DAY TWENTY-NINE (Sunday, July 21): Another beautiful day.
We have had the most incredible run of good weather. We are very grateful.
Today, we had a very good and remarkably low-cost breakfast
at the kind of café which has become a rarity - a family run café on main
street in Sedro-Woolley. We each had a substantial plate of food, plus coffee
or juice, for a total of $16.00!
Ellen found there another rarity - a rack of postcards of local scenes
created by a local photographer - they were $1.00 each and she got seven of
them. Grab them while you can!
By the way, I learned that Sedro-Woolley is the result of
the merger, in 1899, of two rival, neighboring towns, Sedro and Woolley. If you
want to read a really fascinating history of this town go to
-->
http://www.skagitriverjournal.com/S-W/Pre1900/Bughouse01.html
This town's history is a window on the almost unbelievable
world of the early exploitation of the old-growth forests of cedar and fir in
Washington in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the early
twentieth.
Sedro was founded by Mortimer Cook, who had moved to the
area from Santa Barbara to take advantage of a railroad and logging boom. He
wanted to name the town "Bug" because of the abundance of mosquitoes,
but his wife and others talked him out of it. Instead he took the Spanish word
for "cedar" -
cedro - changed the "c" to an "s",
and got "Sedro." The town was relocated almost immediately a bit
higher because of flooding by the Skagit River, and in a matter of a couple of
years, there were eleven trains arriving daily in Sedro!
Meanwhile, Philip A. Woolley moved to
Sedro from - of all places - Elgin, Illinois! Take note family!
He founded a new town just northeast of
Sedro to take advantage of the knowledge he had gained that three new railroads
would soon cross there. (There must have been a beehive of railroads back
then!). The town he gave his name to flourished and soon eclipsed Sedro. I
guess that eventually it became obvious that the two towns should become one,
but there was bitter rivalry over its name. Result? A hyphenated compromise:
Sedro-Woolley.
 |
| An early Sedro-Woolley house |
 |
| An even earlier house - living in a cedar stump! |
 |
| This is the kind of log the early loggers found - over 9 feet in diameter. |
After breakfast we went up into North Cascades National
Park, to the Visitor Center in Newhalem, about an hour's drive. The NCNP is, in
a way, the other side of the coin from the history of Sedro-Woolley: it was
formed in 1968 to preserve what the exploitation of forests that created towns
like Sedro-Woolley was destroying. The only thing that saved the forests in at
least parts of NCNP was their utter inaccessibility due to the ruggedness of
the terrain. The geology of the North Cascade mountains is very complex, and in
some ways still somewhat mysterious to geologists, and thus controversial. These
mountains are the result of massive shifts, lateral thrusts, volcanic eruptions, glaciers, oceans, upthrusts,
erosians - you name it - over millions of years. Just to give you an idea, the result is places like the
"Bell Pass Melange."
"On top of the Chilliwack River
terrane rests the Bell Pass mélange. Mélange
is French for mix, and geologic mélanges are very mixed rocks; they are
hodge-podges on a grand scale. Much of the Bell Pass mélange is made up of sedimentary rocks,
including sandstone, shale, and chert. Basalt is also abundant in some areas.
The chert, shale, and basalt are not only mixed, but highly broken up. The
continuous layers of bedding are gone; only blocks and pieces remain. The rocks
look faulted, or, more expressively, smeared. Blocks of hard basalt or chert
stick out here and there as resistant knobs. But the mélange contains exotic
rocks as well, things we do not expect to find mixed into unmetamorphosed
sedimentary or volcanic rocks. Exotic blocks in the mélange are metamorphic rocks,
such as gneiss and schist, which came from deep in the Earth’s crust, and ultramafic rocks
dark colored, rich in iron and magnesium which came from deeper in the mantle.
The sedimentary parts of the Bell Pass mélange are mostly oceanic in origin,
but many of the exotic blocks are not. The blocks or "knockers"
of gneiss (being hard, they resist the knocking of a geologist’s hammer) in the
Bell Pass mélange were called the Yellow Aster Complex
by Peter Misch, who
named the formation for Yellow Aster Meadows,
which is underlain by a large slab of gneiss. The gneiss was formed deep in the
crust, at relatively high temperatures. Associated with it are igneous rocks.
Both the gneiss and igneous rocks have been smashed and further metamorphosed
at cooler temperatures. The origin of much Yellow Aster gneiss is obscure, but
on Park Butte,
gneiss rich in calcium minerals and associated with marble indicates that some
Yellow Aster rocks were sedimentary rocks before high-temperature metamorphism.
The association of metamorphosed sedimentary rocks and plutonic igneous rocks
is suggestive of a continental setting, although it is surprising to find such
rocks amidst the relatively unmetamorphosed oceanic rocks that comprise most of
the Bell Pass mélange. Even more startling in the mélange are blocks of ultramafic
rock. They began existence in the mantle. Most ultramafic chunks in the Bell
Pass mélange are small, a few feet to a few hundreds of feet across. The
largest block of ultramafic rock in the Bell Pass melange is the Twin Sisters
Mountain massif, made mostly of dunite, a rock consisting of the mineral
olivine. Except for the remarkably unchanged Twin Sisters dunite, many of the
ultramafic blocks are now partly or entirely made of serpentinite."
I don't pretend to understand that paragraph, but it is
clear that a series of unimaginable and varied cataclysms have formed what is
today North Cascades National Park.
 |
| This chart shows the geological diversity of North Cascades |
We watched, as we usually do, the film at the Visitors
Center which gives an introduction to the park. This particular film was a more
extreme example of a phenomenon I had already noticed at the other parks we
have visited - a strong religious dimension - not Christian or any other
organized religion, but more a religion of nature, or more precisely, a
religion of wilderness. It was particularly noticeable in this film (which was
titled "Return to
Wildness") in the sound track, which I took the trouble to find out was
taken from CDs with titles like "Inside the Cathedral," "Sacred
Ceremonies," and "Healing Solar Winds." The narration was
heavily larded with words like "spirit," "healing,"
"vision," "redemption," "renewal," - all words
from the vocabulary of religious thought and experience. I'm not sure what to
make of this phenomenon. At a superficial level, it is a form of propaganda to
support and advance the concept of the National Park System. Inevitably, the
narrators of these films advise us that our materialistic and over-harried
society needs wilderness as a refuge. But it is tempting to seek a deeper
explanation. Is there a deep hunger for religion which is basic to human
nature, and which, when you close the front door against formal organized
religion, will inevitably sneak in the back door? Maybe.
We took the River Trail along the Skagit River for a short
hike. My foot wasn't up for a long hike, but the foam inserts I had gotten the
previous evening did help. It was a trail not unlike the Hoh River Trail in
Olympic Park - large firs and cedars, nurse logs, moss. Mimi went through the Junior
Ranger program and got a lovely badge.
 |
| River Trail |
Then we hit the road again and headed
for our destination: Davenport, WA, west of Spokane, where we had a reservation
at the Davenport Motel. The ride took us by an overlook of Diablo Lake where we
stopped and admired the incredible turquoise color of the water.
 |
| Diablo Lake |
The scenery
remained beautiful but changed as we went west and became first extensive
orchards and then endless wheat fields. It also took us by the Grand Coulee Dam, and we were treated to the sight of an almost full moon rising over the dam.
 |
| The moon over Grand Coulee Dam |
We reached the motel after 10pm and
found it to be very nice, maybe the best yet.
DAY THIRTY (Monday, July 22):
Today was a driving day. We've decided not to go to Glacier
N.P. - just too much driving - but instead to try to spend some time in
Yellowstone N.P. before returning to Alpine. The problem is that all lodging
inside the park is booked. We thought we had gotten a place at Canyon - we were
using the phone reservation service - but just as we were wrapping it up the
operator said, "Uh oh - they're overbooked." No dice. So today we
drove from Sedro-Woolley to Bozeman, MT.
Along the way we stopped at a visitor's center in Butte, MT and also stopped for a picnic out of the box at a rest area.
 |
| Rest Area Picnic |
We had hoped
to get closer
to Yellowstone tonight - Livingstone or even Gardiner, MT -
but everything seemed either to be
booked or frightfully expensive (like $200!). So we're at the Ranch House Motel
tonight and we are actually in a little house, not a motel room. The huge
living room/dining room is bare of furnishings, the kitchen has stove and frig
but no utensils, there are two bedrooms (which have beds!), and a bath. You
just never know what you're going to find. All along the highway today we all
listened to an audio version of The Life of Pi. Both Ellen and I had read the
book and seen the movie, but it is still incredibly engrossing, even to
Mimi.
Great writing.
We finished "Son," and are
getting near the end of "Homecoming." Mimi has been a great traveler.
No comments:
Post a Comment