On a day where an armed militia, with tens of thousands of rounds of live ammunition, who destroyed a community, vandalized Indian artifacts, interfered with wildlife management, and cost taxpayers millions of dollars, is declared not guilty of conspiracy and firearm charges, I need to flee. Here is where I go……..

Did you know that the largest island in the Columbia river, a piece of land the size of Manhattan, lies 10 miles north of Portland? Yep, you do: you know it as Sauvies Island, bordered by the Columbia river, the Multnomah channel and the Willamette. It is an easily accessible paradise for bird watchers, bike riders, nude bathers, kayakers and the rest of humanity that wants to hike extensive loops, admire the smallest light tower in OR, or go for u-pick bounty from spring to fall.

It was, however, no longer paradise for the Multnomah Indians after they greeted the George Vancouver expedition in 1792 only to be wiped out subsequently by small pox, syphilis, measles and tuberculosis. The island was originally called Wapato Island after a potato-like plant that grew there in abundance. The name was changed to Sauvies after an employee of the Hudson Bay Company, Laurent Sauvé, started to operate the first dairies on the island in 1836.

It is still rural today, with a few large and many smaller farms working the land; large portions of the island are closed off during many month of the year to guarantee safety for thousands of migrating and/or nesting birds. Hunting is part of life on the island, as is training of hunting dogs. Again, partial closures enable these sports and keep he rest of us safe. You need to have daily or annual permits to park anywhere, which is money going into preservation of the island, well spent.

Here is what the NYT had to say: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/21/travel/an-island-world-next-door-to-a-city.html almost 20 years ago. Not much has changed other than a new bridge.

The land is flat, rich, crisscrossed with lakes and small streams, a haven for large stands of oaks, that are slowly dying from diseases we don’t know how to treat.  The sky is low, and ever changing, just like the skies back in Holland. Two tiny convenient stores, a few farm stands and no gas station make life only possible for those who plan and organize and don’t forget half of what they meant to buy every time they visit a grocery store…    

Let’s move on from mountains, desert, and the Gorge to the Pacific Coast. Today’s photographs cover a range of places that I frequently go to: hiking at Ecola, hanging out at Manzanita, admiring the authenticity of Newport, still a working class town despite the seasonal tourism, visiting Lightbox Photographic Gallery in Astoria, and climbing down strawberry hill to find the seals. And, of course, Gearhardt for the elk herds that can be frequently found roaming the dunes.       Or not.

The coast is a jewel and offers astonishing variety depending on where you land. It is also under siege from climate change and reckless development. If you are interested in more information look at this book:

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/3914974         

Paul Komar’s The Pacific Northwest Coast: Living with the Shores of Oregon and Washington teaches everything about natural hazards, coastal management, and coastal geomorphology.  It was published in 1998, and became a prescient, instant classic.

We moved from New York City to Portland in 1986. 30 years later I still cannot wrap my mind around the diversity of our environment and the luck that brought us here. We had one week to decide if we would come here, given a job offer from Reed College. I had never seen the West coast, had no prospects here, and come from Germany to the US only five years earlier. Was I ready for yet another big move? Exhausted from discussing the pro’s and con’s we went to a small movie house in Brooklyn, buying tickets for whatever played that evening to distract ourselves. It was Short Circuit, an inane movie about a robot coming alive. But the scenery was gorgeous, and when the credits rolled we learned it was filmed at he OR and WA coast.  That sealed the deal – we took it as a sign and committed to the move.  I have never looked back.

Between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams lie 108,096 acres of Goat Rocks Wilderness, a portion of the volcanic Cascade Mountain Range. The Goat Rocks are remnants of a large volcano, extinct for some two million years. You find snow there up until July, meadows of wildflowers, small lakes and pools filled with glacier water in all shades of green, turquoise and blue.

Crisscrossed by numerous trails and the PCT, it is heaven for those who are fond of marmots, picas and goats, not necessarily in that order. Volunteers maintain the Pacific Crest Trail. 

You can camp there in the wilderness as long as you observe fire bans, and you can thank your prescience that you invested in stocks of band aid companies, since you will need a million bandaids for all the blisters from steep climbs on uneven trails. Man, is it worth it when you reach the top and see the blessed land.                

The goat rock area is located within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, named after an extraordinary individual, really the father of the conservationist movement. Think rich East coast kid, Yale-educated, interested in forestry in the 1880s. Since that field does not exist in the US he goes to Nancy, France to study it and then comes back here to found the Forest Service under Roosevelt’s protection. The link below describes his life and accomplishments.

http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/People/Pinchot/Pinchot.aspx

Here is a quote from him:”

“When I came home not a single acre of Government, state, or private timberland was under systematic forest management anywhere on the most richly timbered of all continents….When the Gay Nineties began, the common word for our forests was “inexhaustible.” To waste timber was a virtue and not a crime. There would always be plenty of timber….The lumbermen…regarded forest devastation as normal and second growth as a delusion of fools….And as for sustained yield, no such idea had ever entered their heads. The few friends the forest had were spoken of, when they were spoken of at all, as impractical theorists, fanatics, or “denudatics,” more or less touched in the head. What talk there was about forest protection was no more to the average American that the buzzing of a mosquito, and just about as irritating.”

(From Breaking New Ground, Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998, page 27.)

Individual people can make a huge difference, we should not forget that. That is true for Pinchot’s wife, Cornelia, as well, who was an ardent feminist and radicalized her husband in the 1920s. Yeah for those nasty women!

I never thought I would see the words Ronald Reagan and rebel in the same sentence. But he declared himself a rebel, in an August 1980 campaign speech in Salt Lake City, telling the crowd, “I happen to be one who cheers and supports the Sagebrush Rebellion.” The National Wilderness Preservation System, opposed by the Reagan administration and a loose coalition of sagebrush “rebels,” grew out of recommendations of a Kennedy-administration Presidential Commission, the Outdoor Recreational Resources Review Commission (ORRRC)chaired by Laurence S. Rockefeller. The goal was legislation to protect recreational resources in a “national system of wild and scenic rivers,” a national wilderness system, a national trails system, the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, and recreation areas administered by then-existing public lands agencies beyond National Parks and National Monuments.

The whole issue of public land use and federal vs. state legislation is complicated. The “sagebrush rebellion” was a concerted effort to make land available for resource extraction, private use, grazing and water exploits, rather than protection. A truly interesting history, friendly to environmental concerns, can be found here:

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32199

James Morton Turner’s book The promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 analyzes the state of affairs ( it was published in 2012) but also has almost lyrical descriptions of the landscapes under siege, capturing the beauty that is out there.

I think I have said it before, but the rolling hills of the Eastern end of the Gorge always remind me of gigantic, alien sea lion backs. The sky over them changes hourly, and if there is wind there are so many sounds that you usually don’t hear, as if the sagebrush comes to life and whispers. A ravishing landscape during all seasons.

When you cross the bridge from Hood River into Washington State and take a right on Hwy 14 you will eventually come to the Old Highway 8 that veers off to the left. A few miles further you have a choice: take a delightful little stroll on paved paths – Catherine Creek – overlooking the Columbia river.

Here is the river at different times of day: 

Or get ready for a serious hike up Coyote Wall, through a constantly changing landscape, flat boulders, Aspens stands, pine forests, the occasional remnant of structures for collecting and branding cattle.

Steep, slippery, with chances of rattlesnakes in the summer and chances of being shot in the fall…. it’s all worth it to get a sense of the might of the river snaking through the Gorge.

No kidding, by the way, about the “being shot” part – it was typical for me to read the warning sign about wearing orange vests to be visible in deer hunting season AFTER I returned to the car. Never thought that public hiking paths could fall within hunting grounds. No harm, no foul, I guess. I do admit, though, that it is not particularly wise to hike there alone. I will keep that in mind, and a SPOT locator in my pocket that can call 911 from anywhere with satellite GPS. Floppy ears might not be so lucky….

In the late spring a profusion of wildflowers can be found in these places (and many others in the Gorge.) So today’s book recommendation offers a variety of sources to get you hooked on some serious beauty in our region. The compilation was done by the native plants society/WA chapter.

http://www.cbwnps.org/books/

In my elementary school there were 4 grades to a classroom. Often when the teacher needed a break from the chaos he declared it was time for Heimatkunde – local history and geography – a subject that allowed him to entrust the first grade to some aide, and take the rest of us for a walk.  We would visit the old water tower, left over from Roman occupation, or the poplar-lined roads, planted for shade by the occupying French, or a windmill from the time the Dutch governed the region. We were then asked if we had already visited these sites on the practically obligatory Sunday afternoon family stroll, and all but one said yes.

“I take it, young Friderike, your family does not like to walk in the countryside?””No Sir, it’s just that my father has no legs.” “This time, Missie, you are going to far even for someone known to have a rich fantasy life – I will inform your parents.” Inform he did, only to walk away with tail between his legs, since I had spoken the truth. To this day I do not understand why he, a veteran himself, so shortly after the war, did not put the pieces together.

In any case, I have made up for the missing walks ever since, and will document some of the most delightful places in the Pacific Northwest this week.

We begin with the Klickitat river, which flows into the Columbia at Lyle, WA. There is a 9 mile trail following the stream, with beautiful vistas, and enough width to allow you to avoid the rampant poison ivy on each side. Native Americans have restored the salmon population, and when I hiked there some government agency was trying to get cables with antennas across the river to help count the fish. I saw salmon fishing with nets – it requires unbelievable strength and agility to hoist those huge fish out of the water, on platforms or the rocks; the law now requires safety lines for the fishermen, since too many lost their lives on the slippery granite. And here is the perfect book to learn tribal history from:http://pharoseditions.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Naked-Against-the-Rain-Front-Cover.jpg

The fall color was beautiful,the moon visible and for a few short hours one could forget about the election.

We have seen the damage inflicted by torrents of water in the wake of hurricanes, both from above filling rivers as well as through breaking levees. Whether Hurricane Katrina or Irene or Sandy, now Matthew, the surging waters create far more damage than the winds themselves. Hurricanes, however, are isolated incidents, even if there frequency and their intensity seems to be on the rise. What about the day-to-day changes of water levels that we’ll see in the course of climate change?

I recommend a link to a piece about what rising water will do to populations, written in 2014, and long enough that I don’t expect anyone to read it fully. Here ist the upshot: if the predictions about climate change hold (and since 2014 they have been even more dire) 50 million Bangladeshis will have to flee their country by the year 2050. Think of how Europe, for example, has drifted into a xenophobic nationalism with a mere million refugees coming ashore last year.  The psychological fortress that is forming in so many people’s heads might well be constructed in the real world in the form of fortified borders. The Brexit was just the first step into such a direction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/world/asia/facing-rising-seas-bangladesh-confronts-the-consequences-of-climate-change.html

50 million – from just ONE country. I cannot begin to think of all the low lying areas in the world that will be equally drowned, forcing migrations that are larger than anything mankind has seen, even during the worst of wars.

As Paul Krugman wrote in last weeks. NYT:

It’s time to end the blackout on climate change as an issue. It needs to be front and center — and questions must be accompanied by real-time fact-checking, not relegated to the limbo of he-said-she-said, because this is one of the issues where the truth often gets lost in a blizzard of lies.

There is, quite simply, no other issue this important, and letting it slide would be almost criminally irresponsible.
Do we want more headlines like this? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/10/10/thousands-of-people-are-stranded-in-north-carolina-city-as-flood-waters-rise/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow-nonsub&wpmm=1

We’ve had the first taste of real rain yesterday. The photo above attests to it – a watery veil in front of my lens. This week, then, I will focus on water, too much and too little of it, the fight over it, the need to conserve. And before you roll your eyes over the fact that there is depressing politics again associated with a topic, I’ll cheer you up with someone who’ll brighten your Monday.

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/10/benedict-cumberbatch-magic-trick-video

And if that didn’t work, you can always dream yourself into a Caribbean free of hurricanes….