Today’s travel “In the Wake of Lewis and Clark” actually intersected the path of the Corps of Discovery exactly 197 years ago. The party had spent parts of three days at the mouth of the Snake River (Lewis’ River to them), making navigational and ethnographic observations. Captain Clark had climbed to a high elevation and observed a snow-capped peak far to the west, which he had assumed to be Mt. St. Helens; it probably was actually Mt. Hood. He had recorded the first observation of the head-flattening practice of some of the Chinookan Indians, and had collected the first specimen of sage grouse. Captain Lewis had “taken a vocabulary” of the local people, and the corps acquired 47 dogs and 20 pounds of dried horse meat to augment their store of dried salmon. Now the final thrust to the ocean was at hand.
On October 18 it was back on the trail, and the 19th saw another segment of travel through the country we saw today. Captain Clark described this basalt monolith as resembling a hat, and it has been known as Hat Rock ever since. We used the versatile Zodiac boats to access a walk through the Oregon State Park here. It was a beautiful day for a walk. At this season, this virtually monochromatic landscape comes alive with wonderful tones of gold, bronze, yellow, tan, and other earthy tones. Under the shade of giant cottonwood and willow trees, we enjoyed a cool and invigorating stroll around a small pond, and got a closer view of the Rock. Migratory waterfowl shared our space, and we got our first good look at a black-billed magpie, a bird mentioned several times in the Lewis and Clark journals.
All day today we have been traveling through the extensive basalt flows of the Columbia Basin. We have marked the transition from the humid coastal forests to the grass/shrub steppe of the rain shadow. We have shared William Clark’s observation about the lack of trees. One marked difference between his experience and ours is the very sparse population here today; in 1805 this whole region was occupied by many villages involved in the fall salmon fishery. Tonight we will “proceed on” up the Snake River, still back-tracking the Corps of Discovery.
