The Saddle Mountain Fault scenario envisions an 87-mile long failure of the fault.
There was a small earthquake centered on Frenchman Hill one day around 1972. When an earthquake scientist from the University of Washington called Othello High School to look for a reliable student to tend to a helicorder they were setting up at the epicenter, they ended up talking to my mother, the counselor. I was 16, and I had just gotten my driver’s license. She told them she had a perfect match for them.
So my second job off the home place (the first one was changing sprinklers for my neighbor) was visiting a tiny trailer parked next to a plowed field overlooking the Lower Crab Creek valley and the ancient massive slide on the north face of Saddle Mountain. Six seismographs fed streams of data to a series of heated needles that recorded every tremble of the earth around the trailer. I had to changed the waxed paper they burned their message onto once a day and then put in a phone call to Colorado to calibrate the clock with the National Bureau of Standards.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, this must have been a heady period for earthquake scientists in the Northwest. Endorsement of the theory of plate tectonics was in its infancy. Continue reading
Posted in Books, Bridges, Columbia Basin, Crab Creek, Disaster, Earthquake, Education, Family History, Frenchman Hill, Geology, Hanford, History, Natural Disaster, Railroads, Saddle Mountain, Science, Speculative History, Transportation, Washington
Tagged Bonnie Henderson, Boulder Creek, Cascadia Fault, Central Washington, Colorado, Crab Creek, Department of Natural Resources, Devil's Mountain Fault, Earthquake Scenarios, Earthquakes, Eastern Washington, Education, Family History, Frenchman Hill, Geology, Hanford Reservation, History, National Bureau of Standards, Nature, Nisqually, North American Plate, Olympia, Oregon, Othello High School, Plate Tectonics, Railroads, Saddle Mountain, Saddle Mountain Fault, Sandi Doughton, Seatac, Seattle, Seattle Fault, Seattle Times, Seismograph, Spokane, Tacoma, University of Washington, Washington, Whidbey Island, WPPSS
Sandhill cranes frolic in the fields of the Danielson farm, with the Saddle Mountain cliffs looming over it. Photograph by Phyllis Danielson.
The communities of Oso and Darrington were devastated by the recent landslide, in which around fifty houses and more than thirty people were annihilated in the space of a couple of minutes. It will be a long time before life can return to anything like it used to be, with Darrington’s main artery to the rest of the world cut off. Now commuters from Darrington have to head north, past our Sauk River cabin, to get to their jobs, shops and supplies. It takes a lot of time and gas. My son’s scout troop raised cash and supplies that we took to Darrington last weekend, and I’ve been watching the news about the landslide daily.
Pictures of the Oso landslide reminded me very much of the landslide my family and I used to climb around on when I was a kid. One of our favorite hikes was to the cliffs at the top of Saddle Mountain, where you can climb down to a ledge where sandstone exposures have been carved by the winds and graffito-ed by generations of local visitors. Continue reading
Posted in Cold War, Columbia Basin, Columbia River, Crab Creek, Death, Disaster, Earthquake, Education, Geology, Hanford, Hiking, History, Ice Age flood, Irrigation, Natural Disaster, Saddle Mountain, Science, Washington
Tagged Catastrophe, Central Washington, Climate, Cold War, Columbia Basin, Columbia River, Columbia River basalt, Corfu, Crab Creek, Culture, Darrington, Desert, Dr. Bruce Bjornstad, Eastern Washington, Education, Flood, Geology, Hanford Reach National Monument, Hanford Reservation, History, Ice Age, Lake Missoula, Landslide, Low Gap, Mars, NASA, Nature, Oso, Photography, Saddle Gap, Saddle Mountain, Sauk River, Senator Clarence C. Dill, Sentinel Gap, Stillaguamish River, Washington State, Wenatchee
A soldier of Custer’s regiment uses his Springfield carbine as a club. Source of this painting is not known.
When you grow up in desert heat, at least when video games and television have yet to proliferate, one of the joys of childhood is playing with the garden hose. Personally, I enjoyed digging rivers and lakes into the earth of the wire enclosure where our chickens roamed. I remember the amazement of unearthing a living frog that had burrowed into the ground for hibernation, and that had narrowly avoided the blade of my shovel.
One of my maxims about the desert landscape around Saddle Mountain is that this earth is honest. When people pass through, the traces they make remain to be read by those who come after them. As I think back on the traces we’ve discovered on our farm alone, it amazes me that so much history is written in its sand and dust.
In the early 1960s my father hooked his tractor to a battered old machine he called the rototiller. He was in the process of rooting sagebrush out of a new field, and this machine would completely destroy the plants that grew there naturally. Continue reading
Posted in Art, Columbia Basin, Conflicts, Crab Creek, Death, Education, Family History, History, Native Americans, Railroads, Saddle Mountain, Speculative History, Treasure, Washington
Tagged Arrowheads, Art, Atlatl, Badger, Bunchgrass, Campbell's soup, Central Washington, Chickens, Chinese workers, Clovis points, Coin, College, Culture, Deer, Desert, Ducks, East Wenatchee, Eastern Washington, Ecosystems, Education, Environment, Family History, Farm, Frogs, Garden hose, George Armstrong Custer, Gunsmith, Hibernation, History, Hunters, Irrigation, Jackrabbit, Little Big Horn, Livestock, Lynx, Merrybelle, Milwaukee Road, Native Americans, Nature, Oliver tractor, Othello, Pheasants, Projectile points, Railroads, Rototiller, Saddle Mountain, Sagebrush, Soldiers, Springfield carbine, Television, Tractor, Treasure, U.S. Springfield trapdoor, Video games, Walt Danielson, Washington, Weapons
Truth be told, I cannot vouch for the details of this tale. My father related it to me when I was too young or too disconnected to remember names or dates, but the truth of the story is etched into the face of Saddle Mountain above lower Crab Creek.
The trace of the bulldozer descent of the north face of Saddle Mountain above Crab Creek. The track is located around nine miles east of the Columbia River. This view is a telephoto image, showing only the upper section of the trace.
What a bulldozer was doing on top of Sentinel Peak, I cannot say. Perhaps in gouging a firebreak above the Milwaukee Road the driver found himself forced to make corrections that led him ever higher. Eventually he must have found the railroad hundreds of feet below him, a distant trace at the bottom of a precipitous drop. Did the railroad send someone to him, demanding that he bring the dozer down again? Did he refuse to drive down the face of the mountain? I would have. Continue reading
Posted in Columbia River, Crab Creek, Family History, History, Railroads, Saddle Mountain, Washington
Tagged Betting, Bulldozer, Central Washington, Columbia River, Crab Creek, Eastern Washington, History, Landmarks, Milwaukee Road, Railroads, Saddle Mountain, Washington State
The meteor explosion over Russia and the unrelated but equally awe-inspiring near miss of the earth by a huge asteroid remind us of the inevitability of space objects colliding with the earth. Disaster movies are a popular genre: one of the favorite video clips in my fifth grade science classroom is one animating the ancient collision between Earth and the planet Thea (but the throbbing, powerful new-age soundtrack clearly contributes to that popularity).
A journalist for the British newspaper The Guardian published a link to a Google map with data for every known meteor strike on Earth, from 2,300 BCE to the present. He erroneously credits the US Meteorological Society for the data…I’m sure it happens all the time. The link actually takes you to the US Meteoritical Society, where I wasn’t able to locate the same map, but there was a ton of information about meteors.
Ellis Hughes and his son pose on the heavy cart they constructed to move the fifteen and a half ton meteorite three quarters of a mile to their own land.
My favorite meteor has got to be the legendary Willamette Meteorite. At 32,000 pounds and composed mostly of iron, with a little nickel, cobalt and phosphorus, this ten-foot long, six-and-a-half foot wide, and four-and-a-quarter foot deep glob of metal balances a heat-polished oval exterior with deeply eroded chambers. But its girth isn’t the big draw. Continue reading
Posted in Astronomy, Bellingham, Education, History, Ice Age flood, Native Americans, Saddle Mountain, Science
Tagged American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), artifact, Canada, Central Washington, Columbia Plateau, Cordilleran Ice Sheet, Earth, Ellis Hughes, explosion, Google, Grande Ronde Tribe, Help End Willamette Meteor Absence Committee (HEWMAC), hematite, History, Ice Age, Impact Earth!, Iowa, Judge C. J. Wolverton, Lake Oswego, Lewis & Clark Exposition, Lime Kiln Park, Macovich Collection, Meteor, meteorite, Missoula Flood, Mrs. William E. Dodge, Myth, NAGPRA, Native Americans, Nature, New York City, North America, Oregon, Oregon Iron and Steel Company, Palouse River, Portland, Purdue University, Representative Les AuCoin, Russia, Sacred, San Juan Island, Senator Bob Packwood, Shrine, Supreme Court of Oregon, The Guardian, Thea, US Meteoritical Society, Vancouver, Washington, West Linn, Willamette Meteorite, Willamette Valley, William S. Ladd
I published this photograph of the Lower Crab Creek Valley as viewed from the Taunton townsite in “Another Flood.” On a recent visit to the same spot I took the following photograph.
This summer I took a hurried trip through Eastern Washington, photographing sites I have written about. In this article I try to post old photographs alongside more recent ones. In some cases I have also provided views of places previously mentioned in my posts, although no older photographs are available to compare them to.
A view of the Lower Crab Creek Valley in 2012, more than fifty years after the previous photograph was taken, reveals the changing ecology of the formerly arid landscape. Irrigation and invasive species have radically altered the local habitat.
There is definitely an article to be written concerning the environmental changes that have taken place in the Lower Crab Creek Valley over Continue reading
Posted in Airplanes, Biology, Columbia Basin, Crab Creek, Death, Education, Family History, Geology, Hiking, History, Ice Age flood, Irrigation, Natural Disaster, Railroads, Saddle Mountain, Science, Travel, Washington
Tagged Always (movie), Army Air Force, Burrowing Owls, Central Washington, Corfu, Corfu Pioneer Picnic, Corfu Road, Crab Creek, Crater Lake, Culture, Desert, Earl Arthur (Luke) Danielson, Eastern Washington, Education, Ellensburg Army Air Field, Environment, Ephrata Army Air Field, Family, Flood, Fossils, G. W. Faulkner, Geology, Herman Danielson, Highway 26, History, Ice Age, Invasive Species, Irrigation, Lawrence Danielson, Lieutenant Pickerall, Milwaukee Road, Mount Mazama, Mud Dauber wasp, Nature, North Bend, Othello, P-38, P-39Q, Photography, Railroads, Richard Dreyfuss, Saddle Mountain, Schools, Smyrna Bench, Snoqualmie Pass, Taunton, Taylor Bridge Fire, Volcanic Ash, Volcano, Wahatis Peak, Washington, Washington State, World War II
Beneath this towering cliff and rubble fallen from it lie the remains of the Saddle Mountain Ice Cave.
There has been a fair amount of mystery concerning the Saddle Mountain Ice Cave. Even today you’ll find inquiries about it on internet chat sites. Over the years, locals disagreed on lots of points concerning this phenomenon. Some said it was a natural cavern, a huge chamber full of glittering perpetual ice. Others said it wasn’t really anything more than a big root cellar where people kept chunks of ice they would cut out of Crab Creek in the wintertime. Some people even doubt its existence. But it’s there.
Virtually all that’s left of the Ice Cave is a pile of old timbers and the remains of the massive wooden doorframe.
The Ice Cave is about four miles west of the end of the paving on the old Corfu Highway after you leave Smyrna, around eight miles from Beverly. It’s difficult to spot the remains from the roadway, so look for a large alkali clearing in front of it and a huge slope of tumbled rock flanking its other three sides. Continue reading
Posted in Archaeology, Columbia Basin, Crab Creek, Education, Geology, Grand Coulee, Hiking, History, Ice Age flood, Native Americans, Othello, Railroads, Saddle Mountain, Science, Speculative History, Travel, Washington
Tagged A. J. Splawn, Anthropology, Beverly, Bruce Bjornstad, Carbon dioxide, Central Washington, Chief Moses, Cold Traps, Corfu, Crab Creek, Culture, Dan Bolyard, Deer, Desert, Eastern Washington, Education, Erratics, Family, Flood, Geology, History, Ice Age, Ice Cave, Icebergs, Jericho Camp, Milwaukee Road, Missoula Flood, Moses Coulee, Nate Lewis, Native Americans, Nature, New York Times, Othello, Palisades Road, Pioneers, Saddle Mountain, Sentinel Gap, Smyrna, Spokane Daily Chronicle, Tri-City Herald, Washington, Washington State