Washington: Volcanoes, Water and Salmon

The West is tied to water.  People, trees and crops across southern Washington are literally attached to the major rivers of the Columbia and the Snake that weave along the state.  Without these sources of water, the Palouse region and the neighboring scablands would be barren, regardless of the quality of the soil.  In contrast, once the Cascades are reached the open lands of central and eastern Washington are gone, steadily replaced by a thicker and thicker weaves of evergreens.  First Ponderosa Pines and then Douglass Firs and Western Hemlocks dominate the landscape and give testament to the amount of rain these areas normally receive.

“Normally receive” definitely are the words to use, for, like the rest of the region, the Northwest is in a drought.  Wildfires, a natural part of the ecosystem in central and eastern Washington, raged more dangerously than ever this year and influenced our more southerly route passing dry lakefront campgrounds, marinas extending their docks out into half-full reservoirs and four-wheelers tearing up the dust as they raced across the dry lake bottoms.  The Northwest should be wet.  They depend on the wet and, specifically, they depend on the snow to provide a continuous melt during the summer months, but last winter was a warmer and drier winter that brought some rain but didn’t bring snow.   Mt. Rainier recorded a record low snowfall (under 300”) as its glaciers did not receive their normal snowpack padding, which in 2011 was 25 feet deep at a place called Paradise on Rainer’s southern flank.

Camping in Mt. Rainier National Park, a short bike ride from the Grove of the Patriarchs, we drove up to Paradise to start one of our favorite hikes of the trip: the Skyline Trail.  This well-used loop trail meanders along the southern side of Mt. Rainier and is the starting point for climbing the mountain itself.  The upper reaches of the trail were largely snow-free this year and allowed us to sneak further up on another trail towards Camp Muir than would normally be possible without extra gear.  The views, dominated by the majestic Mt. Rainier and its fracturing glacier fields on one side and the continuing Cascade Range on the other, including Mt. Adams, the Goat Range, Mt. St. Helens, and the pointed Mt. Hood, were astounding.

One striking thing that we were reminded of by looking across towards Mt. St. Helens is that the Cascade Range is a range of active volcanoes and Mt. Rainier is, potentially, the most dangerous of them all.  The reason lies with a phenomenon called a lahar.  Super-heated, volcanic debris flows that have periodically poured off the mountain when it erupts and raced down into the Puget Sound.  The model of the region in the visitor center shows their historic paths running right through present-day Tacoma and Seattle.  This may seem something to not overly worry about but when we visited our good friends from Malaysia, Vicki and Amir Salim, Vicki pointed out that lahars were one of the reasons they chose to live in Olympia, which lays outside these lahar paths.

My cousin Mary-Kate, and her husband Phil, also live just outside these paths in Issaquah, and it was such a delight seeing her wonderful family as they brought us to their town’s salmon fish hatchery.  It was great seeing Luke and Natalie run down to the river to show the boys the salmon swimming upstream and then bring us over to the fish ladders and tanks of the hatchery.  Just two weeks earlier, Luke and Natalie’s school had their annual salmon festival at the start of the run and their infectious enthusiasm was still at a high.
 
We continued to learn a lot about salmon throughout our time in the Northwest, from Amir’s work inspecting commercial salmon boats coming back into Puget Sound, the continuing restoration of the Elwha River’s salmon runs after its two dams were removed, to our wonderful walks in and talks with Park Rangers at the Olympic National Park Headquarters and the Hoh Rainforest.  Just like wolves, salmon are the keystone species to this entire ecosystem directly feeding over 100 different animals and insects and thereby influencing and supporting this region’s amazingly rich biodiversity.  It all seemed to come full circle when Vicki joined us in a visit to Wolf Haven, a reserve south of Olympia that cared for a variety of North American wolves, and the tour discussion turned to trophic cascades, keystone species and the importance of both salmon and wolves.

Our time in the Northwest, punctuated by visiting family and friends, taught us much about the region’s dynamic environment that shaped Native American tribes for centuries and continues to shape modern society.  It was wonderful to witness sustainability, restoration, and preservation efforts throughout the region as there seems to be an awareness of the importance of stewardship of our natural resources.  Writing this from the desert area of the Great Basin, the progression of storms in the Northwest has started its annual rain and snow with a deluge, and we hope that this starts to replenish their snowpack, refill their reservoirs and jumpstart the winter salmon runs.  Each region of our country is dominated by and proud of their own history and natural features and here in the Northwest it has and will continue to revolve around volcanoes, water and salmon