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.
SECTION II
Some Places and People
CHAPTER I
Cow Country
Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington are far more like one another than they are like their respective sister halves, the lush green stretch of seacoast country which the Cascade Mountains separate from the inland. Sometimes when traveling north to south, or south to north, in Oregon and Washington, the sense of homogeneity is so strong that one is apt to think, how sensible it would have been to make these two wet sections one state, and let the dry sections form another. Yet this feeling changes when moving east or west along the mountain passes that separate these two dramatically contrasted landscapes. Then it seems that no matter how sensible it might appear on the maps there must surely be something very valuable in the experience afforded the citizens of these two states, for nature has offered them the chance to understand diverse ways of life produced by sharply contrasted environments.
And in the end one is more than content to leave them as they are.
Eastern Oregon and Washington played their brief but significant part in the colorful drama of the cowboy. Flavorsome Spanish words from the days when California ranchmen penetrated the Oregon country still linger in speech and writing: vaqueros, riatas, rosideros. A description of a real round-up in eastern Oregon in the old days sounds very much like the Southwest:
“They were all well-dressed, showy men, wearing bright colors—all roamers of space in light countries love color, for color is the product of light: the best equipped men for vaquero life of any that ever rode the plains, and they all had the fine,
