the beautiful and dignified skunk cabbage defies its lowly name. The air along the coast carries the mingled scent of salt spray, sun-warmed conifers, and the first fruit blooms. Inland it’s the scent of sage, pungent with the spring showers, and sprays of flowering thorn. The winds are languorous with wild syringa, the mock orange of which Lewis and Clark took note in their Journal, and from whose straight shoots Indians sometimes made arrows. Up the river valleys travels the breath of mountain balm or cinnamon bush, azalea, pine sap, and last year’s needles which carpet the stirring earth. Prairies mark the sun’s climb with carpets of purple violet and yellow buttercup, blue lupine, camas, and leopard lily. Mountain meadows display the curious markings of mission bells and arrogant tufts of Indian paintbrush. Shooting stars point the wind with their black-tipped pink arrows.
With early summer, hill slopes yield the tiny wild strawberry of unsurpassed flavor, and then the trout are leaping in the swollen streams. Later the salmon berries ripen in every cool ravine, and so one knows the salmon are running. When summer deepens it brings the wild blackberry, growing on logged-off land, where fireweed also raises its slender magenta wand. Soon follow the great bush blackberries; head high sprawls of burdened branches, yielding lavish harvest to any passerby with a tin pail.
As the earth begins to cool, huckleberry, elderberry, and blueberry darken on bushes in the mountains and along the prairie trails. This is the season when, not long ago, all the Indian women went out to gather camas root for the winter’s food supply. They still pick berries, the Indians, and on the roads near White Salmon one may see them picking up one side and the whites up the other. Vine maple sends thrusts of brilliant red and yellow up the rocky slopes of mountain passes and along the boiling rivers. Then the restless madrona—forever peeling its green and brown bark—yields its orange berries to greedy birds, south-bound. Wild geese cry in the night, traveling high above the fog. Ducks rise whirring from freshwater lake and salty cove. Gulls are long since back from the north to cry mournfully on the shore.
After the dry summer, with forest fire warnings posted on every roadside, the good smell of burning brush rises into the air. The mountains take on fresh coats of snow. Against the first gray skies they stand out with startling clarity; they seem to move nearer with a new and formidable intimacy, an almost menacing beauty.
On the coast the rains begin. People withdraw to their fireplaces. The run on the local libraries sets in. It is winter. In eastern valleys alchemy of fog and frost creates enchanted landscapes; bare trees in thrall to crystal, shrubs of spun glass and weeds of spun sugar along the hill slopes where the brief sun has no power. The gray light plays a range of cool and icy blues over these frosted forms, and in the distance they seem to exhale a white breath.
Over the weekends, east and west, hundreds of cars, ski-laden, make the brief trips that take their owners out of tideland and valley rain or frosty fog and bring them to clear mountain air, to ski and toboggan runs and miles of powder snow.
The skiers are still practicing christianias and slaloms on the snowy slopes when the alpine meadows set forth their annual pointillists’ display of riotous color along the melting snow line. . . . The Season has turned again.
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
