It rained every day but one in January. February has been mercifully dry by comparison but the semi-permanent cloud cover only broke this week. As Monday was sunny and a holiday, we decided it was time for some nature. We laced up our hiking boots and drove eastward into the Columbia River Gorge, past waterfalls galore, with shaggy, snow-topped mountains looming over the highway like Winter Itself glaring down from above. We made it more than forty miles this time before the car-sick dog vomited on my wife – a good omen. It usually happens faster than that.
Catherine Creek is on the Washington State side of the river, a few miles beyond the town of White Salmon. The woods get sparse here; Douglas fir and western red cedar give way to ponderosa pine and white oak. Ten-million-year-old basaltic lava flows crisscross the landscape. The creek runs through a little valley just below a huge basalt wall with an arch in it. Rotting wooden corrals mark the site of an abandoned ranch. We saw Steller’s jays, ravens, a couple bald eagles, but most notably several dozen Lewis’s woodpeckers – scruffy, purple-breasted birds that look like the alcoholic uncles of the woodpecker family.
We have a favorite picnic spot atop the eastern ridge in the shade of a big ponderosa (you can recognize the species by bark that flakes into jigsaw puzzle pieces). It was cold and windy, but we drank hot tea from a thermos and ate cheese and salami sandwiches. A couple elderly ladies visiting from New Hampshire came by to alarm our dog and ask directions (none of the trails are marked). After chatting amiably for a couple minutes they left – and only then did my wife see fit to advise me I had a running nose and a bit of snot in my mustache.
We climbed into the high meadows after lunch. The turf this time of year is what I imagine tundra to be like: one part rock and three parts moss and lichen, very soggy. My daughter found some bleached deer vertebrae. The dog stopped to snack on animal droppings of mysterious provenance. The view is memorable up top. In the midst of the river a thousand feet below is what Lewis and Clark called “Sepulchar Island,” where the local Indians buried their dead. To the east one sees the treeless steppes of the interior. To the southwest, draped in glaciers and 11,000 feet high, Mt Hood looks just like Mt Crumpet from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
Loose Canon 