Washington Vs. Oregon and BLM Lands

Washington and Oregon are very strongly linked historically as both were once part of the Oregon Country and later the Oregon Territory. We share a number of other characteristics: the Pacific Ocean on our coast, the Cascade Range dividing the states into a dry east half and a wet west half, a western low land with population centers, cloudy wet winters on the west side and icy cold winters on the east.

 

But there are some big differences. Eastern Oregon, with the exception of the northern Umatilla Basin, is mostly high plateau country with scattered high ranges while eastern Washington has the large Columbia Basin and massive irrigated land areas and the rich dry land farming of the Palouse. Eastern Washington was and is overall a much richer farm landscape and as such was much more heavily settled via homesteads and settlers buying railroad land grants.

 

That settlement legacy has also greatly influenced land management at the federal level. There is a lot more Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in Oregon than Washington. The Oregon/Washington BLM district maps are telling. Washington has one district. Oregon has nine. 

 

BLM Districts in Oregon and Washington

 

BLM lands in Washington State are bright yellow.

 

BLM manages approximately 450,000 acres in Washington State. The vast majority is in eastern Washington with the remaining a scattered set of rocks, headlands and islands in the San Juan Islands area of northwest Washington. The San Juan BLM lands were recently designated a National Monument san-juan-islands-national-monument-map.

 

By comparison the BLM Lakeview District in Oregon alone manages 3.5 million acres.

 

 

BLM Lakeview District, BLM land is yellow

 

Given the high scrub steppe of eastern Oregon, it is not surprising that there is so much more federal public land in eastern Oregon than in Washington, but the same applies to western Oregon as well. Note in the above Oregon/Washington map there are 5 BLM districts in western Oregon. The majority of these lands are timber lands, but there is also valley bottom lands.

BLM Eugene District

 

The story of how these lands ended up in BLM management is described http://www.blm.gov/or/files/OC_History.pdf. The short story is these were railroad land grant lands that the federal government took back (revested). This did not happen in Washington State (there are a few that ague it should have). The vast railroad land grants have and sill greatly influence forest policy, economics and politics. In Washington the privately held land grant forests still influence politics and forest policy.

Clark County: When A County Government Goes Bad

The Clark County Commission appointed a GOP State Senator Don Benton to head their Environmental  Services Department. Besides the question of his qualifications for the job (benton-clark-county-environmental-services-job) a more repellent aspect of this action by two of the three Clark County Commissioners was the process that forced Benton's predecessor out (benton-predecessor-forced-out). The short version: the director was trying to take action against a couple of county employees to that were doing free lance work on county time. One of the employees was a friend of one of the commissioners.

Well yuk is about all I can say.

In Washington State the default form of county governance is the county is run by three elected commissioners. Some counties have shifted to a charter form of government with what amounts to a locally crafted form of government. Typically this leads to an elected council and elected executive (Whatcom, Snohomish, King and Pierce) but Clalam has stuck with the three commissioner scheme (they elect the planning director) and San Juan the most recent went with a council and a hired manager.

All the other counties (I'm doing this from memory) have the default 3 commissioners. Any government is only as good as the folks that get elected. It is an efficient way to run a local government and a commissioner can be much more responsive to citizen concerns as all she/he needs to do is persuade one other commissioner. The down side is commissioners are very powerful and if they are unable to check their own power, you get the mess like Clark County.   

Mountains Falling Apart: James McCaplin Lecture May 7

Sackungen

James McCaplin, the 2013 AEG Jahns Distinguished Lecturer will present a talk Tuesday, May 7 at 4 pm in ES 100 at Western Washington University titled: The Mountains Are Falling Apart; A Spectrum of Mass Failures from Landslides through Deep-Seated Gravitational Spreading (Sackung), to "Unfolding" of Folds.

One of the benefits of living in a town with a great university geology department.

There are definite Sackungens in northwest Washington. The above image could easily be used to to describe the steep slopes above parts of the South Fork Nooksack Valley or the Samish River Valley. One of the lessons of  Sackungens is not to get them confused with fault lines. These can be enormous landslides and indeed on two occasions I spent the better part of a day or two thinking I was seeing fault scarps. This paper by Varnes, Radebruch-Hall and Savage (1989) http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1496/report.pdf  is a great introduction even if a bit Colorado centric.  

Notes on Being Driftless

Sinsinawa Mound viewed from the east

I visited the Driftless Area a few of weeks ago. The Driftless Area is so named due to the lack of glacial drift in an area of the upper Midwest otherwise dominated by glaciated landscapes. Most of the Driftless Area is in southwest Wisconsin with a bit of an overlay into southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa and extreme northwest Illinois. For some reason during the last glacial period the continental ice went around this area and for a period of time it was a large island of ice free land surrounded by glacial ice.

 

Driftless Area is the area circled by the blue hatched line

Blue hatched line is early Wisconsin ice extent

Green hatched line is late Wisconsin ice extent
(National Map)

Southwest Wisconsin shaded relief (National Map)

 

The lack of glaciation means the soils here are different and the stream systems are much more fully incised into the landscape. The Mississippi River flows through the area giving the area some topographic relief such that there are many deep narrow canyons and high steep bluffs along this section of the river.

The hill in picture is not much to look at by Washington State standards, but it is the highest summit for many miles. And it has some history - an Indian/pioneer battle, a very old convent, lead mining. And the term mound is interesting. In this case the mound is natural, but there are a number of man made mounds in the area that were built in the shape of animals and Mima-like mounds that are man made.

No island-like Driftless Areas are present in Washington State. At the beginning of my trip I had views of mountain ranges with clear evidence of past glaciations: tracks-of-bull-lake-and-pinedale-glaciations and alluvial-fans-and-glacial-moraines. But another range, the Blue Mountains in southeast Washington was not glaciated.

View of the northern Blue Mountains, Washington State

The Blue Mountains in Washington State are over 6,000 feet, but no glacial cirques or glacial deposits have been mapped in the range. Somewhat higher portions of the range to the south in Oregon were glaciated. The topography of the range is consistent with the range not being glaciated. If glaciers did exist, they did not leave any of the classic U-shaped valleys or any readily identified moraines or cirques. That said, I once was doing some geology work in a lower range in Montana and came across a previously unidentified glacial moraine. But regardless, the lack of glaciation in the Blue Mountains of Washington is a bit of a curiosity.

Shaded relief map of Blue Mountains

Root of a Volcanic Arc, Fidalgo Ophiolite

I got a good look at the root of an ancient volcanic arc on Fidalgo Island south of Anacortes. Plagio-granite intrusions injected into one another as feeder dikes to a long disappeared volcanic arc. 

This volcanic arc root is an estimated 160 million year old volcanic arc that is one part of the Fildalgo Ophiolite, a slab of ocean crust that accreted to North American approximately 100 million years ago. Being a Western Washington University geology grad student I am of the accretion to the south school with later lateral emplacement and further thrust stacking (brown-gsa-cord-07-san-juans.pdf). I made a modest contribution to this interpretation with my thesis in the North Cascades.

In addition to the igneous intrusions we noted a fair bit of slikenslides indicative of some localized slippage along plains of weakness in the rock likely from more recent folding.

And a substantial overhang. A good dry spot, but a little stinky.

And great views.

The purpose of this rock inspection was to assess a rock fall hazard. The rock exposures and views were all gravy.

As can be seen in last picture, there were rocks that had tumbled to the forest floor below sitting directly on undecayed sticks and needles indicating that rocks were reaching some areas of the slope below. Basically we were doing an assessment on a much smaller scale to avoid this:

 

Bill Purnell

All things come to an end. An engineering geologist associate of mine, Bill Purnell, died early this week. If not for Bill, my life would have taken a decidedly different path. I worked for Bill for 4 years in the 1990s.

Bill grew up in rural Jefferson County and even lived for a time on Protection Island at the opening to Discovery Bay. He had a mammoth tusk that he and is brother had pulled out of the shoreline bluff on display in the office. The shoreline bluffs of Jefferson County were the inspiration for Bill to study geology. Bill worked for a period of time with a large geotech firm out of Seattle, but upon doing some work in Bellingham figured out how to stay in Bellingham by starting his own firm.

He ran a one or two man show for a long period of time and was the primary small scale geotech company in Bellingham. Over the years he hired many students out of Western Washington University. The company was always too small to hang onto anyone for any length of time until the mid 1990s. At that time his company started to take off and expand via a construction boom and some steady geotech work and environmental work and a few big clients. It was at that time Bill hired me.

At the time I was managing a Superfund cleanup in Tacoma and had drifted into becoming a field project guy in a large corporation. It was a big change to come into a small company where we were all in it together one way or another.

Bill had tremendous confidence in me. He assigned me all sorts of projects in which I had absolutely no previous experience. Hence, I learned a lot in a short period of time. I also learned a lot about business form Bill. Good lessons and bad. I worked at W.D. Purnell Associates for 4 years. I liked everyone I worked with very much and was very fond of Bill. It was tough to leave, but the hard calculations of business and risk determined that I was much better off going on my own versus staying on with a new ownership structure. I could never had made that calculation without the experience I had gained working with Bill.

There is a rather large group of former Bill employees scattered about northwest Washington. We still often team up on projects. I sometimes wonder what the company could have looked like if the business calculation for the employees was just tweaked a bit so that more of us would have stayed on.

After I had worked for Bill for about a year, he and I attended a forestry talk. I introduced him to a couple of folks as my boss. Bill interrupted me and said no we were associates. And it was true. His behaving as the boss never extended much beyond having signed to front of the pay check. He was the last boss I have had and I appreciated being his associate. 

Wave Cut Terraces in the San Juans

I was messing around with LiDAR images of the San Juans as I had a request for use of an image from a past blog post and I am working on a few projects in the San Juans where LiDAR might be of help.

The messing around part was looking at wave cut terraces from post glacial isostatic rebound (with some additional local explanation isostatic-rebound-on-northwest-blakely). I started looking at bedrock areas as well. Most of the bedrock upland areas above the level of local late ice age sea-level are free of glacial sediment. This features could be used as a sea-level indicator as well.

That said I did find some interesting wave cut terraces.

Blakely Island

The Blakely image has been posted before. But it also shows the elevated bedrock area that has very little glacial sediment and for that matter very little soil development. The lack of smoothing of the bedrock by the glacial ice suggests that the ice filled in the fractures and joints and the ice flow simply was incorporated for the most part above the rock surface and the bedrock was not eroded very much. This is a common pattern throughout the San Juan Islands.

Part of Lopez Island

The image of Lopez is interesting in that wave cut terraces are restricted to the steep slope on the eastern side of the image. The upland area shows what may be glacial drumlins, but they are not well developed and possibly some sort of water flow or currents have altered this area while it was below sea-level.

Cattle Point, San Juan Island

Cattle Point is located on the southeast end of San Juan Island. This area is within the San Juan National Historic Park. It is the place where Americans set up camp during the joint occupation of the San Juan Islands with Great Britain post The Pig War. The Cattle Point area is also a great place to visit for metamorphic geologists as there are some great bedrock exposures along the shore with intense thrust fault shear zones and much debate about thrust direction.

But the wave cut terraces on the hillside my be the best in the San Juans. One possible explanation is that this area is fairly well exposed to open water so the wave energy was likely much greater here than other sites. The LiDAR also shows the small dune field that covers a section of wave cut terraces. The pit like structures sure look like kettles - places where blocks of ice were stuck and melted leaving a pit in the landscape.

Aerial image of Cattle Point (USGS)

The dunes can be seen in the aerial image. The kettle idea would require a field trip to confirm. The terraces show up a bit as the soil and slope aspects are just enough to alter vegetation growth habit.