B
Saturday, May 30, 2020
RECREATION
REPORT
Some
state park
campgrounds
reopen
Several Oregon
state park camp-
grounds reopened
Friday and others
are slated to resume
overnight camp-
ing on June 9, the
Oregon Parks and
Recreation Depart-
ment announced.
Parks that re-
opened Friday are
ones that have fi rst-
come, fi rst-served
campsites. They
include:
• Minam, between
La Grande and Wal-
lowa
• Hilgard Junction
west of La Grande
• Catherine Creek
near Union
• Clyde Holliday
near John Day
• Cottonwood
Canyon southeast of
The Dalles
Campgrounds
scheduled to reopen
on June 9:
• Wallowa Lake
• Farewell Bend
near Huntington
“I am cautiously
delighted,” Lisa
Sumption, director
of the Parks Depart-
ment, said in a press
release. “We are
working hard to
welcome campers
wherever we can
safely do so, as soon
as we can.”
Sumption said that
due to lost revenue,
COVID-19 precau-
tions and staff reduc-
tions, services will
be reduced at most if
not all campgrounds
that reopen. Cabin
and yurt camping,
except in rare cases,
will not be offered.
Group camping re-
mains closed across
the state, due to
distancing concerns.
RV and tent camp-
ers with existing
reservations for a
campground that
opens will be hon-
ored beginning June
9. For updates check
the parks website,
stateparks.oregon.
gov.
Idaho Power
reopens
campgrounds
BOISE — Idaho
Power Company
on Friday reopened
several campgrounds
in Hells Canyon that
had been closed
since March due
to the coronavirus
pandemic.
Camping areas
now open include
dispersed sites on
both the Oregon and
Idaho sides of lower
Brownlee Reservoir,
and Hells Canyon,
McCormick and
Woodhead parks.
Copperfi eld Camp-
ground remains
closed because it is
close to Idaho Power
facilities where power
plant employees
are most likely to be
close to campers,
according to a press
release from the com-
pany.
Brownlee Reser-
voir is about 4 feet
below full. At that
level all boat ramps
are usable.
The Observer & Baker City Herald
Defining disturbances
■ Volcanic
eruptions and
wildfires both show
the power of nature,
and its resilience
High mountains stare
at one another across long
spaces. Think of how the Wal-
lowas and Elkhorns lock eyes
over the Baker Valley, how
the Wallowas in turn gaze
across Hells Canyon to the
Seven Devils.
Well to our west, the
solitary snowpeak stratovol-
canoes of the Cascades keep
a bead on each other with
dozens of miles between.
South of the high-standing
North Cascades, the inter-
vening range between those
white giants tends to be much
lower than they themselves
are. They’ve been compared
to an archipelago of snowy,
alpine islands — or a string of
icebergs — in a green sea.
I’m thinking of peak-to-
peak sightlines on account of
we’re just past the
40th anniversary of
the great eruption
of Mount St. Helens
— also known by the
indigenous Sahaptin
name Loowit —
which ravaged its
north fl ank the morning of
May 18, 1980. There is no
shortage of incredible up-close
pictures of that cataclysm,
but, for me, some of the most
evocative photos are those
taken more distantly from
Mount Adams and Mount
Rainier. You can almost sense
these massive snowheads
keeping tabs on one another
across the millennia, waiting
to see which will make the
next violent move. These past
tens of thousands of years, it’s
often been Loowit to do so.
The mountain’s world-
famous 1980 eruption
— preceded by a couple of
months of quakes and steam
explosions, and followed by
additional big eruptions that
summer and fall — involved
volcanic phenomena immor-
talized by terrifying fi rsthand
accounts and intense scien-
tifi c analysis.
The triggering 5.1-magni-
tude earthquake collapsed
the volcano’s north face in
several slide blocks that
became a great debris ava-
lanche barreling into Spirit
Lake. The fearsome lateral
blast — the “stone wind” un-
leashed by this epic landslide
— surging at close to 700
miles per hour northward,
obliterating nearby forest,
toppling farther timber in the
“blowdown” zone, scorching
still more trees beyond in
the “standing-dead zone.”
The pyroclastic fl ows that
churned out of the broken
crater, and the devastating
mudfl ows (lahars) scouring
down the drainages, most
catastrophically the North
Fork Toutle River. The mind-
boggling eruption column
that billowed up and out for
some nine hours, racked by
lightning and littering ashfall
over the Columbia Plateau
and far east.
(One of the observations
from that wild day that’s
always struck me: the singed
conifer twigs dropping out
of the sky seen by climbers
on both Adams and Rainier
— bits of the blasted-away
forest.)
The Cascade snowpeaks
— Mount St. Helens included
— have contributed fertilizing
ash to our Northeast Oregon
mountainsides, and their
Photo by Ethan Shaw
A view of the “blast zone” north of Mount St. Helens.
THE LAY
OF THE LAND
ETHAN SHAW
occasional eruptions remind
us of the bygone volcanism
that roiled our landscape. But
more generally Loowit’s big
blow and its aftermath hold
lessons for us: perspectives
on the unfolding of earth-
time and what the sudden,
wholesale rearranging of a
landscape means.
Looking at those remark-
able before-and-after pictures
of Mount St. Helens is a
good trigger for pondering
the different, overlapping
timeframes at play in our
world. The 1980 eruption —
its transformation of smooth
cone (the “Mount Fuji of
America”) into ravaged am-
phitheater, of forest-cradled
Spirit Lake into barren, dead-
wood-choked basin — seemed
to represent a confl uence of
“geologic time” with “human
time.” But geologic process is
occurring always, all around,
at every scale, though typi-
cally so slowly and subtly we
don’t take notice.
Milk Shakes and Table
Rock on the Wenaha-Tucan-
non horizon from a ridgetop
far south, the Elkhorn Crest
snow-gleaming above spring-
time sagelands: Mountains
always seem to be waiting.
Biding long eons with the
same skyline silhouettes, the
same snowfi elds forming year
and after. Of course they are
not constant: freeze-thaw
cycles are wedging open out-
crops, rockfall and landslides
and torrents are wearing
down those mountain bones,
the timberline’s moving up
and downslope.
Usually this change pro-
ceeds at the slow tempo of
gnawing water and ice, frac-
turing roots. But sometimes
a mountain’s getup changes
dramatically in a relative
instant. One of the basalt
spires atop Twin Peaks in
the Wallowas partly toppled
overnight. Avalanches and
landslides open bold scars.
And, yes, depending on the
mountain, sometimes its
whole crown opens up and a
stone wind comes roaring out.
To our eyes, an explosive
volcanic eruption is the most
stunning expression of a
mountain’s geologic energy.
But it’s only one embodiment,
a dramatic, “realtime” symbol
of all the other slower- or
Photo by Ethan Shaw
Wildfl owers rapidly return following a wildfi re in the Wallowa Mountains.
smaller-acting ones: faulting,
glaciation, the weathering of
a boulder by lichen, a spill of
pebbles here, a few more soil
grains formed there.
Scientists have been
surprised by both the speed
with which revegetation and
animal recolonization have
occurred within the Mount
St. Helens Blast Zone, and by
how they’ve happened. One
profound lesson has been the
limitations of the language
we use to describe an event
such as a volcanic eruption
and its aftermath. We talk
of the eruption’s “destruc-
tion,” and indeed landforms,
trees, elk, and human beings
were destroyed in it — but
the place itself was not. With
a long-range view, those
“destroyed” forestlands will
be resurrected; the elk are
already “replaced.” A whole
part of the volcano vanished,
but new landforms have
been made: canyons in the
Sasquatch Steps below the
crater breach, badlands in
the North Fork Toutle debris-
avalanche deposits.
In the decades since the
blowup we’ve also talked a
lot about “recovery,” and in a
sense that’s just as trouble-
some a word as “destruction.”
That’s because it suggests
some kind of baseline state
to return to, whereas there’s
always a little fl ux involved
in the evolution of both eco-
systems and terrain, multiple
pathways the land can take.
“Recovery” is also tricky
because it seems to diminish
the legitimacy — the natural-
ness — of the raw, gray, ham-
mered here-and-now of the
Blast Zone. That’s as intrinsic
a part of the Cascadian land-
scape as stately evergreen
forest, even though, geologi-
cally speaking, it’s a fl eeting
feature.
The same is true of a
stand-replacing Northeast
Oregon wildfi re: Blackened
trunks and charred ground
are also the way a forest
looks around here, some of
the time. This is beyond the
values, good and bad, we
humans might apply to a
burn. (A lot of folks prefer the
way Spirit Lake used to look,
but its current guise is just as
authentic and natural.)
Think of the clock by which
these “disturbances” — as
landscape ecologists call
volcanic eruptions, severe
storms, wildfi res, and the
like — abide. The Mount
St. Helens blast was the
culmination of a long priming
of magma. The schedule of
that magma buildup, the
timing of that triggering
earthquake, determined
when a whole host of trees
— some seeded hundreds of
years before — would perish.
The groundwork for a Blue
Mountain wildfi re may be
laid over decades or centuries
of shrubs and saplings crowd-
ing a stand. Then there’s the
lifespan of the thunderstorm
that lights the match, the
stage set days or weeks
before by airmasses get-
ting charged with moisture,
large-scale dynamics of tem-
perature and pressure and
airfl ow — then an afternoon’s
worth of actually boiling up a
thunderhead and aiming just
the right lightning bolt over
just the right patch of dense,
dry woods.
How a fi re spreads across
the land can be shaped by
the pattern of past wildfi res,
with previously burned
acreage often less intensely
fl ammable; long-ago blazes
sparked by long-ago storms
(or human hands) can thus
have a lingering ghostly
infl uence, steering new fl ame
fronts and helping dictate the
ecological patchwork.
All of this — the way
atmosphere and terrain
conspire to light an inferno,
or a volcano in one fell swoop
lays a whole forest fl at and
chokes up a river with mud
and boulders — speaks to
the volatility of this here
planet of ours. And also to the
bewilderingly complex forces
acting together to build —
and tear down, and rebuild
— any given place on it.
Mount St. Helens — lo-
cated well to the west of the
main Cascade crest — isn’t
one of those few Cascade
snowpeaks we can spot in our
longest westerly prospects
out here. But you can make
a pilgrimage. If you haven’t
visited the mountain, I highly
recommend it: whether you
drive to the Johnston Ridge
Observatory and take in the
big-picture view of the Blast
Zone, tramp all the way
around on the Loowit Trail,
or climb up the south face
— sometimes a snow climb,
sometimes a dusty slog — to
stand at the jagged summit
rim.