Everett, Pullman and San Francisco

I've been doing a fair bit of work in Everett over the past month. At one site last week it felt a bit like San Francisco with a bank of fog hovering along the ridge line of downtown and me being in the sun. I have spent a fair bit of time in the San Francisco area and hence the summer fog bank and sun in an urban setting triggered a memory. A number of years ago while returning from Idaho, we stopped for pizza in Pullman. While eating the pizza at a table on the sidewalk, a little girl exclaimed "This is just like San Francisco". Initially it seemed funny, but then we noted we were on a steep hill slope in an urban setting and we were eating pizza - not really all that different from SF's North Beach in the eyes of someone that was 3 years old. I had the same feeling with the sun, fog and breeze last week in Everett.

Everett Avenue Everett looking west at the fog on an otherwise sunny day

Basalt Injections Near Brewster

The Waterville Plateau area in central Washington is full of geologic highlights. I have posted on few: moment-in-deep-time-back-to-back, giant-ripples, field-of-erratics, washington-states-other-mounds, glacial-erratics-near-grand-coulee and mini-badland-southeast-of-bridgeport. There are plenty of other sites associated with the Columbia River Basalts, the continental ice margin and the Missoula Floods. 

On a recent trip I stopped along the Big Bend (one of several) east of Brewster on the Columbia River to admire the glacial terraces on the opposite side of the river.

Terraces along lower Okanogan River and Columbia River

The terraces developed along the ice margins of the Okanogan ice lob approximately 13,000 years ago. The level terraces are excellent apple orchard sites if water can be delivered to the terrace. The Columbia at this point opens up into a rather broad valley compared to narrow canyon reaches both up stream and down stream. The valley is filled with water backed up from Wells Dam downstream.

As nice as the view across the river is at this location, there is a spectacular road cut on the opposite side of the road.

The outcrop is mostly Cretaceous to Jurassic granodiorite that has been partially very sheared from faulting with numerous injections of basalt magma. The granodiorite is referred to as the Summit-Frazer Complex is a southern extension of the Okanogan Block - a fairly coherent band of grantic rocks that extends well to the north into British Columbia. This is one of the southernmost exposures of this accreted terrane that was added to the North American margin. Basalt dikes cutting through granitic rocks is not unusual, but in this case the dikes have ends with the injections frozen in place.

Thin sliver of basalt within highly sheared granitic rock

Another thin sliver of basalt within shear zone

Close up of basaltic injection

Unsheared granodiortite country rock

Mini columnar jointing along the basalt dike chill margin

I really do not know much about these rocks. The granitic county rock is much older - on the order of 120 million years. The shearing and basalt injections may be associated with extension in the area in the Eocene roughly 45 million years ago. Complex rocks with a well exposed location.

Location map. A very wide pull out is located along the river adjacent to the outcrop.

You Are Being Watched

My plotting out the route of the Press Expedition through the Olympic Mountains reminded me of an article from Peirce County. I recently traversed to the wilds of rural Pierce County east of Tacoma and Fort Lewis. This part of our landscape is a mix of small towns, suburban cities and rather heavily developed rural areas. Pierce County has begun a program using aerial photographs to identify unpermitted buildings HERE. This sort of program should bring out some interesting philosophy and political alignments. The program has identified at least 17 unpermitted homes, and they haven't even begun looking at east county area.

Frequent high resolution aerial photographs are now a common tool for planners. If I can spot fractures in a logging road using aerial photographs (deep-seated-landslide-in-upper-trout-creek), spotting unpermitted buildings using a GIS overlay should be pretty easy.

An Olympian Expedition

The Olympic Mountains presented an odd problem. A mix of very thick forest, steep slopes and the fact that the mountains did not present a barrier to be crossed left the interior of the range as terra incognita all the way into the time Washington became a state. The mountain range is not long and was easily circumvented by simply sailing around them or traveling via well established trails and then later river boats and roads along the Chehalis River south of the range.

The result was that all the way into the 1880s, despite towns and cities growing up within view of the range, the interior of the range was unknown. With coastal Indians decimated by disease and also the great quake and tsunami of 1700 as well as the cultural upheaval brought about by the influx of Europeans and Americans any knowledge of the interior of the range, if any once existed, was lost.

As Seattle grew into a large city, residences began to speculate about what was in the interior of a range that was located a mere 25 miles from the city. Speculation ran to great mineral wealth, unknown species, monsters, a great lost tribe and civilization living within an idyllic valley. In the Fall of 1889 the Press Expedition began their trek to penetrate through the range from the Elwha River in the north and out via the Quinalt River at the southwest end of the range.

The expedition did not have satellite and aerial images like we do, but I plotted out the expedition route.

Press Expedition route

The expedition began with rather remarkable optimistic view of how travel through this landscape would proceed. First, they began the trip in early December assuming that it would be a mild winter. Unfortunately the winter proved to be very cold and their location on the north facing Olympic slopes put them in a bad spot. When western Washington is cold it is typically due to cold air flowing out of the Fraser River valley from the interior of British Columbia. This produces a northeast to southwest flow of air aimed directly at the Olympic Range. As the cold air flows across the Strait of Juan de Fuca it picks up moisture and then as it begins to rise over the Olympics the air cools further dumping copious amounts of snow on the lower slopes. This weather pattern continued throughout the winter greatly slowing the expedition progress.

The second optimistic idea was that the expedition would be able to travel well up the Elwha Rive via boat. After building a raft the party struggled with portage after portage until the gave up the idea.

Once deep in the range, the party knew that at some point they would have to leave the Elwha and cross over into the Quinalt River. The big question was where to do it. The image below shows the unfortunate route they picked.

The difficult detour

As can be seen, the party headed up a tributary, but their path west was blocked by glacier clad jagged mountain ridges. They followed one drainage by ascending a ridge line and traversing through deep early spring snow to the top of the drainage divide. The descended the ridge and found themselves back on the Elwha River as the upper reaches of the river curved around to the west. However, see low spot on the ridge to the west the party crossed over the ridge through the snow and on to the Quinalt River.

James Christie, Charles Barnes, John Sims, John Crumback, Christopher Hayes and Harris Runnalls were the first to pass through these mountains. They answered some of the speculations about the mountains. I make about 20 trips over to the Olympic Peninsula every year for work, but I have yet to enter the interior of the range - it is still terra incognita for me.

A good read Across the Olympic Mountains The Press Expedition, 1889-90 by Robert Wood provided a fair bit of the information in this post.

Lake Whatcom Forest Reserve Park: On Base Forest Acres

As posted previously HERE, the State Board of Natural Resources approved an interchange of State Trust Lands in the Lake Whatcom watershed. The trust land now looks like this:

Blocked up Trust Lands in Lake Whatcom watershed

The light green on the map are the County Forest Board lands and the pink are the Common School, Scientific School, Capital Buildings and Agricultural School Trust lands. The goal of the exchange was to consolidate or block up the County Forest Board lands into contiguous land and the other trust lands as contiguous lands.

One issue that has received some discussion was How much timber land would be removed from the timber land base? This issue was raised at the Board meeting and it is being raised by timber industry reps and by those opposed to a forest reserve park in the watershed. The map below is of help in understanding the amount of land that may be impacted by reconveyance and establishment of a forest reserve park.

Timber management constraints

Reconveyance area outlined in red

The red outlined areas indicate the area that will be reconveyed to the County for park purposes. Within the park boundaries, dark green, pink, orange and purple areas can not be harvested. The yellow and brown areas are potentially inaccessible due to constraints on building roads across unstable slopes (This access issue requires site specific ground truthing). The light green areas can be logged. However, even some of the light green areas may be for all practical purposes out of potential harvest simply because of the cost of road construction to access these areas (a few of these areas may be potentially harvested via helicopter, but based on DNR analysis very unlikely).

A glance at the map shows that only about 20% of the land on the east side of the lake park area is within areas that can be harvested. And even within those areas that can be, access via logging truck is very problematic.  The proposed park area on the west side of the lake is approximately 50% "on base" for harvest. Some, but not all, of these on base areas are accessible with minimal road building. 

Based on the Lake Whatcom Landscape Plan as well as my own on the ground assessment of some of the areas, I estimate that amount of timber acreage the reconveyance will remove from commercial timber land acreage to be approximately 2,200 acres. I am sure quibble and arguing over exact numbers could be done. My purpose here is to attempt to bring some clarity to the acreage issue. And it should be noted that some limited timber management activity is likley on portions of the County Forest Resrve Park once a full management plan is developed.  

A bit of historic perspective on the process thus far is HERE

One More Step Towards Lake Whatcom Reconveyance

Jared Paben at the Bellingham Herald covered the Washington State Board of Natural Resources (BNR)approval of the trusts exchanges in the Lake Whatcom watershed.
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I get quoted mostly because I called Jared to let him know how the vote went and Jared knew that this is an issue I have been working on for a really long time. Yeah, I am very happy about this. My experience with BNR votes has led me to expect delay BNR Punts. But after a very clear presentation by DNR staff with no caveats or alarms, the Board voted 5-0 to approve an exchange between the various state trust lands within the Lake Whatcom watershed.

While, perhaps not pleased that the County will be seeking to reconvey 8,900 acres from Department of Natural Resources (DNR) management to County management as a forest reserve park, the BNR through approval of the exchange ensured that the lands that will still be DNR managed will be the easiest to log lands and that the County park land will be in the areas of the watershed that would present much greater difficulty to log and areas where logging poses the greater risk of causing sediment loading problems for the lake.

The Board did here testimony from those opposed to the parks. The opposition was primarily backed by forest industry folks with a seasoning of various political groups using the name Freedom and Heartland. I little of the testimony is a bit off on the facts. You can hear the testimony HERE. The testimony starts at 35:00. My bit is at 64:25.

Previous posts: whatcom-county-council-moves-forward and lake-whatcom-reconveyance

Fresh Glacial Striatations

Glacial striations are always a pleasure to see. They are a reminder of the past. I came across an excellent fresh exposure where even the finest scratches in the bedrock were readily apparent. The site was along a shoreline. Periodic high waves have been removing the glacial drift that is covering the glacial striated bedrock exposing very unweathered striatations etched into the metamorphosed basalt.