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These statues carved out of a large tree trunk stand at the Lewis and Clark Campsite State Park, near Chinook, Washington. We know for sure that the expedition camped here because of detailed surveying measurements Clark made and then recorded on a map that he drew of this part of the Columbia River. This place was the westernmost campsite for the expedition. They had been canoeing down the right bank of the Columbia River (next to present-day Washington state), and as the waves at the end of the river increased in size the nearer they got to the ocean, they determined that this would be the closest they would try to take the boats to the ocean. They arrived here on November 15, 1805 and camped ten days near a Chinook Indian village. They traded with the Chinook people for fish, roots, and wild cranberries. From this camp, Lewis and Clark led small groups of men to explore Cape Disappointment and the Pacific coast on foot. Clark wrote in his journal: "the men appear much Satisfied with their trip beholding with estonishment...this emence ocian."

The wet, tired group needed to find a wintering place that was not too cold and where elk or deer would provide meat and buckskins to replace their ragged clothing. They also needed sea water to make salt. Clatsop Indians had come by canoe from across the Columbia to trade with the Chinooks, and they told the expedition leaders about the number of elk there were on the other side of the river. To help decide where to winter, the captains polled each member of the expedition, including York (a black slave) and Sacagawea (an Indian woman). This poll or vote may have great significance in U. S. history. At that time blacks, Indians, and women did not have the right to vote.

Many of the men on the expedition kept journals. Private Joseph Whitehouse’s journal entry of November 24, 1805 said,

"In the evening our officers had the whole party assembled in order to consult which place would be the best for us to take up our winter quarters at. The greater part of our men were of opinion that it would be best to cross the river."

These two scenes represent two of the diverse ecosystems included in Olympic National Park. In addition to these two areas-- rain forest and high Sitka spruce trees, as well as western hemlock. Some of those trees grow to over 300 feet (91.4 meters) in height and 23 feet (7 meters) in circumference. Precipitation in this part of the park ranges from 140 to 167 inches (356 to 424 centimeters) a year. That's 12 to 14 feet (3.6 to 4.2 meters) of rain every year! No wonder you're seeing some moss in that first picture! In fact, for twenty miles (32.2 kilometers) I drove up from the coast into the park under very tall trees dripping with club moss, the forest floor underneath a tangle of greenery--mostly ferns. The center of each lane of the highway was covered in moss, where the car tires don't drive over it. It was strange to look ahead up the highway and see the two tracks of moss glowing in the rare sunshine that I was enjoying that day.

Because of the dense cover of plants on the forest floor, there is much competition for seeds to sprout. The tree seeds that happen to land on fallen trees have an easier time sprouting and maturing. "Nurse logs" can grow a whole row of trees that are called a colonnade. You can see one in this picture. In another hundred years or so this nurse log will rot away, leaving trees standing in a row with big spaces at their bases where the old nurse log used to be when the younger trees' roots grew around it and down to the ground.

I also saw a tree that had a "cave" at the bottom of it. That tree grew from a seed that sprouted on top of a stump, and the roots of the newer tree grew out and down around the stump which later rotted away, leaving a cave-like hole at the bottom of the tree.

The second picture shows the mountainous region of Olympic National Park, where the peaks reach above 7,000 feet (2,134 meters). Mt. Olympus, the highest point in the park and somewhere in this range you're looking at, is 7,965 feet (2,428 meters) high. The sky was overcast that day, so the snow-covered tops of the peaks seem to blend in with the white of the thin clouds. It's hard to tell where the mountains stop and the sky begins. I can tell you that it was much, much colder standing up on Hurricane Ridge, where I took this picture, than it was in the rain forest the day before, down near sea level.

Land on the east side of these mountains sits in the "rain shadow" and receives very little rain in comparison to the rain forest and the peaks.

Native Americans inhabited this area for centuries before Europeans arrived. Cedar from the rain forest was their most important resource, and they used it for everything from building houses to making clothing, towels, and even diapers out of the bark.

Please see the April 17, 2001 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

There are 768 islands, reefs, and rocks in the San Juan Islands northwest of Seattle in Puget Sound. That’s at low tide. At high tide there are only 457 of them visible. These islands are the tops of mountains so ancient that they are older than any in the whole of North America. Over thousands and thousands of years they are being folded under a "plate" of the Earth along a fault line in the Earth’s crust that runs right through Puget Sound.

I took this photo of little Barnes Island and Clark Island from the much larger Orcas Island. To get to Orcas Island I had to ride on a ferry for about an hour. I was with my nephew and a friend of ours. We drove their car right onto the ferry! In the background of this picture you can see a peninsula sticking out from the mainland. Somewhere over there is where we got on the ferry. When we got to Orcas Island we drove the car off the ferry, onto the road, and right up to the top of Mt. Constitution, where I took this picture.

Later in the day we drove onto another ferry that took us to another island, San Juan Island, where we explored a fort, which you’ll see in the next report. I do love these San Juan Islands. As you can see, they are very beautiful. It’s so restful and relaxing to be sitting on the ferry as it makes its way across the deep blue water. And on the islands--well, life just slows down. Ahhhhh.

The boundary between Canada and the United States was set at the 49th parallel in the mid-1800s. However, the wording in the agreement was not very clear as to how to divide up the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound. Settlers from both England and America had overtaken the islands, running out the native population. The settlers weren't very concerned with which country owned which island, as long as they could homestead their land. In 1859 an American farmer, frustrated with a pig that kept digging up the potatoes in his garden and eating them, shot the pig. The pig belonged to a British settler, and in the dispute that followed the shooting, both American and British troops were posted to the island. Each side was allowed one hundred men. The British fortified this spot at Garrison Bay at the north end of the island, and the Americans created their fort at Cattle Point, at the south end. Through the following years, no other shots were fired except the one that killed the pig. Instead of battling each other, the British and American troops spent time in each other's camps, socializing and enjoying dinners together.

Finally, in 1871 the British and American governments agreed to arbitration to settle the dispute of who owned the San Juan Islands. The question was given to Kaiser Wilhelm I, emperor of Germany, who decided in favor of the United States. The British left their garrison, and only the American flag remained flying over the island.

The tree near the barracks building in the first picture is a Bigleaf maple which is more than 325 years old. At one time it was considered the world's largest Bigleaf maple, but two huge branches crashed down between 1969 and 1978, reducing its size to something less than the world's largest. Indians, British settlers, British soldiers, American settlers, and now tourists have all enjoyed its majesty, beauty and shade.

The second picture shows the formal gardens that the British planted, as well as the blockhouse on Garrison Bay and the parade ground for mustering the troops. In the top right corner you can see some of the branches of the Bigleaf maple.

It was easy for me to imagine the social life the British and American troops enjoyed on this beautiful island, especially on this sunny day that I visited. I was in the company of good friends, and our stories and laughter rang out over the grounds just as those soldiers' laughter must have when they were enjoying dinner together in each other's camps. What a lovely war!

But I'm sorry for the pig.

Thirty blocks of the business section of early-day Seattle was destroyed by a fire in 1889. After the fire, the merchants rebuilt their stores and banks, using stone instead of wood, as they had initially used. Later, when the city council realized there was a problem with proper drainage of the downtown area--lying low and close to Puget Sound--they decided to raise the streets 8 to 35 feet (2.4 to 10.7 meters). That solution created the next problem--the streets were then so much higher than the businesses that ladders had to be installed to help people get from the streets down to the stores and banks. Yet another problem presented itself: people fell off those ladders--and off the streets. Finally, it was decided that the businesses would all make the second floor of their buildings their main floor, at the new higher street level. New sidewalks were constructed at the street level, creating tunnels underneath them. I took a walking tour through some of those tunnels, walking on the old sidewalks and into the first floors of some of the businesses, all lying beneath the level of present-day downtown Seattle, in the area around Pioneer Square. This picture makes it look quite light down there, but actually the lights were pretty dim. There were lots of cobwebs, too, but not right where we walked.

All of us on the walking tour asked what happened a few weeks ago when the earthquake hit Seattle. Our tour guide explained that no walking tours were conducted until the whole route of tunnels had been inspected. Officials determined that nothing in that underground level had moved or was damaged. However, when we were back on the street our tour guide showed us where bricks had fallen off the outside of some of the old buildings. Those places had already been repaired with new bricks.

The best part of the tour was listening to the funny stories the tour guide told us. Our group laughed all the way through the tour. What a fun way to learn a bit of history!

This mountain was a beautiful, conical peak when I first saw it in 1965. Its summit reached 9,678 feet (2,950 meters) into the sky. It had looked the same to Lewis and Clark when they saw it for the first time, as their expedition floated down the Columbia River in November of 1805. Clark wrote about it in his journal: "It is emensely high and covered with snow, riseing in a kind of cone perhaps the highest pinecal [pinnacle] from the common leavel in America." [Not until Noah Webster came along with his Blue-Backed Speller did spelling of words become standardized among the general population in America. Lewis and Clark weren't bad spellers--they just wrote words the way the words sounded, as everyone else did at the time.]

On Sunday, May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens blew its top--after two months of emitting warning signals and building up a huge bulge on its north face. First, at 8:32 that morning the bulging face of the mountain started avalanching down into the valley below it--a monumental landslide more than a mile (1.6 Kilometers) wide. The landslide released pressure inside the mountain, and within seconds of the start of the landslide a blast of super-hot gas, steam, and rocks came shooting out the side of the mountain, mowing down forests like toothpicks. In the lower left corner of this picture you can see some of the trees that were blasted. The trees are all lying in the same direction they were blown down that day twenty-one years ago. A cloud of volcanic ash rose 80,000 feet (24.4 kilometers) into the air and began drifting to the east, falling onto everything in its path east of the volcano, as the winds blew the ash in that direction. There was a layer of ash many inches thick in some places. The heat from the volcano melted the snow and glaciers on the mountain, and that tremendous amount of water rushed down into the riverbeds below the mountain, carrying downed trees and house-sized rocks in its churning current. In the river valleys below the mountain, towns were flooded and houses were ripped off their foundations. Those rivers flowed into the Columbia River, and the silt level in that river rose so high that ships could not enter the river until it was dredged. More than a hundred people died that day--many of them never found but known to be in the vicinity of the mountain when it blew.

Mount St. Helens is now 1,313 feet (400 meters) shorter than it was, and the valley below the north face of the mountain is changed, as well. It is now full of the part of the mountain that slid down into it. In the picture you are looking at Mount St. Helens from the west, so it's the left side of the mountain that was blown away. Brownish rubble fills what was once a deep pine-covered valley below the left side of the mountain. One lake not visible in the picture was raised two hundred feet (61 meters), and two new lakes were created as a result of the landslide blocking off two rivers that flowed down from the mountain.

Now, twenty-one years later, life has returned to some parts of the landscape below the mountain. Scientists are learning a lot about volcanoes as a result of that eruption, and they are also studying how plant, insect, and animal populations are making a comeback after such total destruction. A new lava cone is growing inside the crater of the mountain, and some think that over hundreds of years, the mountain may create a new top for itself.

In the history of the world's biggest volcano eruptions, this one ranks as a rather small one. It wasn't the first time Mount St. Helens erupted, and it wasn't the largest of its eruptions, as geologists and volcanologists have determined from studying the evidence in the mountain, itself, and in surrounding rock and soil layers. One thing is nearly certain--Mount St. Helens will blow again someday.

Captain William Clark, on an advance scouting trip with Private Joseph Field on October 31, 1805, proceeded down the Columbia River a few miles ahead of the main body of the expedition. After rejoining the corps he wrote in his journal that night:

"A remarkable, high detached rock Stands in a bottom on the Stard. [starboard, or right] Side near the lower point of this Island on the Stard. Side about 800 feet [243.8 meters] high and 400 paces around, we call the Beaten [Beacon] rock."

Beacon Rock is in the distance, near the middle of the first picture. The photo was taken at a point on the highway down the Columbia River from the rock, looking upriver. The rock is actually 848 feet (261.5 meters) high, so Clark's estimate was very close, indeed. The rock is a six-million-year-old core of a shallow volcano. Much of its distinctive stone is columnar basalt, which forms when pooled lava cools and cracks into long polygons of four to eight sides. This type of stone is seen all along the Columbia River Gorge, for at one time this whole region of Washington and Oregon was covered with several hundred feet of lava from thousands of volcanoes which erupted here. As the Cascade Mountain range was later pushed up by shifting plates of the earth, the Columbia River continued cutting through the rising land, creating this beautiful, deep valley (the Columbia River Gorge) that you see in the picture. As the river deepened the valley it left more dense rock (like Beacon Rock) standing alone while washing away softer rock around it.

Henry J. Biddle (descendant of Nicholas Biddle, who was the first editor of Lewis and Clark's journals in Philadelphia in 1814) purchased Beacon Rock in 1915. He bought it from Charles E. Ladd, a prominent Portlander, who had bought it after learning it might be quarried for rock. Biddle assured Ladd that he wanted to preserve the rock for generations to come. Biddle also wanted to build a trail to the top of the rock; he accomplished that goal in 1918.

Biddle's heirs donated the monolith to Washington as a park in 1928, but cost-conscious Governor Hartley refused the offer. When a similar offer was made to Oregon, the governor changed his mind, and Beacon Rock State Park became a part of the Washington state park system.

You can see from the second picture that the trail-building involved some hard work, cutting through stone to create ledges to hike on. Biddle also had to install steel railings and build wooden cross-walks (some of which cross over trail below on switchbacks). I found it to be a strenuous but exhilarating one-mile (1.6 kilometers) hike, made more exciting by the presence of a storm that blew through while I was on the trail. The hard wind drove tiny ice pellets nearly sideways for just a few minutes. By watching the clouds I had anticipated the storm and was able to find shelter under a rock outcropping beside the trail. The view from the top was "tremendious," to borrow a spelling from Lewis and Clark.

Lewis and Clark named this river, which flows into the Snake River from the north, "Drewyer's River." It is known today as the Palouse River, probably named by French fur trappers who came through the area a few years later, unaware that the river had been previously named.

The expedition passed this point on October 13, 1805, and Lewis and Clark decided on the name "Drewyer's River" in honor of George Drouillard, a civilian member of the expedition. They spelled his name phonetically as "Drewyer" in their journals. Drouillard was French-Canadian and Indian and was one of the civilians on the expedition roster. (Most of the others were in the military, including captains Lewis and Clark.)

All through the journals, there are many references to Drewyer excelling as a tracker, hunter, scout, and interpreter. He was considered by Lewis and Clark to be one of the most valuable men on the expedition.

Two years after the expedition returned to St. Louis, Drouillard joined forces with a fur trader, Manuel Lisa. The Corps of Discovery had met Lisa at their winter quarters with the Mandan Indians in 1804-1805, in what later became North Dakota. Lisa later set up a fur trading post at Three Forks, Montana, and Drouillard and others trapped beaver for him on the upper Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. Blackfeet Indians shot and killed Drouillard in 1810.

Today this river valley bottom is filled with water which is backed up behind a reservoir on the nearby Snake River. It was a still morning when I visited this site. There was not a sound to be heard except bird song. As I walked along the top of the grassy area above the beach I spied three families of Canada geese with their fluffy little gray goslings waddling along down at the beach. I stood as quietly as I could, and they remained where they were--but wary and watching me. When my other camera clicked, they all scurried into the water, mothers and fathers swimming on opposite sides of their own goslings to keep them safe from danger as they paddled away. I took this picture with the digital camera after they were gone from sight and I could walk down to their beach. I was sorry I'd disturbed the morning peacefulness for them.

Drouillard would like this place the way it looks today, even though it's very different from how it looked the day he got a river named after himself.