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CHAPTER IV

Where to Play

You cannot drive many miles along any highway in the Pacific Northwest without seeing one of those well-designed wooden road markers which indicate that here is a place where the traveler can find a stove, an open fireplace, a shelter, perhaps a swimming place, certainly trees, ferns, flowers, and flowing streams—in short a public park or a camping ground.

Quite apart from the big national recreational areas such as the parks at Crater Lake or Mount Rainier, the national forests and the primitive areas, Washington has fifty-six state parks and Oregon sixty-two. In addition every town has set aside some local beauty spot as a city park.

The Northwest is park conscious. When the city of Seattle set out to harness the Skagit River for use as power it also created a park high in the Cascades and organized inexpensive tours to this primitive land. These trips have remained popular year after year; literally thousands of people view the dam and reservoirs, wander in the twilight along the roaring green Skagit, eat the power company’s generous helpings of good camp fare, and loiter in the adjacent gardens where colored lights play on the waterfalls by night, hidden voices sing Jerusalem the Golden, and synthetic birds warble from the subtropical underbrush.

To keep the land as beautiful as it was originally is an ambition belatedly but powerfully rising in the Northwest; and the people of this part of America would definitely like to handle it in their own way. They do not care much for the high prices and the restrictions of the national parks, where “concessions” pretty well determine the kind of holiday the traveler is going to have. They prefer their land left under the jurisdiction of the National Forest Service.

One of the finest pieces of untouched coastline in all the world is that along the Oregon shore. With real envy Washingtonians view the long miles, as untouched in many places as they were when the first brigs sailed warily off the rocky shore. Washington let much of its own coast be ruined with billboards, logging butcheries, and a clutter of cheap buildings. Now it will have its chance to make and preserve a billboardless highway along the Olympic Peninsula from Queets to Long Beach.

No matter what your taste in recreation the Northwest can supply your needs. Parks range from a “splendid stand of virgin timber” with or without camping or picnicking facilities to restricted acreage around an old blockhouse from the Indian wars; from hot, sandy geological and educational areas to damp, green, ferny recreational regions; from sea level and below to thousands of feet in the air.

If you are a collector of rocks, fossil remains, or Indian arrowheads the Northwest is your country. The richest fossil finds are those in the John Day region, the famous Condon fossil beds where, naturally, much that is seen may not be carried away as mementoes; although I once met a Texan who had cut a dinosaur’s footprint out of a New Mexican desert—when Carnegie Tech’s back was turned—and carried it home to his ranch parlor, and I wouldn’t put it past him to try to carry off relics of Oregon’s diminutive three-toed “dawn horse” if he came on them.

If something a little rarer than arrowheads appeals to you, you can go into the country of the pictographs and petroglyphs. Here along the desert waterways Indians, antedating any present tribal memories, left strange symbols, painted with ochre and time-resisting native pigments, cut in hard basaltic rock with “pecking stones” of harder quartz. These pictographs represent, with simple emphasis on the essentials of form, hunters and their prey; priests with wands of power; the ceremony of the first born with attendant convocation of animal powers, and so on.

Once you start to search for orbicular jasper, opals from the Hart Mountains, the agates that lie on so many of the beaches of the Northern Pacific stretch, or for the rare type of “iridescent” obsidian found in the Glass Buttes country of Oregon you’ll be more than ever bound to a land so rich in treasures for the knowing eye.

If you are a student of wildlife, particularly of birds, then the 160,000 acres of Bird Refuge in Malheur County in Oregon will offer you an unusual field of observation where literally millions of birds gather at seasons’ turns to feed and rest. And if you want some days of hearty and exclusively male companionship and some consistent drinking in the name of Conservation and Preservation, try to get to the land of the great antelope preserves in Lake County, Oregon, when the Order of the Antelope holds its annual hunt without firearms.

All year long the fabulous marine flower beds at the Depoe Bay Aquarium on the Oregon coast display their marvelous colors and forms for those who can be torn away from the fearsome spectacle of the octopuses or the beguiling antics of the baby seal.

If you’re drawn to geologic mysteries you can visit Washington’s Ginko State Park where gems of petrified wood are to be seen, along with relics of the sacred Oriental Apricot, the Ginko, which once flourished here. Or you can view that tantalizing geologic riddle, “the great mystery falls” on the way into Grand Coulee. Big descriptive words wither on the tongue when one tries to convey the magnitude of this ancient waterfall, where a river three miles wide took a four-hundred-foot drop. You can go some four hundred miles south into Oregon and view another “mystery,” Crater Lake, that silent and awesome relic of “unfathomable volcanic power” lying in the rim of a mountain which once stood 14,000 feet high.

The best time to see Crater Lake is in the very early morning, just before the sun comes up, and you can have this experience from your bed if you don’t mind paying the Lodge’s charges for rooms on the lake side. (People in the camp have to get up and dress and take a good brisk walk for their sunrise view. One old Oregonian who remembers tenting on the lake’s rim said to me with a growl: “We used to have a pretty good lake until the government got to fooling around so much with it.”) Crater Lake never loses the power to inspire a sense of dark mystery, of the presence of forces that might well intimidate man. There is, under certain conditions of light, something almost evilly beautiful about the strange dark cone that rises from the unplumbed depths of blue water; and one comes to understand Indian legends of the lake, and their reason for sending their young men to bathe in it as a part of initiation into manhood. When, in very early morning, the light is beginning to grow, the lake is blue-black and utterly, terrifyingly, still and quiet. Around its rim the peaks and walls of the ancient crater form a black silhouette. Above this sinister wall the sky rests in cold purple. Then the true spirit of the lake seems to breathe from it—a mysterious, deeply lonely, and saddening spirit. As the light grows into blues and pinks and golden fragments of cloud and peak, the lake seems to become less itself, as though it were now putting on the face it wears for the tourists who roar in for a quick look and roar out again.

If you came west to “rough it” almost any mountain trip will give you what you want: the Olympics, the Cascades, the Blues, the Wallowas, the Okanogans, or the primitive area at the head of Lake Chelan.

You have a chance to walk or ride some four hundred miles along the Oregon Skyline Trail, a trip of quite unparalleled scenic variety beginning at the Columbia River, traversing the mountain country of Hood and Jefferson, with their vast stretches of alpine gardens; past the “unconquerable spires” of Three Fingered Jack and Mount Washington; through the great lava “blankets”—viewing in passing those famous cold white beauties, the Three Sisters, South, Middle, and North; and so finally down into the region of lakes, large and small, dominated by Crater. Here with pack on back you can cross the trails of old frontiersmen and skirt the battlegrounds of Indian wars; and even, it is said, camp where young Indians from the northern tribes, newly mated, used to spend their honeymoon days, hidden safely from the warring redskins to east and west.

The visitor can hardly miss the great single mountains: Rainier, Hood, Baker, St. Helens, Adams. They offer everything in the way of accommodation from well over a million dollars’ worth of carefully designed rusticity at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, to little overnight cabins with wood-burning stoves at Camp Sunrise on Mt. Rainier. You may force your way to their cloud-capped summits or worship them afar from some gentle meadow; seek their reflections in lonely lakes, circle them on horseback trails; or, on skis, squint up at their brilliant glitter from a field of powder snow. At Christmastime shops burgeon with hundreds of views of these snowy giants, particularly of Mt. Rainier, a mountain so grand, so remote, and so ever-changing that no Indian was ever foolhardy enough to force his way up its steep flanks and thus risk coming permanently under its powerful spell.

You can visit the only mainland seal rookery in all the world, not far from Florence on the Oregon coast. Here in a cavern fit for Beowulf, lit with eerie light from the cave’s mouths, some three hundred sea lions roar and splash in the green swells, or slide on and off the big central rock, ruled over by Brigham, chief of the bulls.

The cave was discovered on a calm day in 1880 by a roving sea captain in a little skiff who was once marooned in the cave by a raging storm outside, and was forced to kill a small lion for the juicy meat of its flippers. I can understand the many trips the captain made to this cave of his discovering. I am never able to pass the place without making the mile-long trip down the cliffside to stand in the darkness and watch these creatures, quite unconscious of observing eyes, disport themselves in the restless green tides; the females quarreling, young bucks fighting for precedence, new babies demanding attention. Once I missed, by just an hour, a great battle between killer whales and the lions just offshore.

If it is spring there are strange birds to be seen. Here is the rookery of the guillemot, whose arrival in March signals the new season on the ocean. This bird, living most of the year on the open sea, has curious feet with red scarlet webbings which he uses like a rudder in his long flights. Here also, at the cave entrance, the tufted puffins or sea parrots make their nests.

If you fancy another kind of cave, Oregon has that for you also. Down in Josephine County there are caves underground in a “mountain of marble”; stalactites and stalagmites theatrically lit, earnest young guides to point out to you the Ghost Chamber, Dante’s Inferno, Bacon Rind, the Onyx Butterfly, Kate and Duplicate and all the other tedious comparisons with which lecturers seek to beguile the public to gaze on nature’s handiwork. Even if you don’t like caves you can be extremely comfortable at the Caves Chateau in that rustic, overstuffed, and pleasant style—all chintz and stone and dark wood—which big resort hotels in the West manage to achieve with such apparent ease.

Surely no country anywhere in America is richer in resources for the weary human who wants to rest and restore himself than are these two states of the North Pacific slope. By boat, by foot, by horseback, by bicycle, and even by car, he can come, within a short distance of any city, to utter solitude and peace. There is such an extravagance of natural beauties that no visitor could possibly cover them all: lakes and rivers and ocean beaches; miles of inland sea; snowcaps and glaciers and alpine meadows; rocky canyons, pine forests, green valleys stream-threaded—it would be hard to choose one favorite kind of landscape from among the wealth that is offered.