Rain dampens joy of reaching the Pacific

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

As the Cascade Range rose in its path, the Columbia River plowed straight ahead, carving a gorge 80 miles long and up to 4,000 feet deep through the mountains.

Great joy in camp we are in view of the Ocian, this great Pcific octean which we have been so long anxious to See. After the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing o the rockey Shore (as I suppose) may be heard distictly. -- Lt. William Clark, Co-commander, Corps of Discovery, Nov. 7, 1805

FORT CANBY STATE PARK, Wash. -- As the Columbia River flows west toward the sea, one of the great mountain systems of North America rises squarely in its path: the Cascade Range, a rumpled mass of volcanoes, lava flows and glacier-carved granite. Even to a river as powerful as the Columbia, the range would seem a prodigious obstacle: 50 to 120 miles wide, 700 miles long, its peaks reaching more than 14,000 feet above sea level.

Disdaining detour, however, the Columbia hurls itself without hesitation or digression against the Cascades, through which it has carved a gorge 80 miles long and 4,000 feet deep. Widened and deepened by cataclysmic Ice Age floods, the gorge is a gargantuan cleavage through dense rock squeezed out of the planet's fiery interior. It is as if the flowing river were a giant saw blade and the uplifting mountains no more resistant to its downward-cutting bite than a fir log fed into the steel maw of a lumber mill.

The Columbia Gorge is more, however, than a testament to the erosive power of flowing water. It is an ecological transition point where the semiarid plains and grasslands of eastern Oregon and Washington meet the moist, lush valleys and forested slopes of the coast. The gorge also is a travel corridor, a sea-level route through frequently impenetrable mountains, the river serving for centuries as a liquid highway for people traveling between the interior West and the Pacific Coast.

In the autumn of 1805, the Columbia's powerful current bore an unusual group of travelers through the immense gorge. Dispatched across the unmapped West by President Thomas Jefferson with instructions to find the best water route between the Mississippi and the Pacific, the Corps of Discovery was nearing the object of its long quest. Thirty-one men, one woman, one child and a dog, packed with their dwindling supply of trade goods and equipment into five crude canoes, sped down the Columbia in a race to reach tidewater before the onset of winter.

Expedition commanders Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, along with the soldiers originally recruited to accompany them, had been away from their homes and families for two years. They had crossed more than 4,000 miles of wilderness, faced hostile natives and marauding grizzly bears, and had endured hail and snow, heat and mosquitoes, hunger and disease. They had traced the course of the Missouri River across the Great Plains to its Rocky Mountain headwaters, walked across the rugged Continental Divide, and now were wearily running rapids and portaging around waterfalls as the Columbia sped them seaward. They traveled 30 or more miles a day, in their haste piloting canoes through rapids the natives considered unrunnable.

They were tired and aggravated, their clothes and bedding rotten, their diet monotonous. Lewis quit writing altogether, or else his notes were lost. Clark's journal, although containing precise descriptions of local tribal culture, technology and economy -- notably the pivotal role played by prodigious populations of salmon, tons of which could be seen drying on racks along the shoreline -- also became a compendium of complaints about the increasingly unpleasant weather, "thievishly inclined" natives, bloodsucking lice and unsatisfying food.

"Wind blew hard accompanied with rain all the evening," Clark wrote on Oct. 28, 1805, in a typical entry. "Our Situation not a verry good one for an encampment, but such as it is we are obliged to put up with it ... we encamped on the Sand, wet and disagreeable."

Conditions soon would grow even more disagreeable. And they would remain that way for the next four months, as the explorers hunkered down to endure a sodden winter beneath the weeping gray skies of the Pacific Northwest.

Like Lewis and Clark, along whose path I had been traveling during most of the summer and autumn, I accelerated the pace of my own journey last October when I began following the Columbia River downstream from its confluence with the Snake River. Like the explorers, I found myself eager to reach the sea after having crept across two-thirds of the continent, and although there were opportunities for digression -- waterfalls and scenic vistas, charming little towns strung along the broad Columbia like beads on a gleaming necklace -- I mostly hastened westward.

Motorized travel is easy along the Columbia. The river is the border between Oregon and Washington; on the Oregon side, Interstate 84 hugs the water all the way to Portland, while on the Washington side a scenic two-lane state highway traces the river's course, offering motorists occasional views of distant, snow-capped Mt. Hood as it parallels the shoreline.

West of the town of Umatilla and nearby McNary Dam -- one of four major dams erected across the lower Columbia to generate electricity and aid navigation -- the landscape is relatively level for several miles, but then the river approaches the Cascade Range and the gorge deepens. Aridity surrenders to moist coastal air at The Dalles -- a town that derives its name from La Grande Dalle de la Columbia, the label French voyageurs bestowed upon the 12-mile stretch of whitewater once found there. (Dalle means "flagstone" in French, a reference to broken fragments of thin rock layers that eroded from the walls of the gorge and littered the area.)

Linking the cool, moist coast with the hot, dry interior of Washington and Oregon, the Columbia River gorge is a natural wind tunnel. Hood River, Ore., has become a mecca for windsurfers.

Within the gorge, forested slopes crowd steeply to the water's edge, a lush mantle of hardwoods, conifers and ferns softening the dark edges of the mountains' bones. Waterfalls plunge hundreds of feet down cliffs draped with mosses and wildflowers. The gorge is a natural wind tunnel, and hordes of windsurfers were racing acrobatically across the choppy water as I drove along the scenic old highway. Towboats pushing barges loaded with grain, wood chips and other bulky commodities slapped through the churning whitecaps, bound for Portland.

The highway passed John Day Dam, The Dalles Dam, and finally led me to Bonneville Dam, grandaddy of them all. Completed in 1938, during the depths of the Great Depression, Bonneville marked the commencement of an orgy of federal dam building in the Columbia Basin unequaled anywhere in the United States before or since.

Three years after Bonneville came Grand Coulee, and then McNary in 1953, Chief Joseph in 1955, The Dalles and Priest Rapids in 1957, John Day in 1968. Additional dams rose in the Columbia basin, some built by state and local agencies. By the time the campaign to harness the watershed had ebbed, 36 major dams -- an average of one a year -- had been erected on the Columbia and its tributaries.

The dams, which generated prodigious amounts of inexpensive electricity, had two immediate effects. They all but wiped out the Columbia River's prodigious runs of salmon. And they won World War II.

Cheap and abundant hydropower generated by Columbia River dams gave birth to a string of aluminum smelters such as this one. Aircraft built using Columbia River aluminum and electricity helped the United States win World War II.

Although it is an element, aluminum does not occur in a usable form in nature. The strong, lightweight metal -- critical in modern aircraft manufacture -- must be refined from bauxite ore. The key step in this laborious, energy-intensive process involves passing an electrical current through a hot solution containing a powdered residue derived from the bauxite. The current causes a chemical reaction that induces metallic aluminum to form. It takes 8 to 10 kilowatt hours of electricity (half a day's use by the average suburban tract home) to produce a single pound of metal.

When World War II began, Germany was the world's leading producer of aluminum and it used that capacity to build the world's most formidable and technologically advanced air force. When the United States entered the war, it used the surplus generating capacity of its first two Columbia River dams -- Bonneville and Grand Coulee -- to power a string of aluminum plants hastily erected nearby. Factories sprang up in Washington to fabricate military aircraft from the aluminum produced with Columbia River hydropower. Shipyards on Puget Sound also used Bonneville and Grand Coulee electricity to run the welding equipment that stitched together the steel hulls of warships.

Thanks to Columbia River hydropower, the United States was able to out-produce Nazi Germany, manufacturing ships and planes faster than Adolf Hitler's soldiers could destroy them.

Electricity from Columbia River dams also powered the plutonium production facilities at Hanford, the vast, top-secret military installation in southeastern Washington responsible for the first atomic bomb, as well as the one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

Writer Robert Clark sums up that moment thusly in "River of the West: A Chronicle of the Columbia":

"The bomb was made of plutonium produced and refined with Grand Coulee electricity and Columbia River water in the reactors and "canyons" on the banks of Columbia; dropped from a B-29 Superfortress fabricated of Columbia aluminum with Columbia hydropower; the gift and creature of the river; the river itself condensed to an instant of light, to a word beyond words."

Aluminum plants are visible today from the highway along the river, grimy and utilitarian, reminders of a turbulent and dangerous period in America's past. During my visit in the autumn of 2001, the gorge also served up a reminder that the world has not changed as much since 1941 as we might think; when I reached Bonneville Dam I found that, like all the other federal dams along my route, it was closed to visitors because of post-Sept. 11 concerns about terrorism and national security.

Federal dams drowned most of the traditional Native American fishing sites on the Columbia River. Although the federal government promised to replace them, it waited 60 years to do so, providing sites for tribal fishing platforms.

I pulled off the road downstream of the dam and took pictures of traditional native fishing platforms built out over the water, each equipped with a long-handled dip net. There was something timeless and yet forlorn about the rickety wooden platforms, juxtaposed against the implacable concrete of Bonneville and the gleaming steel of its high-voltage transmission towers. The Columbia's dams may have helped win World War II, but they spelled disaster for the American Indians whose economic and spiritual lives revolved for centuries around salmon and the traditional fishing spots -- primarily the river's great waterfalls and cascades, where fish congregated during their upstream migrations -- that the dams drowned. (See accompanying story.)

I stopped for the night in Vancouver, the location of an important trading post and fort in the 19th century. Now, it's a busy and rather nondescript blue-collar town across the river from cosmopolitan Portland. It was crowded there, and I spent the final hour of the day driving in traffic that seemed shockingly heavy after my weeks of travel on largely empty Western highways and back roads.

Members of the Corps of Discovery probably had a similar sense of anticlimax and disorientation when they reached this point, a feeling that their long adventure was at an end. They still had many months of travel before them, but the journey home would be through known territory and travel of that sort is not the same as adventure.

The explorers entered an unmapped landscape in the spring of 1805 when they broke winter camp and pushed west of the Mandan villages on the Missouri River in North Dakota. When they reached the area around today's Vancouver, Wash., however, they were back in the known world.

British explorers had pushed as far up the Columbia as the future site of Vancouver during a 1792 survey of the Pacific Coast. The river itself had been named for the ship commanded by American sea captain Robert Gray, who sailed into the river's estuary that same year (conflicting American and British claims to the region would not be settled until 1846). As they descended the Columbia, Lewis and Clark began noticing manufactured goods of European and American origin among the possessions of the natives: brass kettles, glass beads, sailors' clothing, wool blankets, muskets -- evidence of visits by maritime traders plying the Pacific Coast in search of furs.

As they paddled out of the Columbia Gorge and past the mouth of the Willamette River, in the broad valley where Portland would later be established, Lewis and Clark stitched together the two sides of the American continent. Their Corps of Discovery -- a mobile community comprising young men from nearly every state in the Union, an Indian woman, a black slave, French Canadians -- became a bridge between East and West, Atlantic and Pacific.

As they passed out of the unknown and into the known, they brought together the ragged edges of the national map, filling in the blanks and erasing errors born of speculation, fantasy and foolish hope. They became the link between America's past and its future.

After two years of arduous travel, members of the Corps of Discovery watched their first Pacific sunset from the beach on Cape Disappointment. Today, their campsite lies within Fort Canby State Park.

Beyond Portland, I followed the Washington side of the Columbia to Fort Canby State Park. The winding road passes through several small towns before heading northwest through forested hills, curving along the edge of Willapa Bay and then crossing to the Long Beach peninsula. Fort Canby is on the north side of the Columbia River's mouth at the tip of Cape Disappointment, given that name 17 years before Lewis and Clark's arrival by a British sea captain because he expected to find a great river entering the Pacific there but concluded erroneously that none did.

The error is excusable; the Columbia is so broad and rough at its mouth that it looks nothing like a river. It seems merely an extension of the sea.

I pulled in late at Fort Canby, set up camp in a grove of firs 100 yards from the beach, and watched my first Pacific sunset of the trip from the damp sand. That night, I thought about how members of the party must have felt when they camped in the same vicinity. They, of course, still had an entire winter to survive and the homeward half of the journey to complete. But I wondered if they felt sad, as I did, to have come to the end of the exploring.

There's no hint of such emotion in the expedition journals. Clark's field notes seem to indicate the opposite; as his canoe splashed through the waves of the broadening Columbia River estuary, he scribbled the simple and heartfelt line, "Ocian in view! O! the joy!"

He was wrong about his geography; the expedition's camp that day was 20 miles from the coast and the sea cannot be seen from there. But his emotional accuracy seems unerring. Clark's writings generally betray little emotion, but as the river's banks receded and the water turned salty, Clark could not contain the sense of relief at approaching his long-sought goal. The strain of the long trek was showing, and his companions no doubt felt the same sense of accomplishment.

As I listened to the surf pound the beach, my weeks on the Great Plains during the summer seemed but a distant memory. I built my first campfire since leaving North Dakota and the badlands of the Little Missouri River, where I had tossed sage leaves into the flames and savored their fragrant smoke while listening to coyotes serenade a midsummer moon.

In their place, I had shrieking gulls, fog and visits from aggressive raccoons. The air was damp and tasted of salt.

After Clark penned his memorable line about having the "ocian in view," it took the Corps of Discovery 10 more days to reach the coast. They were not pleasant days. Rain fell and the wind howled. The water was so rough that members of the party grew seasick. The shoreline along the Columbia River estuary is steep, heavily timbered, dense with undergrowth, and when they landed each day they could find little room to set out their bedding and cook their scanty meals. The rising tide threatened to carry away their canoes, so they filled them with rocks. Waves sent enormous driftwood logs crashing into camp.

"It would be distressing to See our Situation," Clark wrote on Nov. 12, 1805, "all wet and colde our bedding also wet, (and the robes of the party which compose half the bedding is rotten and we are not in a Situation to supply their places) in a wet bottom scercely large enough to contain us our baggage half a mile from us, and canoes at the mercy of the waves."

Four days later, the usually equable commander was even more exasperated. He noted that it had been raining for 11 days straight, and declared it "the most disagreeable time I have ever experenced confined ... where I can neither git out to hunt, return to a better situation, or proceed on."

Eventually, conditions improved enough to allow the Corps of Discovery to paddle as far as Chinook Point, near the north end of the bridge that now carries Highway 101 over the Columbia from Astoria, Ore., to Megler, Wash. They decided they could go no farther by canoe, and began scouting for a place to spend the winter. Clark took about a third of the party to explore the north side of the estuary, giving the men at last a real view of the Pacific from Cape Disappointment.

"Men appear much Satisfied with their trip beholding with estonishment the high waves dashing against the rocks & this emence Ocian," he wrote on Nov. 18, 1805. Before they returned, one member of the party shot a California condor with a nine-and-a-half-foot wingspan. Clark collected the head, which Lewis later sketched in his journal (the head apparently made its way back to Philadelphia, where it was displayed for several years in a museum on the second floor of Independence Hall).

Game was scarce on the north side of the river, and the topography steep. For food, the explorers were relying on dried salmon, roots and dogs purchased from the natives, as well as the occasional duck, goose and deer shot by the expedition's hunters. The natives told Lewis and Clark that elk were plentiful on the south side of the Columbia.

The commanders had conflicting options in choosing a winter camp site. The weather was drier east of the Columbia River gorge, but game and timber were scarce there. The coast was dismally wet, but offered food and hope that an American trading ship might drop anchor nearby, allowing the expedition to replenish its supplies, send back word of its success in reaching the sea, and dispatch notes, maps and specimens to Jefferson. The south side of the river promised better hunting than the north, but would require another canoe crossing of the Columbia's turbulent waters.

Although the Corps of Discovery was a military expedition, organized and run according to military protocol, commanders Lewis and Clark put the selection of a winter camp to a vote. Even more remarkably, they gave everyone a ballot -- even York, Clark's black slave, and Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman.

This exercise in democracy took place on Nov. 24, 1805. African Americans would not be guaranteed the right to vote in the United States until 1870. Women would have to wait until 1920, Native Americans until 1948.

The majority voted to wait out the winter on the coast, south of the Columbia. The group headed back upstream, crossed the river where it was more calm, and made its way to the site Lewis had chosen for their winter fort, which they began building on Dec. 8. The party moved in on Christmas Eve, and completed the structure on New Year's Day.

"Our repast of this day," Lewis wrote on Jan. 1, 1806, "tho better than that of Christmass, consisted principally in the anticipation of the 1st day of January 1807, when in the bosom of our friends we hope to participate in the mirth and hilarity of the day, and when with the zest given by the recollection of the present, we shall completely, both mentally and corporally, enjoy the repast which the hand of civilization has prepared for us."

The language is formal but the sentiment is clear. Meriwether Lewis was homesick.

Fort Clatsop, the 50-by-50-foot wooden structure in which the Corps of Discovery spent three months fighting boredom, is now the centerpiece of Fort Clatsop National Memorial.

Fort Clatsop National Memorial encompasses 125 acres of dense forest and wetlands near a stream originally called the Netul and now named Lewis and Clark River. It includes a visitor center and numerous outdoor exhibits, but the memorial's centerpiece is a replica of Fort Clatsop, the 50-by-50-foot wooden structure in which the Corps of Discovery spent three months fighting boredom, fashioning new clothing and moccasins from elk hide, organizing their scientific data, catching up on mapmaking and journal writing, and planning the homeward leg of the journey.

The fort is built on roughly the same floor plan as Fort Mandan, where the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1804-05 on the northern Plains. It consists of two rows of rooms, each with a fireplace, facing each other across a small parade ground. Ongoing archaeological investigations have yet to pinpoint the location of the original fort, but the reconstruction, built by community volunteers in 1955, is in the same general area.

From Fort Clatsop, I drove to Seaside, 14 miles south along the coast, where members of the expedition established a small satellite camp to make salt by boiling seawater. Staffed by a rotating crew, generally of three men, the salt works consisted of five large iron kettles atop a fireplace of boulders, in which the flames burned day and night. In two months, the men produced about 20 gallons of salt, enough to last the winter and most of the way home. A replica of the salt works is located near the beach in Seaside, on a tiny lot hemmed in by modern homes.

From Seaside, I headed south a few more miles to Les Shirley Park in Cannon Beach, the farthest point south that members of the expedition reached along the Oregon coast. Clark led 15 members of the expedition on the long hike there in January 1806 after learning from the natives that a whale had washed up on the shore. Lewis and Clark were motivated largely by a desire to obtain meat and blubber, but other members of the excursion party seemed simply curious.

Sacagawea was among them. In one of the rare instances in which a hint of her personality comes through in the expedition journals, Lewis wrote that "the Indian woman was very importunate to be permitted to go, and was therefore indulged; she observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters, and now that a monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either (she had never yet been to the Ocean)."

When I returned to Fort Canby, I put my kayak in the water and paddled around on the Columbia for about an hour. It seemed necessary, since I had spent so much time paddling on the Missouri. The two river systems are like bookends, slightly distorted mirror images of each other. The Columbia's current is deceptively powerful; the width of the river lends the illusion that the water isn't moving, but it surely is. Paddling upstream was quite difficult, and it provided some idea of the task that would face the Corps of Discovery when it began the homeward leg of their long journey.

That evening, as my last campfire snapped and crackled in the gathering mist, I thought back over the entire long journey and relished the high points: a night on a replica of the expedition's keelboat on Onawa, Iowa; the Upper Missouri canoe trip; watching eagles soar over the Plains on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation in South Dakota; snowfall in the Bitterroots as I crept along the rocky Lolo Trail; and so may others.

Again I wondered what the members of the expedition felt when they knew their journey was nearly over. Sadness? Elation? Relief? Their journals reveal irritation, anxiety, impatience. They don't mention wistfulness.

One thing I am sure they must have felt during that last night on the trail westbound, as did I: amazement at the sheer scale and diversity of the Western landscape. On one level, that's a trite observation; one look at a U.S. map suggests the physical dimensions and topographical variety of the continent, particularly its western two-thirds. Maps alone, however, do not adequately convey the reality.

A cross-country drive today on interstate highways provides a slightly better appreciation of the West's scale and geography, even though it takes only a few days. Better still is a meandering journey on secondary highways or local roads, punctuated by episodes on dirt or water. Such peregrinations extended my trans-Western odyssey by several weeks.

Even so, much of my mileage rolled by at 70 mph as asphalt under four steel-belted Michelins. Crossed at a speed determined by human muscle power, the West would seem almost incomprehensibly broad. And so settlers found it when they followed the path blazed by Lewis and Clark: Even though they took a shorter route and did not tarry in the service of science and diplomacy, pioneers on the Oregon Trail spent four to six months walking and riding the 2,000 miles from Independence, Mo., to the Willamette Valley.

Conducted in Europe, a hike of that distance would allow you to visit Spain, France, Italy, Austria and Germany.

It was raining when I awoke to greet my final morning on the trail. It seemed appropriate that I conclude my voyage of rediscovery in a tent, listening to raindrops spatter the nylon and drip from the trees, since it rained on Lewis and Clark all but 12 days during the four months they spent on the Pacific Coast.

I read for a while in procrastination, hoping the rain might diminish, but it did not. I packed up my wet gear and hit the road for the final time.