Rivers' rapids roil no more

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

Although Lewis and Clark reported that the area near the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers was devoid of timber, the shoreline is almost buried by wood today. Felled in the forests of the Rockies, the logs are destined to become pulp to feed the Potlatch paper mill in Lewiston, Idaho.

The number of dead salmon on the Shores & floating in the river is incrediable to say -- and at this Season they have only to collect the fish Split them open and dry them on their scaffolds on which they have great numbers. -- Lt. William Clark, Co-commander, Corps of Discovery, Oct. 17, 1805

LEWISTON, Idaho -- In 1805, as explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led their Corps of Discovery out of the Rocky Mountains and toward the Pacific Ocean, they piloted their flotilla of clumsy dugout canoes through mile after mile of exuberant whitewater.

Not really by choice. And certainly not for fun.

As the explorers floated down the Clearwater River and then the Snake, through what are now Idaho and eastern Washington, they were racing westward against the approach of winter. The boatmen often halted to scout rapids, as whitewater rafting guides do today, and portaged the very worst, carrying their goods along the shoreline rather than trusting everything to their prowess with paddles. But they could not afford to delay and be caught traveling when bad weather arrived, and so they drove their vessels relentlessly downstream through water more turbulent than anything they had encountered during their long journey up the Missouri River.

"(We) determined to run the rapids," Clark wrote in his journal for Oct. 16. "Put our Indian guide in front our small canoe next and the other four following each other, the canoes all passed over Safe except the rear Canoe which run fast on a rock at the lower part of the Rapids."

For the next several days, the explorers' journals record their passage through repeated stretches of roiling, boulder-strewn water. Several times, rapids overturned one or more of their canoes, dumping contents and passengers into the river (the passengers always were saved; trade goods and supplies sometimes were not). In Clark's words, they passed through "a bad rapid," "a verry bad rapid" and later "a verry bad rapid (with) a chane of rocks making from the Stard. (starboard, or right) Side and nearly chokeing the river up entirely with hugh black rocks."

There is still whitewater today on the Clearwater, and it would seem familiar to members of the Corps of Discovery. But they would not recognize the Snake. Below its confluence with the Clearwater, the frothing, boulder-studded river that carried Lewis and Clark through barren canyons to the mighty Columbia has been transformed into a placid expanse of deep, still water. The only obstacles to navigation on it today are the handiwork of modern engineers, who have considerately provided the means by which to circumvent them.

The consequences of that riparian transformation are profound -- as profound as anything Americans have done over the past 200 years to the landscape Lewis and Clark first described to the young nation.

Lewiston's waterfront is dominated by the huge Potlatch paper mill. The mill also dominates the city's atmosphere, filling it with a peculiar and unpleasant odor.

Lewiston and Clarkston grew up facing each other from opposite sides of the Snake River where it meets the Clearwater. Lewiston is in Idaho, Clarkston in Washington. It is a stretch to call them cities: Lewiston, the dominant twin, has a population of about 31,000 people, while Clarkston counts a mere 7,400.

Lewiston was established barely more than half a century after Lewis and Clark passed that way. It sprouted up illegally, on land the governor of Washington Territory had granted by treaty to the Nez Perce, to serve as a supply center for miners drawn to gold strikes in the nearby Bitterroot Mountains.

Incorporated in 1861, Lewiston was named after Meriwether Lewis. Clarkston, established across the river in 1896, originally was known as Jawbone Flats or Vineland; it was renamed in 1902 in honor of William Clark.

The men after whom the cities were named had little to say about the land around the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake rivers. "The Countrey about the forks is an open Plain on either side," Clark wrote in his journal on Oct. 10, 1805. "I can observe at a distance on the lower Lard. (larboard, or left) Side a high ridge of thinly timbered Countrey the water of the South fork is a greenish blue, the north as clear as cristial." He also noted that there "was not one stick of timber on the river near the forks and but a fiew trees for a great distance up the River we descended."

To Clark's impression I would add a few amendments. When I arrived at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater in early October 2001 during my trek along the explorers' path, I found the river banks crowded with timber. It was, however, horizontal: Vast storage yards along the shoreline held mountainous stacks of logs waiting to be ground into pulp to feed the huge Potlatch paper mill that dominates Lewiston's waterfront. I also was immediately struck by the peculiar stench that hangs over the area, an invisible yet malodorous cloud that emanates from the mill.

And I found that both rivers are now a deep bluish green. It is the color of deep, still water that has dropped its load of suspended sediment.

The primary purpose of the dams is to facilitate barge traffic, which carries grain and other bulky commodities to Pacific ports.

Lewiston and Clarkston are 470 miles inland, yet they are seaports. The Snake River, which could barely float the Corps of Discovery's small dugout canoes 200 years ago, is plied today by huge towboats and barges, which deliver grain, wood chips, paper products and other bulky commodities from the Western interior to seagoing freighters docked in Pacific ports.

The technological feat that changed the color of the rivers and makes such navigation possible has become the subject of one of the most heated public-policy debates in the Pacific northwest.

Downstream from Lewiston, the Snake River is blocked by four dams constructed between 1962 and 1975 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Learn more about Major dams and reservoirs on the lower Snake and Columbia rivers). Each dam is accompanied by a navigational lock, allowing barges and boats to make their way between Lewiston and the Columbia River, which in turn is controlled by four more dams and locks. The cumulative effect of the eight dams is to transform nearly 500 miles of formerly rapid-strewn river between Idaho and the Pacific into a deep-draft shipping channel.

The dams also have been blamed for a precipitous decline in salmon and steelhead populations in the Columbia and Snake river watersheds. Snake River salmon were the marathon champs of anadromous fish, those that hatch in freshwater, make their way as juveniles to saltwater and then return from the sea as adults to spawn in their natal streams. From the Pacific to their spawning grounds high in the Rocky Mountains, Snake River salmon may travel nearly 1,000 miles through rapids and over waterfalls, past hungry bears and eagles and tribal fishing platforms.

Ice Harbor Dam was the first of the Snake River dams completed by the Corps of Engineers. The navigation lock in the foreground allows boats to pass around the dam, located near Burbank, Wash.

An estimated 5 million to 8 million salmon returned to the Snake River to spawn each year in the early 19th century, when Lewis and Clark challenged its rapids. Since the Corps of Engineers completed the four Snake River dams -- Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite -- the number of wild salmon returning annually to the Snake River to spawn has dropped to fewer than 5,000. Snake River coho salmon are extinct, and all the remaining species of Snake River salmonids -- steelhead trout, sockeye salmon, and the spring, summer and fall runs of chinook salmon -- are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

Although the salmon runs also have been affected by other forces -- climate change, urbanization, logging, agriculture -- scientists place much of the blame for the population decline on the dams themselves, which interfere with migration. Huge numbers of young salmon die as they make their way downstream, chopped up in hydroelectric turbines, exposed to predators and exhausted when they are forced to swim through hundreds of miles of slackwater rather than being carried effortlessly seaward by the current.

Environmentalists have proposed breaching the four Snake River dams as a way of restoring endangered salmon species. The COE has rejected that suggestion, which is also opposed angrily by farmers and others who benefit from the cheap electricity and navigation the dams provide. (Next month's installment of Voyage of Rediscovery will include a more complete discussion of the plight of salmon in the Pacific Northwest, including the role of dams and hatcheries.)

From Lewiston, I followed the Snake River into Washington toward Lower Granite Dam, expecting to be able to visit it. I quickly found, however, that the events of only a few weeks earlier had rippled far from the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center, the charred Pentagon, the gouged and blackened field outside Shanksville, Pa. Post-Sept. 11 concerns about security at potential terrorist targets had brought a virtual lockdown to federal facilities across the nation, including dams operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

So, I had to content myself with distant views of the controversial dams. Tours were not being allowed, and guards were posted at locked gates blocking public entrances to the dams and powerhouses. Above Lower Granite Dam I ate lunch at a campsite on the river bank, in one of the many public recreation areas the Corps of Engineers operates in conjunction with its dams, navigation locks and power plants. A cold wind blew, and the skies were gray and threatening rain.

Despite the weather, small boats full of fishermen zipped up and down the stilled river. The hills rise steeply on both sides of the canyon, outcroppings of volcanic rock protruding darkly through a thin covering of desiccated grass.

The Palouse region of southeastern Washington produces a bounty of grain and other crops in its thick, fertile soil, which consists of glacier-pulverized rock deposited by wind after the most recent ice age.

Straying from the river, which in many places is inaccessible except by boat, I threaded my way along winding roads into the Palouse country of southeastern Washington. It is a landscape of rolling hills, golden with wheat, barley and oat stubble, some fields beginning to show green where winter crops already were beginning to sprout. Grain elevators were everywhere, standing like silent sentinels against a cloud-studded autumn sky.

Washington is bisected north to south by the Cascade mountain range, which intercepts moisture-laden air moving inland from the Pacific and forces it to drop most of its water as rain and snow on the western slopes. Immediately east of the range, in the mountains' rain shadow, Washington is as arid as a desert, but rainfall totals increase as you move east toward the Idaho border. In the Palouse region, rainfall is adequate for grain and legumes, which thrive in the deep soil. Known as "loess" (pronounced "luss"), that soil is composed of rock ground to a powder by glaciers and deposited by wind over a large area, forming deep drifts that give the area its rolling topography and agricultural fertility.

I took a short side trip to Palouse Falls, where the Palouse River plunges dramatically into a deep cleft gouged into the tortured volcanic rock of the surrounding plateau. Many times during my trip along the Lewis and Clark trail I wished I could have been whisked back in time 200 years to see the landscape as they had seen it, before it had been so changed by 20th century human manipulation. As I stood near the lip of the gorge, however, I wished I could turn the clock back even further.

Had I been standing there 13,000 years ago, I would have witnessed one of the most remarkable spectacles in Earth's history. For although it is 198 feet high, Palouse Falls is not the product of patient eons of slow, gradual erosion. The deep chasm into which it drops was carved nearly overnight into solid basalt by a flood so powerful and massive it defies imagination and description.

Like the loess soil that grows southeast Washington's grain and beans, Palouse Falls is a product of the most recent ice age, which buried a large part of North America under a continental glacier between 10,000 and 80,000 years ago. Instead of thick drifts of loess soil, however, the region surrounding the waterfall and the Palouse River gorge downstream is scoured bare, a tortured topography of naked volcanic rock deeply dissected by gorges and gullies. Geologists refer to this region as the "channeled scablands," a most descriptive term.

Between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago, a lobe of the great continental ice sheet protruded south out of Canada and blocked the Clark Fork River in Idaho. Water backed up behind the dam of ice, flooding valleys in western Montana and forming Glacial Lake Missoula. At its greatest extent, it was huge -- an inland sea, really, not a lake -- 200 miles long, 2,000 feet deep and containing 500 cubic miles of water. That's more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined.

Ice is not a particularly robust substance from which to build a dam. As the lake's depth approached the top of the ice dam, the dam became buoyant and started to float, allowing water to creep between it and the bedrock. The tremendous force of that water quickly began eroding the dam from beneath, weakening it and causing it to collapse suddenly and catastrophically.

In a heartbeat, 500 cubic miles of water began rocketing through the breach on a search for the sea. Moving at more than 65 miles an hour, the flood surged forward in a thunderous jet that carried 10 times the combined flow of all the world's rivers and drained the 200-mile-long lake in as little as 48 hours. The floodwaters poured over what is today the site of Spokane, spread out across the eastern Washington plateau and tore southwest toward the Columbia River gorge, a gnawing juggernaut that scoured the countryside down to bedrock and gouged enormous canyons into solid basalt.

On its way to the Pacific, the flood created two enormous waterfalls in the vicinity of today's Coulee City. The larger of the two was 800 feet high, and the violence of the water pouring over it was so great that the waterfall began eating the bedrock away from its lip. Retreating 20 miles upstream as the solid rock melted away, the waterfall finally self-destructed when it broke through the wall of the Columbia River valley.

The abandoned trench dug by that arm of the flood is known as Grand Coulee, and it now holds a reservoir, Banks Lake, which is filled with water pumped from the reservoir impounded on the Columbia by Grand Coulee Dam. (From Banks Lake, the water flows through a complex of canals to irrigate half a million acres of farmland in central Washington.) Grand Coulee is five miles wide, 50 miles long and 700 feet deep.

The other great waterfall on the course of the Lake Missoula flood began near today's town of Soap Lake, and it also began eating its way upstream along Grand Coulee. The skeleton of that waterfall is called Dry Falls, and can be seen at Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park. It is 3.5 miles wide and has a drop of more than 400 feet.

Niagara Falls is a mile wide and drops 165 feet.

Palouse Falls was formed when the floodwaters similarly eroded their way upstream from the Snake River, their unimaginable force melting away the hard rock as if it were no more substantial than a sugar cube.

Geologists tracing sediment layers in the valley filled by Glacial Lake Missoula have determined that the lake formed and catastrophically emptied not just once, or even twice, but at least 40 times during a 2,500-year period, as the continental ice sheet repeatedly advanced across the Clark Fork, forming new dams that later collapsed. The resultant floods carried away more than 50 cubic miles of earth, piled gravel 300 feet deep, created giant ripple marks as high as three-story buildings, and left 200-ton boulders scattered from the Rocky Mountains to Oregon's Willamette Valley. The scarring of the channeled scablands is visible from space.

From space, in fact, it looks a lot like areas on Mars where scientists believe they see similar evidence of enormous floods. The similarity is so striking that in 1995, scientists and engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena traveled to the Washington scablands to gain a better understanding of the Martian floodplain to which they planned to send the Mars Pathfinder probe and its wheeled rover, Sojourner, in 1997.

A marker at Lyons Ferry State Park commemorates the namesake of Drewyer's River, which Meriwether Lewis and William Clark named (and misspelled) after their expedition's best hunter, George Drouillard. The river was later renamed the Palouse.

Below Palouse Falls, I tarried for a while where the Palouse River meets the Snake. Lewis and Clark had originally called the Palouse Drewyer's River after their best hunter, George Drouillard, (poor spellers, they commonly employed phonetic approximations of the names of the men under their command), and a prominent sign at Lyons Ferry State Park commemorates the event.

Heading west, I tried to tour Ice Harbor Dam on the Snake River, but like the other dams it was closed to public entry. The dam backs up Lake Sacajawea, and along the shoreline is Charbonneau Park. It is a drab and spartan park, offering little but a small marina and picnic tables, and it might be the only site along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail dedicated to Sacagawea's somewhat shiftless husband, Toussaint Charbonneau.

Below Ice Harbor Dam, the Snake River joins the Columbia River near Pasco, Kennewick and Richland, which more or less blend together into what locals call the Tri-Cities. At the confluence, Sacajawea State Park offers a pleasant swath of shady grass from which to contemplate the huge expanse of water created by the joining of these two great rivers.

The 1,270-mile-long Columbia drains a watershed of 258,000 square miles, passes through four mountain ranges and delivers more water to the Pacific than any other river in North or South America. The Snake is its biggest tributary, traveling 1,038 miles from its headwaters in Yellowstone National Park.

Although some of the vast expanse of water visible from Sacajawea State Park is the result of artificial augmentation by McNary Dam, more than 40 miles downstream from the confluence, the point where the Snake and Columbia joined must have presented an arresting sight to the Corps of Discovery. From the time they returned to the water after their land crossing of the Rocky Mountains, they had been recapitulating the initial months of their journey west but in reverse. And now, in a way, it was almost as if they were back where they started.

They had crossed the vast Mississippi and navigated the equally robust Missouri, following it upstream for month after month as it eventually grew narrower and shallower, then proceeding up a succession of ever-smaller tributaries until abandoning their boats in the Beaverhead Valley of western Montana. Then, having begun paddling again on the Clearwater River in Idaho, they had followed an ever-larger succession of rivers until reaching this point, where the two greatest waterways of the far West meet in what is nearly a hydrological mirror image of the Missouri-Mississippi confluence. The view from Pasco is an awful lot like the view from St. Louis, at least from the standpoint of a man with a paddle in a small boat.

An observation window at McNary Dam offers a view of salmon making their way up the fish ladder to spawn upstream. With at least eight major dams between the ocean and their Rocky Mountain spawning streams, Snake River salmon face daunting obstacles.

I spent the night in a motel in Richland, before taking a side trip north to visit a stretch of the Columbia that still looks as it did when Lewis and Clark came speeding through in the final days of their push to the Pacific. (See related story.) After returning to Richland, I picked up the highway along the Columbia shoreline and began heading west. The river slices through a volcanic ridge, passing between steep walls of brown and black rock, and enters a tremendous gorge that continues nearly to Portland, 170 miles away.

I stopped at McNary Dam for lunch. Although the dam itself was closed to the public, I was able to tour the Pacific Salmon Visitor Information Center just outside the locked gates. The visitor center is elaborate and largely concerns the efforts to rescue imperiled Snake River runs of salmon and steelhead.

Nearby, one of the dam's huge fish ladders leads from the Columbia River around the dam and empties into Lake Wallula, the name the Corps of Engineers has given to the slackwater stretch of the Columbia River that backs 62 miles upstream behind McNary. A small room has been built into the side of the fish ladder, with glass windows that allow an underwater view into the ferocious, turbulent flow.

Adult salmon and steelhead swimming up the river to spawn pass the glass, allowing visitors to watch as the fish struggle toward their reproductive destiny. The force of the water flowing through the ladder is tremendous, and it was astonishing to watch the huge fish -- some nearly two feet long --come rocketing past. Some would pause, seemingly to gather their strength, before flashing upstream with a powerful flick of their tail. Others would simply fly by without slowing, like silvery torpedoes.

I was witnessing an ancient ritual of the natural world, conducted now under intensely unnatural circumstances. As I continued downstream from McNary on the final stage of my westward journey of rediscovery, I would learn more about these imperiled fish, and about the complex political, economic and technical milieu in which their future is being decided.

Next month: Down the Columbia River to the sea, including a closer look at the debate over the future of salmon and dams in the Pacific Northwest.