stuff it would probably help to find a really pretentious way to phrase that, maybe some mumbo-jumbo about the zen of inhabiting the still spaces inside the wind, and offer to teach people how to do that in expensive multi-day workshops. If only I could say all that with a straight face, and I was more of a people person, and also unscrupulous.

In any case, I unfortunately don't have an ID on the beetle in the first couple of photos. You can kind of make out that it has tiny hairs on its thorax that pick up pollen as it wanders around this arrowleaf balsamroot flower, sipping on nectar (or eating pollen, or whatever it's doing.) It seems reasonable to guess that some pollination happens while it goes about its business.

As the saying goes, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but a brief search came back with a few other photos on the internet of similar beetles on balsamroot flowers, so at minimum this is not a one-off occurrence: Someone's Flickr photo (taken further east on the Washington side of the Gorge), and stock photos on Getty Images and Alamy The Alamy one shows a pair of pollen-covered beetles mating on the side of a balsamroot flower, so it may not be safe for work if your boss is an especially prudish entomologist.

But I haven't seen anything in writing saying the plant is pollinated by such-and-such beetle. I did run across a 2005 study on the pollination needs of the plant. It notes that essentially no previous studies had been done on pollination for the whole balsamroot genus, but then zooms in on the habits of a couple of native bee species and never mentions beetles at all. The study was motivated by practical concerns, namely an interest in growing balsamroot seed commercially, as the plant seems to be good for habitat restoration, and both livestock and wildlife seem to think it's delicious. There are already other seed crops that rely on native bees, such as Eastern Washington's alfalfa seed industry and its dependence on alkali bees, so maybe it just seemed natural to focus on that and not the care and feeding of some weird desert beetle. And admittedly this beetle didn't seem to be in any great hurry to buzz away to the next flower, which helps if you want photos, not so much if you're an international seed conglomerate and your CEO needs a new yacht.

So we're at a dead end regarding beetles, but a Forest Service info page about the plant has a couple of other unrelated nuggets. First, it describes the flowers as "bigger than a silver dollar but smaller than a CD; about the size of a small floppy disk", which is overly wordy but gives you a strong clue as to the age of the author. Later, toward the end when it describes the plant's culinary and medicinal uses, it says cryptically that "The root could be used as a coffee substitute", without elaborating any further. A page at Eat The Planet repeats the claim, as do a lot of other search results, but nobody on the whole wide internet says whether the resulting beverage is regular or decaf. Which to me is the one key detail about anything described as a coffee substitute. No caffeine and it's just another way to make hot water taste bitter, which is not so interesting. Either way, the public deserves answers.

Rowena Plateau, June 2022 (I)

And here are some photos from a visit to the Nature Conservancy's Tom McCall Preserve at Rowena, out in the eastern Columbia Gorge on the way to The Dalles. This is another place that has showed up here from time to time over the course of this humble blog, most recently in 2017.

The (I) in the title is there because this slideshow is just phone photos, and I also have a bunch of DSLR ones from the same trip that I still need to sort through and upload. Now, a bunch of those photos aren't keepers because that's just inevitable when you bring a macro lens here on a windy day, but IIRC there were still a decent number worth sharing. I know better than to promise an exact date on when they might go up, but I'll try not to drag it out unneccessarily, if possible.

wildflowers, rowena plateau

Klickitat River Bridges, Lyle WA

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I was rifling through old Columbia Gorge photos recently and found the above one, taken from Rowena Crest in the eastern Gorge, showing a pair of bridges on the Washington side of the river. I didn't initially know anything about them, and had to consult the interwebs. The map says these are bridges over the mouth of the Klickitat River, where it flows into the Columbia just west of Lyle, WA. The nearer of the two carries the Burlington Northern rail line and dates to 1908, wile the further one carries Washington highway SR 14 and dates to 1933. Both of them look a lot like bridges along the old highway on the Oregon side, but as far as I know they weren't designed or built by the same people; the concrete deck arch was just a very popular bridge design at the time.

Just west of the river (the left side of the photo) is the trailhead for the Klickitat River Trail, a 31-mile rails-to-trails conversion that follows the river upstream, then continues into a remote side canyon. The original rail line ran all the way to Goldendale; I'm not sure if they plan to ever extend the trail that far, though. I don't know that much about the trail, to be honest, and I haven't gotten around to trying it yet. Like most things, it's on the great big todo list.

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.

Video: A look around Rowena Crest

Taken at the far end of the Tom McCall Preserve on Rowena Crest. This was taken on my Blackberry & uploaded to TwitVid while I was still there (although it took about 10 minutes, since they apparently don't have 3G out there yet). This would've been crazy blue-sky sci-fi technology back in 2007, the last time I was out there. It still feels like magic, although it's reasonably mundane magic by 2010 standards. I mean, ZOMFG, it's not even HD video, and it's certainly not 3D or anything. And it was merely recorded & uploaded, not Ustreamed live or anything. So, try as I might, I just can't seem to get with the program. On the other hand, I also Tweeted that I was uploading a video, and got a reply from the East Coast. And also picked up a couple of followbots that clued in on me saying "GPS", which apparently is a lucrative keyword. So, other than studiously avoiding Facebook, I think I have the "social media" side of things covered reasonably well.

And to think that when I started this humble blog, I didn't have a mobile phone of any kind yet, and still had dialup interwebs at home.

Oh, and in case you were wondering -- in between uploading videos, and swapping lenses on the ol' DSLR (which doesn't take video, sadly), I took a few minutes to just stop and sit and watch the river and listen to the wind in the grass and relax and unplug a little. That was while this video was uploading, btw.

double overlook

A few more photos from the eastern Columbia Gorge. First a few from the Rowena overlook, just across the street from the Tom McCall Preserve.

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And a few from the Memaloose overlook, a few miles further west.

The McCall Preserve at Rowena

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A few photos from the Nature Conservancy's Tom McCall Preserve at Rowena, out in the east end of the Columbia Gorge. This may be my favorite spot in the Gorge. It may be one of my favorite spots, period, but explaining why is difficult. I don't think I've ever convinced anyone. I could go on about the wind in the grass, sheer basalt cliffs, and so forth, but most of eastern Oregon is basically like that. There's something else I can't put my finger on. I don't mean that in a mystical mumbo-jumbo sense. It just means it's something I haven't figured out just yet. If it comes to me, I'll let you know.

So for now I'll proceed under the assumption I haven't convinced you. And really I'm not sure I want to convince too many people about the place. Present company excepted, of course. Feel free to visit, O Gentle Reader(s), but don't tell anyone else about it. They'll all show up at once and ruin the silence and desolation. They'll probably stand around with their cellphones yakking to their brokers, or whine that there's no Starbucks nearby, or drive all over everything in their gigantic SUVs, or demand guardrails for the protection of small children and large dogs. They'll ruin everything. In short, it's best to take a Tom McCall sort of attitude about the place.

So the preserve is a desert plateau high above the Columbia River, pretty much the last place you'd expect to find a wetland area. But the preserve hosts a couple of small ponds, with frogs, lilypads, trees, the whole works. You can see one of them in the top photo, right above the cliff. Here are a few closeups of one, including a couple of infrared pics.

One of the many trails around the plateau. Here's a decent page about hiking the area, although I'm not sure that's necessary. It's hard to get lost here, being mostly flat and treeless. But if you do, the plateau's surrounded by cliffs on three sides, roughly, so there's only one way on or off. In the worst case, you could just find any cliff and do a wall follower algorithm and you'll get back to the entrance eventually, probably.

When you do see people discussing the McCall Preserve, it's often about spring wildflowers. I've never actually visited when the plateau was in bloom; there were a few tiny blue ones being whipped around in the wind, but that was it. I've seen some photos, though, and I think I may have to go check the place out in April or so. A few good wildflower galleries can be found here, here, and here.

Looking southwest, with the tip of Mt. Hood in the distance.

The road past the preserve is an eastern bit of the old Gorge Highway, and it crosses over a narrow part of the Rowena Dell on another of those great, photogenic bridges they built back then. I don't want to sound like one of those old coots who insist everything was better back in the Good Old Days, because that would be stupid. I'm sure modern bridges are built to a high standard of technical excellence and so forth. They just aren't as photogenic, generally speaking.