The Pacific Northwest - June 24-30, 2007


Ruth & Joe's extended family vacation—gathering at the Columbia River Gorge:

Amber, Lauren, Tim, Dena, Daddy, Mother, Anita, Brandon, Jay, Ruth, Joe, Mark

A week of long summer days in the Pacific Northwest—Washington and Oregon

Ruth's Picturesque Travelogue:

Joe and I took an extended family vacation the last week of June to see the states of Washington and Oregon. We flew into Seattle with my parents, my sister Anita and our brother-in-law Jay, their daughter Amber, and her husband Tim. We rented two cars, loaded them up, and headed to Lake Quinault, where we rented a cozy lakeside cabin two nights, taking temperate rainforest hiking excursions and exploring rugged ocean shorelines.

Hover the mouse over a picture for a caption. Click a photo or title to see a series in that set.

Washington:

Underway in Quinault Valley, in the Olympic National Park, Grays Harbor County, Washington. Early morning and late evening, the sun's low angle back lights the huge leaves and the forest, displaying every shade of green imaginable. Sunrise in the Quinault Valley at 5:39 a.m. on June 25, silhouetting the foothills in the Olympic Mountain range. Our first morning, relaxing on this pristine glacier-carved lake in the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, June 25, 2007. View toward the historic Lake Quinault Lodge, South Shore of Lake Quinault, with Olympic National Forest illuminated.
Maple Glade Rain Forest Trail Lake Quinault -  First Sunrise Lake Quinault -  First Morning Lake Quinault - Rainbow
Ruth, Jay, Anita, Amber & Tim, and Mother enjoying a hike through the Quinault Rain Forest's illustrious and imposing ancient forest stands on Lake Quinault's northwest shore. The short Spruce Burl Trail leads through a spruce forest to the beach; some Sitka spruce have developed bloated nodules of knobby growths in their trunks, called burls. A most interesting beach, with pristine stunning ocean vistas, famous rock formations known as seastacks rising above colorful sand and round rocks worn smooth by tumultuous waves, and hundreds of logs washed ashore. Our home base for a couple of days on the North Shore of Lake Quinault in the Olympic National Park, Washington.

Quinault Rain Forest Big Cedar

Pacific Coast - South Beach

Pacific Coast - Ruby Beach

Lake Quinault - End of First Day

As much as we would have enjoyed staying the week on this gorgeous lake, we headed on south to visit my cousin Mark and his wife Dena, and their children, Lauren & newborn Brandon. Mark and Dena showed us the breath-taking Columbia River Gorge and some awesome waterfalls. Going to Portland, I saw a bald eagle sitting in a tree by the river. Mark and Dena hosted our whole crew with a scrumptious dinner to end a wonderful day, all celebrating together on my father’s 85th birthday in their beautiful home. We loved this, our first visit to their family and the gorgeous area they now call home. We’d like to fly into Portland and see them again!

Oregon:

Chanticleer Point overlooks Crown Point on a sheer basalt cliff remnant of volcanic rock the Columbia River has worn down through the Cascade Range to nearly sea level. 30-knot winds make some of the world's best windsurfing. At 620 feet, the second highest year-round waterfall in the USA (Yosemite Falls, California, is North America's highest). Mark and Joe stand next to Daddy on his 85th birthday, as Latourell Creek plunges a sheer 249 ft. over a rocky cliff. Mother and Daddy on his 85th birthday, June 26, in front of Wahkeena Falls, on its 242' tumble down the mountain. Wahkeena means "most beautiful" in Yakama Indian.

Columbia River Gorge

Multnomah Falls

Latourell Falls

Wahkeena Falls

In the morning with Oregon’s Mount Hood in the rear-view mirror we headed to Mount St. Helens, and walked the volcanic eruption area with fascination. On the way to stay at our final destination, we made a supper stop in Chehalis at Spiffy’s—a restaurant we love!—and headed to the exquisite house we rented for the remainder of our week, nestled at the foot of Mount Rainier, our hiking pursuit for the next couple of days. The morning of our departure, the rain dissipated: we drove to Mount Rainier National Park a final time for a first close-up glimpse of the 14,411΄ snow-capped active volcano peak, thousands of feet higher than surrounding peaks and tallest of fifteen distinguished volcanoes that make up the backbone of the Cascade Range, including Mount St. Helens. The Northwest’s grandest mountain appears taller than mountains of comparable height, rising out of the earth at sea level, and holding the greatest single-peak glacial system in the United States of America.

[Spiffy's Restaurant, 110 Highway 12 (Exit 68), Chehalis WA 98532. (360) 262-3561]

Oregon and Washington:

Daddy, Mother, Anita holding Lauren, Mark (Dena took their newborn Brandon home), Amber, Tim, Jay, Ruth, Joe We learned a lot about the May 18, 1980 eruption (also previous eruptions in A.D. 1500, 1800, and 1831-1857). May 2007 (no explosive eruptions in a year): lava extrudes from the crater floor at a rate of a small pickup truck load every two seconds—down from one dump truck load per second in October 2004—and is building a new lava dome. Daddy, Mother, Jay, Amber, Tim, Anita, Ruth, and Joe after filling up on lunch in the Visitor Center's restaurant.

Horsetail Falls

Johnson Ridge Observatory  - Eruption Trail

Johnson Ridge Observatory - Lookout

Coldwater Lake; Coldwater Ridge Visitors' Center

We want to see more of cutting-edge Oregon… and astonishing Washington, the only place in the world you can visit—like we did—a rainforest, a river gorge, volcanoes (we visited 2 of the 9), an ocean, numerous rivers, streams and lakes; and—what we didn’t visit in Washington during this week—two mountain ranges (we drove out along the jagged Olympics, and viewed the Cascades in-flight), a desert, wine country, and several islands.

Washington:
Mount Rainier National Park, fifth oldest national park in the U.S.A., offers vast expanses of pristine old-growth forests, subalpine flower meadows, and spectacular alpine scenery. Steller's Jay, Cyanocitta stelleri, is a fairly common bird, with striking deep blue & black plumage, and a long crest. Mother, Daddy, Joe, and Ruth in front of the cross-section of the Douglas-fir, sprouted in 1293, cut 697 years later. The trail we took in the rain loops through high meadows and leads to an overlook of Nisqually Glacier, one of the 26 advancing & receding glaciers on the slopes of Mt. Rainier.

Paradise on Mount Rainier

 Steller's Jay at Narada Falls Longmire - Trail of the Shadows

Nisqually Vista Trail
Tim, Amber, Jay, Anita, Daddy, Mother, Joe, and Ruth: we loved the spacious, beautiful, new cabin near the entrance to Mount Rainier National Park in west central Washington. Christine Falls, a hanging-valley waterfall in Mount Rainier National Park, Pierce County; typical of mountain-glacier landscapes, its beauty far exceeds its forty-foot-high-size. Paradise Inn, one of two National Historic landmark Inns in the Park in the prestigious Historic Hotels of America register, is a rustic retreat with antique Northwest decor. Joe, Ruth, Mother, Tim & Amber, Anita, Jay, and Daddy. After 3 days, our first clear glimpse of the snowy colossal and a White River Valley view ends our visit on a high note.

Our Home Sweet Home Site For 3 Days

 Christine Falls and Vicinity Paradise Revisited

Mount Rainier National Park -  at Longmire Inn

Most browsers (like Internet Explorer) will display all of the 264 hover captions that accompany our 241 different pictures.

 

Photos and website by Ruth and Joe, and of our family by kind passers-by.

 

"We live in a beautiful country."  —Daddy

 

Anita arranged the agenda and made the reservations.
Enjoy finding the names of Anita and Jay's four children and their spouses:
Amber and her husband Tim, Brian and his wife Sue, Jacob, and Katrina!
Their names enhance the content of the hover captions and paragraph text.

 

—Our week-long extended family vacation 2007 portrayed in poetry—
— Ruth's Haiku —

 

Pacific Northwest:

Gentle summer rain falls on

Active volcano.

 

Volcanoes and the Mountains:  Lahars and the Boondocks

We liked looking at stream terraces (low-lying flat areas), the geologic depositional features built up by volcanic layers (not erosional features left “hanging”), that show two kinds of layers or deposits. The first results from river flooding: snowmelt with heavy rains or water backs up under the glaciers, and then releases quickly as a glacial outburst flood loaded with sand, gravel and boulders. A second kind of layer or deposit is composed of lahars (not lava flows) that form when sizable chunks of the volcano break off and travel downhill into a valley.

Anybody who knows anything about volcanoes may recognize lahar, an Indonesian word for volcanic mudflow, a flow of debris—not lava—often rich in clay material from rotten volcano rock containing soil, sand, gravel, & some vegetation (trees), all tumbled together and lubricated by a mix of melted snow and ice along with river water. Lahar got adopted into English from a 1920's study of volcanoes (and later of Mt. Merapi on the island of Java). Boondock (bundok, "mountain"), from the neighboring Philippine archipelago in the Pacific Rim, comes to enrich American vocabulary via Tagalog, one of the most important of the 109 languages in the Philippines.

In case you are not blessed by having part of your family come from the Philippines nor by a connection to the Pacific Northwest—diagonally across the country in the Piedmont, you score when it comes to cool volcanoes:

East in the Carolinas ancestral Appalachian volcano remnants remain; the Concord Pluton (Speedway Volcano, or, Concord Ring Dike), a partial, rather circular formation of igneous rock left when magma solidified well below the surface, is surrounded on three sides by syenite. What is left, exposed after erosion (located just east of UNC Charlotte, stretching northeast about six miles toward Concord), was several hundred million years ago the base of a volcano, about a mile underground. What is unusual, is the fractionation of tholeiitic magmas to produce syenite—and the absence of granitic—residua. The Appalachians no longer have lahars, but the long, complicated formation of the region yields a very complex geology, bounded in the east by the Brevard Fault with folded meta-sedimentary, meta-volcanic, & meta-plutonic rocks (like Looking Glass Rock pluton, a granite monolith by Brevard out in the boondocks of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the beautiful Pisgah National Forest).

Links to a free on-line encyclopedia, (Wikipedia, die freie Enzyklopädie), in German:

Pazifischer Nordwesten;   Columbia River Gorge;   Mount St. Helens;   Mount-Rainier-Nationalpark.
Wikipedia is a multilingual, non-profit, free content encyclopedia project. Its name derives from Hawaiian wiki wiki ("quick"), and encyclopedia.

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