8A • COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • DECEMBER 26, 2018
Off beat Oregon: Biggest mud puddles are once-and-future inland seas
By Finn J.D. John
For The Sentinel
First Publish January 2016
W
estward bound
on the old Ap-
plegate Trail in
the early 1850s, the party of
settlers halted in confusion
at the shore of a vast, plac-
id lake. Its waters stretched
nearly all the way to the
horizon, with just a thin rim
of dimly glimpsed ridges be-
yond to indicate that they
had not reached some sort of
preternaturally calm ocean.
Th e settlers, by now, had
passed a few of these alka-
li lakes as the trail brought
them westward. Th is one
was the biggest they’d seen.
Its size wasn’t what was
startling about it, though.
What confused them were
the wagon ruts — the well
established Applegate Trail
was marked by a deep set of
wagon-wheel grooves that
carved a path across the high
Southeastern Oregon pla-
teau over which they jour-
neyed.
And those ruts led straight
into the lake.
Of course they tried to fol-
low them into the lake for
a few hundred yards, but it
quickly became clear that its
water, in addition to being
miles wide, was also deep —
deep enough, at least, to stop
a wagon train.
But the western sky lay on
the other side of the big wa-
ter, and there was nothing
for them to do but to travel
around it. Th ey toiled their
way north, and then west,
and then south again, fol-
lowing the rim of the vast
lake to its opposite shore, a
journey of something like
100 miles.
Sure enough, when they
got there, they found the
heavy wheel ruts of the Ap-
plegate Trail climbing non-
chalantly out of the waters of
the lake and continuing on
their way westward toward
Eugene City.
Upon their arrival, the
emigrants learned that no-
body else knew anything
about the vast lake they’d
had to detour around. Th ey
wondered where it might
have come from.
It remained a mystery un-
til, several years later, there
was another season of dry
weather — and the lake
dried up once again.
T
oday, the disappearing
lake is known as Goose
Lake. It’s a vast shallow basin,
shaped like an arrowhead,
right on the Oregon-Cali-
fornia border just south of
Lakeview. And right now it’s
as dry as it’s ever been … but
that will probably change
when this winter’s snows
melt.
Several springs drain into
Goose Lake; but Goose Lake
drains nowhere. It merely
collects rainwater and snow-
melt during wetter years,
and lies there baking in the
high-desert sun, quietly
evaporating away, until it’s
either replenished by anoth-
er year’s rainfall or dried up
into a powdery moonscape.
Th e year 1846 must have
been a dry one, because
that’s the year the Oregon
Territorial Legislature com-
missioned brothers Jesse
and Lindsay Applegate, with
eight other early Orego-
nians, to fi nd a safer alterna-
tive to the Oregon Trail.
For Jesse and Lindsay, the
quest was personal. On their
own journey several years
before, they had lost two Ap-
plegate children, drowned
beneath the roaring cata-
racts of the then-untamed
Columbia as the party
struggled to cross it in their
caulked wagons.
Th e trail the brothers’
party blazed diverged from
the main Oregon Trail path
at Fort Hall in Idaho, and
dove down into northern
Nevada and California be-
fore dipping back up into
southern Oregon, crossing
the Cascades, and then turn-
ing north along roughly the
same path taken by Inter-
state 5 today, en route to the
southern Willamette Valley.
But apparently the late
1840s were pretty dry, and
they unwittingly left a big,
miles-wide obstacle squarely
in their path.
T
he lakes of Lake County,
including Goose Lake,
are sort of unusu-al. Th ey
are, essentially, vast mud
puddles, and their shores ex-
pand and contract according
to climactic conditions.
During the last Ice Age,
those mud puddles were
more like a network of small
inland seas, many hundreds
of feet deep and covering
hundreds of thousands of
acres, surrounded by lush
vegetation and home to a
wide variety of animals as
well as human communities.
One such lake, which
covered the future townsite
of Fort Rock under several
dozen feet of water, was the
home of a community of
people 14,000 years ago, who
left behind a small trove of
woven sagebark sandals and
coprolites (very old dried-
out or fossilized excrement)
that form the oldest evi-
dence of human habitation
in the Americas.
And you can still see
where the shores of those
old inland seas used to be,
in wave-worn features in the
surrounding rimrock.
With the changing cli-
mate, though, those seas
literally dried up. Year over
year, the water in them evap-
orated away. And thus, the
dissolved salts and impuri-
ties of an entire small ocean
wound up concentrated in
the waters of a cluster of little
lakes and ponds — many of
them quite large in surface
area, but relatively shal-low.
Some of these dried sea-
beds can be quite dangerous
when conditions are bad; if
one ingests enough alkali
salts, either by drinking the
water or by breathing the
blowing dust, it can change
the body’s acid-base balance
in disastrous ways.
It’s thought that the dusty
bottom of one alkali lake,
near the town of Jordan
Valley close to the Idaho
border, sickened and killed
Jean-Baptiste
“Pompey”
Charbonneau, the frontier
mountain man who had
been the baby born to Sa-
cagawea on the Lewis and
Clark expedition in 1905.
Lake Abert in particular
is very salty; it and Summer
Lake are the remnant of an
ancient inland sea called
Lake Chewaucan. Abert’s
waters are fi lled with a dense
population of brine shrimp,
which are an important food
source for the migrating wa-
terfowl that blacken the Lake
County sky in the spring;
but like Goose Lake, it, too,
is drying up.
But a winter’s heavy snow-
falls suggest that help, in the
form of plenty of snowmelt
to fi ll the lake and relieve the
stressed brine shrimp, may
be on the way.
And when the Earth enters
its next ice age, those ancient
basins will be ready and able
to resume their old role as
the containers of Oregon’s
own network of high-eleva-
tion inland seas.
(Sources: Gulick, Bill.
Roadside History of Oregon.
Missoula, MT: Mountain,
1991; Orr, Elizabeth and
William. Oregon Geography
(6th Ed.). Corvallis: Oregon
State University Press, 2012)
Finn J.D. John teaches at
Oregon State University and
writes about odd tidbits of
Oregon history. For details,
see http://fi nnjohn.com. To
contact him or suggest a
topic: fi nn2@offb eatoregon.
com or 541-357-2222.