Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Pacific Northwest September Travelog #12
Stevenson, WA - Mon, 5 Sep 2022, 9am

The other day I asked, "What's in a name?" as I wrote about Gifford Pinchot and the local political candidate whose slogan is Stinky 4 PUD. This morning brought another "Names that make you go huh" moments, though for the opposite reason. We drove across The Bridge of the Gods.

With a name like that you wonder how magnificent this bridge is going to be. Will the surface be an undulating rainbow like in the Thor movies? Will it be gilt in gold and gems? Will it at least be... holy?



Well, the only thing holey about this bridge is the metal grille of its road deck. It's a fairly standard steel truss/cantilever bridge. Built originally in 1926, it was rebuilt higher and wider in 1938 after the construction of the Bonneville Dam a bit downriver.

So, how does such a standard (if slightly old for US highways) bridge get such a legendary name? The name comes from Native American history. When a huge landslide occurred hundreds of years ago it dammed the Columbia River for a time, creating a land bridge across. Much of the land from the landslide is still visible in the area, especially on the Washington side. Modern scientific methods estimate the date of the landslide at between 900-1000 years ago and the size of the lake created behind it 150 miles long before the force of the water broke the debris open.

What do you do after an awesome day-hike like our trek to Ruby Lake? Well, what we did was enjoy a nice dinner and relax in our hotel room that night. The next morning we enjoyed a soak in the hot tub (we were too tired to do it the night before!) then packed our bags, checked out of the hotel, and set out with plans for more hiking!

We trucked back north from Mammoth Lakes, on the route toward home, but stopped after 30 miles at Mono Lake. We'd been to Mono Lake before— including as recently as two days earlier, when we hiked volcanic crevices at Black Point. This time we went around to another lesser-known area around the lake, Navy Beach. Like our trip to the Crowley Lake Columns, this visit was inspired by photography we saw at the Art & Wine Festival.



Mono Lake is well known for its tufa formations. The tufa are erratic towers of limestone (journal link with pictures) formed by the interaction of calcium-rich natural springs with the carbonate-rich alkaline waters of Mono Lake, exposed gradually as the lake's surface has receded. We've visited the main tufa area three or four times over the years. In that photography exhibit at the Art & Wine Festival we learned that at Navy Beach there are tufa formations that look weirdly different. I mean, all tufa are weird looking; but these are differently weird. They look kind of like petrified tree trunks!

Despite their appearance at first glance these stumpy towers are not petrified wood. They are limestone and sand. If you look closely you'll see their fluted structure. That's where fresh spring water from the lake bed bubbled up toward the surface. As it rose it developed many fine, thin layers of limestone (calcium carbonate) as disparate elements reacted and combined.

In the 20th century the waters of Mono Lake receded— not a natural phenomenon but a totally man-made one, as pumping to deliver water to thirsty Los Angeles reduced Mono Lake (and other water bodies in the Owens Valley) to a fraction of their original size. The water's edge moving 100+ meters in from where it used to be exposed previously underwater formations such as these. These also were crusted with fine sand from the lake bed, but once exposed the sand was blown away by wind, further exposing the structures visible today.

After finishing up with our hike at Silver Falls we drove west, further into Mt. Rainier National Park. Our next stop was Box Canyon. It was partly because we were trying to locate the elusive Cougar Falls; reaching Box Canyon meant we'd gone slightly too far. But it was also because Dat Mountain, Tho'!



There are so many great views of Rainier. It dominates the skyline not just here in the park but even 80-100 miles away in Seattle. Its peak is at 14,410' elevation, and most of what surrounds it is lower than 4,000', so it's in the view from pretty much everywhere around.

While at Box Canyon we decided to walk the paved nature trail, enjoying views of Mt. Rainier and reading signs about Box Canyon.



Box Canyon is an interesting canyon-within-a-canyon. Up above, where we're standing, is a broad canyon carved by Cowlitz Glacier. The lower end of it is just 3 miles away. Beneath our feet is a different canyon, Box Canyon. is narrow and deep— 180' deep where this bridge crosses it, and only 13' wide at the bottom. Box Canyon formed from a crack in the bedrock. Water flows rushes through it from melting Cowlitz Glacier. But because the rock is very hard the water has carved a very narrow channel.

Colorado Travelog #28
Montrose, CO - Thursday, 7 Jul 2022, 12:15pm

Today we're visiting Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. It's a small park in remote western Colorado. We were here one time before, several years ago, but it was gloomy and drizzly that day. Today there's plenty of clear weather on tap here, so it's worth a return trip.

First we stopped at the visitors center around 9:30 and walked out to Gunnison Point. Here you get a sense of what Black Canyon of the Gunnison is about. It is a narrow, deep gorge; the steepest, deepest, narrowest gorge in North America. It's up to 2,250' (685 m) deep and, at some points, only tens of meters wide. The Grand Canyon is deeper, more than twice as deep at points, but it's also thousands of meters wide.



One thing you see in the above picture, BTW, is that the left (north) side of the canyon is much steeper than the right (south). This is a consequence of being in the northern hemisphere. In the winter, when the area receives most of its precipitation, the southern rim (facing north) is shaded by the low angle of the sun, while the northern rim (facing south) is exposed. The southern rim thus experiences a lot more ice formation, and the ice thawing and re-freezing breaks up the rocks. The sunnier, exposed northern rim gets very little ice thus much less erosion.

Our method this morning at the park has been mostly car touring. There are numerous short trails atop the cliffs. Every half mile or so there's another small pull-out on the side of the road with a trail of a few hundred meters. The only hiking alternative to skirting the top of the cliffs is to venture down into the gorge.... There are several marked trails for that, but they are incredibly steep and strenuous, entailing a near-vertical descent of 2,000' elevation and then a return of the same. That's way more than we're in shape for, so we're hopping out for multiple cliff-top trails.



I'm not sharing pictures of all the places we hopped out for short hikes. There are too many of them, and the pictures start to blur together after a while. I chose the second picture above because it's unique. This is Painted Wall. This is the deepest part of the canyon; that one rock face, with the light striations on it, is 2,250' tall. The main part of the wall is gneiss, a metamorphic rock formed upwards of 2 billion years ago. The striations are a much younger volcanic intrusion. They are mostly quartz (the 2nd most common mineral in the earth's crust) with some feldspar (the most common mineral in the earth's crust) and mica.

Again, in this picture you can see the steepness of the canyon. The scale may be hard to tell... that greenery that looks like bushes are full grown trees. In person standing atop cliffs like this and looking down is dizzying. The mind struggles to comprehend the sheer scale of what's below the feet.



The third and final picture I'm sharing here is Tomichi Point. Here again you can see the depth and steepness of the canyon, but also the presence of some of the side canyons. This is the most popular spot for descending to the river at the bottom of the canyon. By going down the side canyon it's only a 60° slope!

Colorado Travelog #8
Rifle Falls State Park, CO - Sunday, 3 Jul 2022, 10:30am

Day 2 of our Colorado Road Trip has gotten off to a beautiful start. We slept in a bit, then after jettisoning our excess baggage (literally) we had a pleasant 45 minute drive, mostly on country roads, to Rifle Falls State Park. The sun has been shining nicely, and the park was just starting to get crowded. Meaning, we got one of the last parking spaces near the trailhead.

Rifle Falls is a small park. You can see all the best parts with less than a mile of walking. But boy, does it pack a punch.



The highlight is the triple waterfall on Rifle Creek. The stream splits just slight above the falls and pours over these three chutes.



Various short paths lead to different vantage points for viewing the falls. In the photo above I've taken a path around to the left from the bottom and climbed up old debris below the cliff.

In these photos you can see there are hollows and caves in the cliffs. That's because the stone is very soft. It's limestone (calcium carbonate). It erodes easily from wind and rain.

Often erosion is also the story of how waterfalls form. Here, though, the falls seem to have formed from the opposite of erosion. The cliff was built up by calcium carbonate deposits from the water. Over time the cliff got taller and taller from deposits and dammed up the stream into a lake above.



Unique geology aside, Rifle Falls is a fun place to visit. The cliff is riddled with limestone caves, most of them small but a few quite big. There's even one that goes behind the largest falls.

High Desert Weekend Trip-log #11
Red Rock Canyon State Park - Sun, 27 Mar, 2002. 1:30pm

After driving around near the falcon cliffs in Red Rock Canyon State Park we decided to head to a spot in the park simply marked "overlook" on our hand-drawn map. The trek turned out to be both less and more than we bargained for.

It was more because the map was not drawn to scale. What looked like 3 miles on the map was more like 6 in real life. And while the disinterested park range warned us about the "rough" road near the falcon cliffs— which was rough only for glorified grocery-grabbers in 20" wheels and summer tires— the road out here was genuinely rough. Our Xterra still traversed it with ease, but only because of its high clearance in addition to 4 wheel drive.

"Less" described the overlook once we found it. Meh, I thought. But there was something fascinating right next to it: a mine entrance!



This wasn't marked on our map— our not-to-scale, hand-drawn map offered by a disinterested ranger who doesn't even know the true condition of the roads in her park— but I found out elsenet it's the Old Dutch Cleanser Mine.

The deserts of California are studded with old mines. Many of them were gold and silver mining claims than never paid out. But many are for softer minerals peculiar to the desert geology, like talc, gypsum, boron, and— here— white pumice. White pumice is the gentle abrasive in old for Old Dutch Cleanser was mined here until the 1940s.



he mine shafts descend at roughly 30° angles and they are deep. Our (small) lights couldn't penetrate to the ends, or even bends, in the descending shafts. And no echo was returned. And coldness radiated up from the shafts. These mines that were used for decades were suddenly abandoned almost 75 years ago. It was kind of spooky.



The walls and floors of the mind are still covered with a soft, white mineral. At first I thought it was talc, then gypsum. But no, it's white pumice.

Elsenet there are videos of people exploring the mine deeply. We did no more than scratch the surface because we didn't have the right equipment with us— particularly helmets and stronger lights.

I already wrote a bit about our visit to Devil's Slide on Saturday. Here's more detail— with pictures— about our hike, the old Highway 1, and why traffic now flows through a tunnel.

California's Highway 1, called in some places the Pacific Coast Highway, was an ambitious public engineering feat completed in the 1930s. It traversed rugged terrain to connect cities and towns on the coast. It was not only utilitarian but jaw-droppingly beautiful. Highway 1 is widely cited as one of the top scenic drives in the US.



Devil's Slide, about 10 miles of San Francisco, is one of many stretches of Highway 1 where the road hugs the coastal mountainside. From the shoulder of the road it's 200' or more down to the pounding surf of the Pacific Ocean below.

In this picture (above) you can see the original route of Highway 1 as it was completed in 1936. The road edges around the flank of San Pedro Mountain.

...Well, not the original route. The road was rebuilt in 1940 after a major landslide wiped out a lot of this section. Landslides happened several more times after that. My recollection from living in the SF Bay Area in the 1990s and 2000s was that every rainy season here was at least one alert on the radio, "Highway 1 is closed at Devil's Slide...." Some of these minor closures to clean up debris on the roadway. Other closures lasted days or weeks to dig out the road and shore up its foundation.

Why landslides here?



Landslides happen frequently at Devil's Slide— and hence its name— because San Pedro Mountain has a lot of sandstone as its top layers. You can see the layers of sandstone in the second picture, above. Sandstone erodes easily, so the action of waves and wind and rain eat away at it. Other mountains in the area are made of granite and don't have this weakness.

As early as the 1950s local activists advocated for rerouting Highway 1 through a tunnel under the San Pedro Mountain. This was deemed more feasible than routing over the mountain due to its steepness and environmental sensitivity. The state and county finally agreed in the 1990s, and in 2005 construction of twin tunnels, 1.2km long, began. When the tunnels opened in 2013 a 1.3 mile stretch of the old road was blocked off to vehicle traffic and made a hiking/biking trail. There are small parking lots at each end. The south end even has a bus stop.



As glorious a driving route as Highway 1 is, the Devil's Slide area is even better as a hiking/biking route.

Update: keep reading about Devil's Slide with part 2: Birds and Battlements!

Oahu travelog #18
Koko Head, HI - Mon, 27 Dec 2021, 4:30pm

After visiting the Halona Blowhole and Sandy Beach in our last-minute bonus round late this afternoon we made time for one more outdoors stop, at Lanai Lookout. Here instead of basalt cliffs there are tilted layers of eroded rock. People hop the guardrail and clamber down the cliffs.



There are great views out here.



Behind us is Koko Head, another mountain/crater kind of like Diamond Head Crater, but on a smaller scale.



The rocks down here on the lower slope are interesting. They're layered and eroded, like sandstone. But I doubt they are sandstone, given that we're standing atop a 20,000' tall volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I believe instead this is tuff, volcanic ash, that was deposited in layers.



As we headed back up the slope we saw a wedding party coming down. I captured a shot of the newlyweds with Koko Head in the background. It reminds me of the last time we were in Hawaii, 4 years ago, for a destination wedding of our friends Beth and John.

Northwest Return Travelog #14
Palouse Falls State Park, WA - Sun, 1 Aug 2021. 1pm.

I generally plan trips around "anchor" activities. I find one or two things I really want to do. They form the basis of the trip; they anchor it place. Then I plan other activities around them. Sometimes I trust that I'll find other activities once I get there. For example, we've enjoyed hking Bassi Falls in California several times. It's not a full day activity, though, so each time we go we combine it with other activities in the area. The first time we went we weren't even sure what was in the area; we merely trusted that there'd be other fun things to do there. (There were.)

For this trip Palouse Falls in remote western Washington was our first anchor. "What's it near?" we asked, looking to combine it with at least one anchor to make the long trip worthwhile. Nothing, it turns out. Then I spotted an awesome loop hike of waterfalls in Idaho— Elk Creek Falls— and figured out we could stay in Lewiston/Clarkston halfway between them. Together those anchored the trip. With a location locked in I searched for other activities nearby and quickly found the Wallowa Lake Tramway to the top of Mt. Howard as another awesome activity. Then I found an awesome (if misnamed) hike called Oregon Butte in Washington. Four awesome activities in 4 days = awesome trip.

So, what's so awesome about Palouse Falls? Let me start with 1,000 words worth in the form of a picture:



Palouse Falls drops 200 feet over a cliff into a deep canyon. It has been designated the Official State Waterfall of Washington. That's quite something considering the many amazing falls on the western side of the Cascade Mountains.

The geology of this area is interesting. Signs near the main lookout points (atop the plateau in the upper right of the picture above) explain it. First, layers of basalt rock up to thousands of feet thick were created by volcanic action. Plate tectonics pushed these layers of rock upward. During the Ice Age large glaciers formed atop these rocks. When glaciers melted or moved they unleashed massive floods. Rivers sometimes multiple miles wide carved channels across the rock. That's how the huge canyons of the Snake River, the Columbia Gorge, and others were created. That's how these relatively calm rivers flow at the bottom of absolutely massive gorges.



Palouse River isn't even that big of a river, BTW. It's no Snake River and certainly no Columbia River. In fact this gorge is a natural accident. The Palouse River used to flow to the west of here. During one of those Ice Age floods it overflowed its course and carved a new route through a fissure in the basalt. The flood carved the fissure fast enough that it became the new route. That fissure is now this canyon.

Coming back around to the topic of anchor activities... I mentioned it here not only to explain my general approach to trip planning and how I conceived this particular trip but also to set up two additional points. One point is that sometimes an activity, even an anchor activity, fizzles. Palouse Falls is kind of a fizzle today because of the combination of weather (it's cloudy all day and starting to rain now) plus heavy smoke in the air. I had hoped to get amazing pictures of the falls and maybe even hike/scramble all the way down to the bottom of the gorge. Neither are in the cards today.

The second point is that sometimes a planned activity is a total loss. Our plans to hike Oregon Butte this weekend went up in smoke. Literally. As in, there's a fire burning there right now. 😳 Because things like that happen— not just massive wildfires but even simpler things like seasonal closures, construction (which thwarted our honeymoon trip years ago!), or protected species of birds nesting (which closed off one of our anchor activities at Acadia National Park two months ago)— it's critical to be flexible with alternatives. For that it helps to have a list of runners-up. We had planned to spend today at Oregon Butte. With it being a no-go we moved up our visit to Palouse Falls to today instead of tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll visit a flower garden in Spokane before we fly home. That's one of our "runner up" activity ideas. Now it's been promoted.

Maine Week Travelog #9
Acadia National Park - Wednesday, 16 Jun 2021, 3pm.

After climbing The Beehive and visiting The Bowl we were not done with our hike for the day. Not by a long shot! From the Bowl we looped around back to the saddle below the Beehive then turned south to climb Gorham Mountain.



Here's a view of the side of the Beehive (above) from partway up Gorham Mountain. It's just partway up because at the top the view back north is blocked by trees. If you could zoom in on this image you'd see a conga line of hikers ascending the steep eastern face of the knob. You can't actually zoom in; the pic is 720px wide for bandwidth issues. But in my 26MP original I can see them when I zoom to 100%. 😅



Gorham Mountain, like the Beehive, provides views in all directions. Above is the view to the southeast, overlooking Otter Cove.

Having hiked up one side of Gorham Mtn we hiked down the other. I said we were going to make it a longer hike.



On the way down we took a slight detour to see the Cadillac Cliffs. Honestly these were underwhelming to me... because of the epic-ness of climbing the Beehive earlier in the day.

Descending all the way down the mountain we arrived back at the park road along the coast. Bad news: we were over a mile from our trailhead. Good news: There's an easy trail alongside the road packed with views of coastal cliffs and rocks.



These last two pictures (above and below) are scenes from the coast. Featuring in both of them is the classic pink-tinted granite of Acadia National Park. The color comes from one of the minerals in the granite.



These cliffs we had pooh-pooed Monday at dusk and yesterday in the foggy weather really came alive in today's sun. And speaking of alive, the cliffside trail was humming with crowds. It's a little too bad we were verging onto the just-get-home portion of our energy reserves.