I sat at the edge of the road, high above Lookout Creek, where the roadway/stream-slope are reinforced with rock, and the water is funneled through a culvert, under the road. This is the Watershed 3 Gauging Station (measuring water/sediment etc. coming out of the WS3 drainage area). WS3 was clear-cut in the 1960s, just prior to the 1964 flood. This section suffered a lot of damage again in the flood of 1996. Note that the brown/ocher mosses on the “gentle banks” surrounding the water are actually growing on cement, used to “reinforce” the soil around this erosion-prone location. The horsetails are growing from moist soil at the edge of the cement.
Note: someone on Flickr just asked about the plant in the right-hand photo. My amateur understanding was that it was “horsetail” (aka snakegrass in the Midwest). I’ve always liked it because it is considered a “living fossil” —- really ancient, and frequently depicted in illustrations of dinosaurs. I though that was terrific, when I was a kid: seeing a recognizable plant drawn next to a fantabulous dinosaur.
Looking it up, I believe the local name is “Braun’s Scouring-Rush” (Equisetum laevigatum). This is an annual member of the horsetail family found in Oregon, partial to disturbed ground and ditches, and notable for the prominent “spore-producing cone” on the tip. Here’s the link for more information about this ancient plant:
High on FR 1508, as I drove up to see Wolf Rock, I noticed this charming miniature riparian zone: flowing water alongside the forest road — (snow) meltwater trickling down through a lush carpet of moss and spring flowers. Pixar or Disney couldn’t make anything more magical!
After a long (unpredictable! windy! beautiful!) road trip from Upper Michigan, I arrived at the Andrews Experimental Forest in the Willamette National Forest late Friday afternoon —- just in time to check in, and catch part of a talk by researcher Fred Swanson, who was addressing an inaugural gathering of geomorphologists, who are calling themselves the Bretz Club, in honor of J. Harlen Bretz.
Fred Swanson gave me a whirlwind tour of the Andrews admin building, and we walked out to a “gravel bar” site in Lookout Creek, where geologist Gordon Grant was speaking to the assembled geomorphologists. From there, we drove out into the forest a bit, so he could show me a log decomposition study site, one of the “Reflection Sites” that the writers are asked to respond to. Since I’m new to this pacific-northwest-cool-wet-old-growth-rainforest environment, every detail of the forest scene is new, and staggering. I’m sure I’m missing 90% of it, looking everywhere at once, unfocused.
Evidence of experiments (flagged markers, white plastic buckets and funnels) are scattered like a bit of seaside flotsam, hardly noticeable amid the grand old trees. A few plastic buckets jut out of downed logs in various stages of decomposition, everything lichenous and moss-cushioned from ground to canopy.
I was given a topo map of Andrews, and marked directions to several other study sites including a clear-cut plot and the “Blue River face timber sale” (which is another reflection site). My plan for today (Sunday) will be to explore the Andrews further.
Yesterday (Saturday) was my “establishing context” day: a crash course in the surrounding GEOMORPHOLOGY.
After a serene night sleeping under great trees, with the sound of Lookout Creek sluicing over rocks below, I joined the Bretz Club gathering on their all-day Field Trip to see various hydrological, geological and vulcanological sites in the surrounding McKenzie River system, just above/outside the Andrews system. We hiked in to a secretive “lost” spring (large, cold, pristine) nicknamed “hobbit-land” and then up to the Collier Cone lava flow, hiking onto it and beyond, to see dry stream channels (complete with stream-rounded cobbles amid the broken landscape of the larger flow) and the absolutely stellar “Proxy Falls” — a waterfall which cascades down from a high ridge drainage area, forms a large clear pool, and disappears! It is like an inverted spring, flowing down *into* the ground, where it escapes under the lava flow.
During our hike we frequently stopped to hear the fluvial geology comments of Gorden Grant, as well as current research findings (with lots of fascinating and as-yet-unanswered questions!) about the lava flows by researchers Natalia Deligne and Sarah Lewis and comments from world-renowned vulcanologist and professor Kathy Cashman. Often the group hiked with (or started by consulting) large LIDAR images, which are revolutionizing landscape research/scientific mapping, or we passed around small xeroxed copies showing the locations of numerous lava flows of various ages. Some flows are hidden by moss and old growth forest, while other flows are young and easily visible, lying black and broken atop the terrain… new research is showing, among other things, there are far more flows of distinct ages/events than previously understood.
We stopped at Olallie Creek (high Cascades spring-fed stream) for lunch, then on to see the Carmen Reservoir (and dry channel) of the upper McKenzie River, much of which is siphoned off through a surreal tunnel in the mountain, bypassing the water to an entirely different canyon, allowing Oregon Power to harvest hydrological power from the river, before it rejoins the original McKenzie downstream.
We hiked along the upper McKenzie as it roars in full whitewater form over logs and through rock gorges and over several drop-dead waterfalls, where the geologists debated erosion theories while the poet sketched and eavesdropped. As a sign at the NFS trailhead put it: “Centuries of visitors have stood in awe of this place. You can almost see their spirits lingering still.”
Finally, we visited Clear Lake where we commandeered a fleet of rental row boats and observed downed (and still-standing) trees along the bottom of the lake. The water is tropically blue-cerulean, ice-cold, and crystal clear. The lake bottom is marbled white with diatomaceous material, reminding me of snorkeling over the white coral reef floor along Cozumel (minus the tropical-fruit colored fish). We put ashore on the far side, and hiked around to see the “Great Spring” which is the source, or headwater, of the McKenzie. Crystalline, teal-sky-blue, the water pours forth with such force that we could not row into the spring’s inlet, which enters the adjacent lake like a whitewater stream. The Great Spring is surrounded with huge trees (including a great Douglas Fir that has fallen down into it on one side, and older bleached trunks visble, deeper down). As with the other hydrological sites we visited, there was a great rubbly lava flow just uphill from the Great Spring.
Repeatedly, the inter-connection was made between the lava flows and the activity of groundwater, and the interplay between river-courses and obstacles such as the lava flows. It was fascinating to hear researchers discussing the underlying seismic activity of the area, including past eruptions and inevitable future volcanic events. How do we plan for catastrophes? How will these groundwater systems be affected by large change (volcanic) or subtle changes (climate shifts could affect groundwater volumes, seasonal precipitation, etc.) The McKenzie provides a key drinking water source for cities like Portland Eugene… begging such questions as how will flooding or ashfalls or earthquakes continue to change this critical high Cascades landscape of complex systems? And how to respond, poetically…
“Ideas without precedent are generally looked upon with disfavor and men are shocked if their conceptions of an orderly world are challenged.”
Year after year, plants like willow and dogwood try to cover the banks of the White River, and year after year they are sheared off by ice. It’s like growing your hear all year long, and shaving it to the scalp each spring. Even the mudbank itself has been cleanly edged — like a potter working heavy clay with a carving-bow. If you look closely, you’ll also see orphaned chunks of ice left high and dry all along the river, and scattered throughout the floodplain fields. Also notice those steeply eroded (dark gray) banks of Pierre Shale? Technically (based on my reading of Philip Stoffer’s work on Badlands geology), what is exposed here is the uppermost layer of Pierre Shale, known as Elk Butte Member. Marine sediments from the Late Cretaceous (imagine a great inland sea covering the land.) The White River, tends to wind from side to side within the floodplain, exposing a sheer flank of Pierre Shale first on one side, then on the other.
This sketch shows the river locked tight with ice. Just as I finished, the ice started moving — creaking, groaning, banging, cracking, slurping and sloshing, MOVING ON. Incredible event to witness. I was alone for a long time, sketching, but people were stopping on the bridge to check as they drove through; when it actually let loose, I was there all alone. Potential energy turning back into kinetic energy. Powerful!
I went down to the flood-stage White River yesterday morning to sketch the ice jam, which had backed up miles of the river and was making the flooding worse. Here is what it looked like just as the river suddenly started moving again, as I grabbed my camera and ran to the bridge. There was an incredible energy — the gong-boom of ice whamming into the bridge pillars, a frozen landslide of trees (some beaver-felled, some storm-broken) and fence posts and dollops of fresh soil on top of the ice (eroded from undercut riverbanks, I suppose) stirred in with all the broken ice. One minute it was stuck, the next it was UNSTUCK. Like that corked-up feeling you get when you can’t remember someone’s name ——– then *gush* and suddenly everything comes sliding back to you in a rush, every detail and nuance of your last encounter, not just their name but their mother’s name and their neighbors’ names, the course you took together, the hobbies and politics of everyone you ever met through them, all their favorite poems and whether they liked wool sweaters and road trips — everything, all of it, sliding downstream in your brain, in grind-creaking technicolor. I’m saying that river just had a bad case of writer’s block!
PS: I just noticed another video posted by someone else who stopped on the same bridge, two days earlier, just before the river became totally log-jammed with ice. In this image, you can see there is a lot of water and ice, but everything was still moving.
Ice is on the move! This “AFTER” view shows how quickly the surrounding floodplain is draining back into the river. The the ice jam broke up, and the whole river started moving in a big (loud) way! I would estimate that the White River dropped over a foot in just about 10 minutes, while I was filming the ice-out event. In this photo, the channel is clearly visible again.
This photograph shows what the White River looked like this morning, when miles of the river were backed-up tight with a huge ice jam, exacerbating the lowland flooding.
