The editors of Cascadia Wild tell us that “land managers and citizens need new norms that take them toward an ecosystems future . . . They must be based on what we know nature produces, not on what we desire nature to produce for us.” This set of “biological and ecological limits that must guide the setting of new ecosystem conservation standards” is something the Forest Service has never really understood.
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Biologists Arthur Sullivan and Mark Shaffer have described the unruly collection of life on earth as “the megazoo.” To a large extent, the Forest Service is the keeper of the Cascadian megazoo. Will it remain a many-ringed circus under a nurturing big top, or will it fade into a more and more tawdry carnival?
I remember a small itinerant circus coming to our tiny community a few years back. As I drove into Naselle, I saw a tethered elephant grazing by the roadside—perhaps the only elephant ever seen in Willapa. But as I gazed in mild shock at the unconformity in local fauna, a carny with a mahout’s hook came over and smacked the beast cruelly to get it back to work hauling lines to erect the tent. The poor pachyderm was so threadbare I could almost see the patches. Is this the sort of attraction the Gifford Pinchot will become—ever more shabby, as it attempts to serve everyone’s demands ad infinitum?
Michelle Allen, in “Believing in Bigfoot” says, “I fell for Bigfoot—hook, line, and sideshow” when she attended the Mid-South Fair in Memphis as a child. “There he was—on the far side of the fair—glass encased and scantily clad in a loin cloth. A recorded message told how Bigfoot had been captured and shot. I fell for it.” Perhaps Bigfoot has no more substance than a bogus freak-show attraction. And perhaps it has. When the creature steps out from the glass case into the full sight of ranger, chief, and president—that’s when the show would really begin at the megazoo.
Will the ringmaster be some overworked ranger—maybe a Harry Cody, inviting everyone with a motorcycle to trick-ride the untrodden trails, or a Big Bull, negotiating the maddening tightwire strung between the demands of Congress and the courts, with no net for his career? Will it be a Pinchot man or a John Muir type? Or maybe an Earth Mother, evolved from one of the many young female professionals treading the Forest Service midway, women like Mary Bean of the Gifford Pinchot, who, while her colleagues were laying out timber sales or sending memos, worked to obliterate roads in and near wilderness areas. It isn’t likely to be a clown like Captain Gutz-Balls, swept up from the loo crew to the supervisor’s chair.
Yet somehow I feel that if Smokey is to survive another fifty years, it will be under the guidance of leaders with a different sense of mission. The Forest Ranger will never be the Green Man. But if enlightened leaders somehow emerged from the flow charts of the USFS, its career foresters could become like the hereditary Order of Verderers, who care for the ancient wood known as the New Forest in England: dedicated to the trees, to the land, through the generations, for the ages.
There are some bright signs. On a field trip in the Olympic National Forest a few years ago to locate a rare butterfly in a stand of old growth designated for sale, I was accompanied by half a dozen biologists and District Ranger Kathy Snow, all of whom were hoping for an excuse to manage the stand in a better way than by balance sheet alone. We didn’t find the butterfly, but the stand remains: an anomaly in a district that has given up more than its fair share of fiber.
The brightest light I have seen in the forest came in the form of an elegant poster for a conference called “Managing Ecosystems for Biodiversity.” Not yet free of the hubris of ecosystem management, it nevertheless got the purpose right. The powwow was cosponsored by the Okanogan and Wenatchee national forests and the Pacific Northwest Forest Sciences Laboratory, Jack Ward Thomas’s old shop. The poster depicted a footprint on the forest floor, made up of elements of natural diversity: a monarch butterfly at the heel, a fishtail in a pool, a skink, oxalis and violets, pebbles and pine needles, feathers and ants and fungi; in the instep a bumblebee visited bunchberry; and the toes were an egg, a rose, an alder leaf, a true bug, and a pine cone. This sweet and whimsical image told of a fresh path into the woods, where we might all step more lightly than we have. And without any doubt it was a Sasquatch track.
Protecting all this diversity while working with affected communities to provide the products and jobs we need on lands that can still be productive, all under the new ground rules, will jog the rangers into the twentieth century—possibly even before it is over. But I can think of nothing that would present the Smokeys with a brighter new day than the arrival of that big footprint right in the middle of the Forest Plan.
On at least one occasion the Forest Service actually invited Bigfoot to stop in and visit. When prospector Perry Lovell found eighteen-inch tracks on his claim in 1969, North American Wildlife Research of Eugene, Oregon, applied to the Applegate Ranger District for a special-use permit to construct a Bigfoot trap. The ten-foot steel cube stood baited and set from 1974 to 1980, catching in that period one bear and one hippie. After a dream visit from the intended quarry, the caretaker left and the trap was sealed open and abandoned. To this day it may be visited as an interpretive attraction.
So the foresters have not always shut out the possibility of hairy giants. Whether or not they ever scuttled the evidence of such a print, they can no longer ignore it. And whether or not it is ever shown to be “real” in the sense of spotty owls and smoky bears, management for Bigfoot might mean better forests for all.
17
Lost in the Big Lava Bed
Stuck in the ruts to the who knows where . . .
—Jack Gladstone, “The Roman Road”
When I left the foresters’ encampment at Trout Lake, I began the last formidable leg of the Dark Divide passage: the Big Lava Bed. When you cross the pine- and dogwood-strewn landscape of the Mount Adams country, dark hulks rear up and surprise you through the scrim of green. These are the lava deposits that flowed from dikes and pipes in the volcanic system, expelled from the magma pool that underlies everything here. Cooling, they froze into pillars and lobes and layers of stone. Now the jumbled basalt lies about like leftovers, a bowl of gelid black-bean chili overturned across the tableland.
Fall colors claimed the shelterwood along the forest roads, chiefly vine maple and dogwood in versions of vermilion. I took a detour, signposted natural bridges, through a mixed dwarfish forest of lodgepole and ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and larch, the larch going yellow. Mountain box and mountain balm wove the field layer; lemon-drop leaves of dogbane among kinnikinnick and long-blown beargrass made the ground layer.
The Natural Bridges of Klickitat County are superb landforms whose existence, a hundred miles from my home, I’d never guessed at. The formation consists of long, sinuous, open-roofed lava tubes, some thirty to eighty feet across from rim to rim, spanned by lava arches that look remarkably like ancient mossy human-built bridges in Cornwall. The tubes’ bottoms are bunched up with boulders from rockslides. One rim supports dry old forest; the other, recent Doug-fir plantation. In a bouldery hollow, vine maples billowed in a red swell like molten lava.
I ventured under the eaves of one bridge whose egress was plugged and found something I’d never seen before: moss stalactites, the wispy growths of two or three species of moss bonded together to form long inverted cones. Hundreds of these green icicles, some as long as six inches, drooped from the lintel. Some were blunt, others quite sharp, many web-slung. As a child I carried a passion for stalactites but a phobia for webs—finding these would have been a dilemma indeed. I had studied stalactites and stalagmites in every cave or limestone mine I could visit, and later, as a ranger-naturalist leading walks in Sequoia National Park’s ornate Crystal Cave, I reveled in them. But I had never heard of mosses gathering into long plaits at the dripping doorways of caves. Coming across a natural feature of which I’ve been utterly ignorant throws me. I wondered how long these all-moss formations had taken to grow and what th
ey could tell me about who had come before.
Layers of lava sills one to six feet thick receded into the low cave. Greenish-pale lichens shone almost phosphorescent. Crinkly sheets of gray foliose lichens hung down like wings, and pale agaric mushrooms pushed up from below. One ruby-red and one bright yellow crinkled leaf lay before the entrance on the needled, mossy mud. The green curvy wands of the maples fended off would-be entrants. Old gray leaves lined the floor beneath the trees, whose living leaves were grass-green near the cave, butter in the shade, scarlet where they reached out into the canyon’s sun. It was cool in the lichen-light, the vine maples’ shade, the cave’s gape.
But not quiet. People picnicked nearby. “That’s a good buy, eight of these for a buck. Shoulda got twenty-four of ’em.” Most of the visitors seemed preoccupied with getting the “best shot” of the bridges on their instant cameras. But that’s interpretive sites for you. People don’t come to these places to marvel at moss stalactites or to find silence. They’re taking a break from jobs and television, malls and movies, and it’s their forest as much as mine. Their method of enjoying it should not concern me. Still, I found myself shrinking into my cave, Grendel-like, thinking rude thoughts about people who discard filter tips willy-nilly and wishing someone would please bite the heads off these nice, yammering folks.
I retreated to the eastern end of the site. The biggest of maybe six or eight bridges was here, farther into the young plantation, where few would look. I heard two or three pikas among log-strewn boulders—a training ground for living in slash piles? But this was not just pika and golden-mantled ground squirrel habitat. There were several elegant Bigfoot dens—at least until the place became a logjam, a picnic spot, and a photo op.
Stumps of old-growth Douglas fir stood around, the culls dumped into the ravine, no doubt for the benefit of pikas (I reasoned ironically); why else would the Forest Service allow logging right up to the edge of a prime geological interpretive site and the dumping of logging waste into the middle of it?
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Roads ring the Big Lava Bed, but none have been built into it farther than a long stone’s throw. My plan was to spend a few days in the area, roaming its rim roads and venturing within wherever I could find a wormhole. I drove down the east side in the late afternoon. Dry Creek was double-dry; Lost Creek disappeared as promised. South Prairie, grassy openings with boggy bits and aspens on its western edges, hosted more cows than any other visible form of life.
Up under Little Huckleberry Mountain the road followed the very edge of the Big Lava Bed, all the way to the south end. Humpy lava poured right down to the verge. On foot I followed a hunter’s trail a short way up and in, finding it very difficult to negotiate. The place was both incredibly beautiful, with vine maple glowing red in green grottoes, and incredibly rough, with holes and traps and turgid tongues of wicked dark rock poking everywhere.
This was no place for backpacking! I knew that I’d been wise (if cowardly—not an infrequent match) to choose several penetrations of the Big Lava Bed over a single long traverse. As the Gifford Pinchot Forest Plan says, “Due to its size and the roughness of terrain, exploring the Big Lava Bed requires initiative, independence, and stamina”; it is “infrequently explored by hikers”—both understatements.
That same document describes the Big Lava Bed as having been “formed by a relatively recent (less than thirty-five hundred years) volcanic eruption from a cone and crater which produced one or more flows of lava.” An elevated lava platform near the crater of the big cinder cone, however, has been carbon-dated at eighty-one hundred years. The Seattle Times called the bed “one of the largest and most impressive sheets of recent lava in Washington” and said, “This waste of basaltic lava covers 12,500 acres . . . posed in a wild array of disorder and violence. About nine miles long, the bed varies in width from one to four miles.”
The Forest Service once maintained two trails across narrow sections of the flow, linking fire lookouts, and strung a simple telephone line along the northern crossing. These were abandoned in the forties. Where I first poked my way in might have been the remains of the Little Huckleberry–Red Mountain telephone trail. The area has since been undisturbed except for a modest mineral claim in the southern end for ornamental lava and rare visits by hunters, botanists, and geologists. As the Forest Plan puts it, possibly indicating a bias, “recreation activities include hiking, hunting, sightseeing, hunting, and plant study.”
The planners were also a little confused about the fauna of the area. “The lava flow and its vegetation are used,” they wrote, “by a variety of rock-dwelling insects and other mammals.” Bigfoot has often been called a bugbear (Webster’s: “an ogre, something that causes needless terror”), but never an insect. Perhaps the Forest Service has bugbears in mind when they speak of mammaliferous insects. Certainly the lava beds furnish niches, in both senses of the word, for many mammals and insects, and for at least one big hairy bugbear.
On the first day of October I made my way to a point where I figured I could penetrate the Big Lava Bed on its northwest flank. A red pumice face that had been quarried for gravel made a deep coral angle of repose by the road. It hinted at the complexity of the igneous history of the area, for anyone who thinks it’s all just a uniform black-rock mess. I passed the pumice shortly before coming to Crest Camp, an old base for horse packers with hitching posts and a loading ramp. Here I was only about three miles from the Indian Racetrack in the southern extremity of Indian Heaven, near Red Mountain. It made me wonder whether the Indians who gathered for olallie and salmon and stories and horseracing up on the plateau, and who surely used Crest Camp too, ever spent much time in the lavaland to the south and east. With the thoroughly inviting open meadows of Indian Heaven so near, why would they want to?
A turkey vulture flew up from beside the road into a lichen-draped fir. I could see sky through its nostrils, see its hood—useful on this chilly morning—up around its bare and lurid neck. Extra lymph glands in their warty wattles lend vultures immunity against the septic substances they love. Investigating, I found the attraction—a road-killed coyote. It was fairly new, yet a mass of maggots writhed beneath its face, and it was very ripe to the nose. A rotting road-killed Bigfoot, which is supposed to smell horrible to start with, would take terrific dedication to deal with.
I drove to the top of a spur road off the eminence of Crest Camp. It should have offered a great view over the Big Lava Bed, but dense fog swiped the scene. Lots of logging loomed, and in the mists in the burned clear-cut below, lots of Bigfeet roamed, but all the apes had roots. A sign read LYNX evaluation plantation cowlitz tree improvement co-op. established 1988 by wind river ranger district. funding provided by batesville casket co. batesville, indiana. With a product like that in mind, this should be truly sustainable forestry. A second sign, with a routed tree design, noted site preparation by wind river fuels crew 1988.
The coffin-wood project bordered the Pacific Crest Trail on its far side. I planned to cross a low saddle to link with the trail, then follow it northerly to the edge of the lava bed. The firs whipped, cold mists blowing through their limber tops, as I set out into the stormy woods.
The “saddle” seemed to be a steep hill of open second-growth hemlock with beargrass and bunchberry below. It made pleasant going at first, but the terrain rose more than the one contour line indicated on the USGS map. Then I plowed through some hundred yards of bucked-up blowdown, a bitch to cross, and emerged on a ridge, clear-cut on top.
I was way west of the lava bed, not where I wanted to be. I struggled through the clear-cut to a line signed “Boundary of Partial Cut,” which was none too partial. There I found a logging road and a boom landing that I certainly hadn’t expected. Juniper, hazel, and Rocky Mountain maple fuzzed a beautiful beargrassed ridge. When the sun came out, I felt hot and sweaty in my wool and Gore-Tex. The cold wind shifted into the treetops, and I hoped for no more windthrow today as I ti
mber-bashed my way back down to the car by a guessed route that got me there.
I realized I had totally hosed up, taken the wrong “saddle,” and ended up in a logging-road system south and west of where I wanted to be. People say compasses don’t work well around the Big Lava Bed, and I was inclined to believe it. At least it made a convenient excuse for my poor orienteering.
From a spot a little farther along the road I could see the impressive crater in the north end of the Lava Bed. Orienting on it, I was able to find the true saddle, not far from my earlier takeoff. In three minutes I hopped over the low rise and landed on the Pacific Crest Trail on the edge of the lava.
Chilly wind and bright sun made a nice combo for exploring. The PCT runs along the Big Lava Bed for about two miles after dropping from the racetrack and before darting west toward Panther Creek. The land had been logged right down to the prime trail of the West; the trees in the little buffer area had, predictably, blown down, entailing much bucking for the trail crew and a not-so-pretty sight for hikers.
I worked my way maybe a mile into the bed, lit by late slanted beams. My feet found a very complex texture of broken basalt, sills, caves, chunks, boulders, layers, and screes; then I reached fairly flat terrain covered with dense, small lodgepole pines, giving way to grottoes, chasms, caved-in tubes, and bridges. There were no picnickers. Dark firs and pines contrasted with the deep reds of vine maple in crevices. Chipmunks worked a wonderland of lichens, mosses, creepers, and gone-over beargrass plumes. Porcupines stripped bark. Douglas squirrels took hermitage in grottoes lush green with moss. A pika sounded in the distance, over vague thunder. Coyotes, by their scat, gave away their endless pursuit of the others. This place should truly be a pika paradise, unless Seeahtlk munches off their little harelike heads. There were geeks aplenty, but no nuthatches for harmony—a rare occasion for this trip, as was the utter absence of aircraft overhead.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 29
