The Snake River and Fire in the West

The Snake River

How generous the people of Idaho can be! Twice, while visiting National Parks, I asked women where the water fountain might be, and twice was offered their own bottles of water! And an Idaho couple invited us, perfect strangers, for a day on the beautiful Snake River.

An eagle in her nest

Karen is a Bureau of Land Management regional director, gracious and generous with information, her time and effort and her husband Jeff is a bighearted wildlife biologist and firefighter. They put in their boat at the Conant landing of the Snake River, near the Antelope Flats. We stepped into the aluminum skiff and motored on, only the engine sound marring the pristine cottownwood gallery forests, which Karen oversees in her role at the BLM. The BLM possesses a mandate for the uneven patches of land (overlooked by the original surveyors) that surround rivers, where mighty cottonwoods shelter a special environment below, called cottonwood galleries--home to bears, wolves, foxes, and most obviously eagles. We saw only one lodge, very posh but unpretentious, owned by Mark Rockefeller whose family loves and preserves--and owns--large tracts of land in the region.

Ridgepole pines march up gentle slopes, tender marsh grasses cover boggy islands, corridors of hexagonal basalt columns tower like manmade sea walls. This kind of volcanic rock forms in hexagonal pillars and ends up looking like ancient ruins as lichen takes root. Aeries of eagle nests, some 7-10 feet across weighing as much as two tons, are high in the mighty cottonwoods--one eagle avoided our gaze, but another soared white and strong across the river. They return to their enormous nests each year during their 30-year lifespan, where they too fish in the Snake. With eyesight 8-10 times sharper than humans, they can see an animal two miles away, and travel up to 60 miles an hour. The Bald Eagle's name comes from the old English word for white.

We motored up to a waterfall splashing broadly over round volcanic rocks and mossy hanging gardens where boys played in life jackets. The natural rock croppings are perfectly symmetrical, beautifully landscaped by time. But mostly we saw fishermen standing in shallow craft, swirling their rods, some of them possibly celebrities who have sought out this choice stretch of wilderness. Dick Cheney used to fish there, disrupting this untouched paradise with helicopters overhead and security men on waterskis and his whole Blackwater guard.

Basalt cliffs on the Snake

We docked in tall grass, at a campsite now obscured by the fallen half of a cottonwood, and Karen laid out cheese and nuts and fruit. We chatted about firefighting, which plays such a large role in the American West. It was the great fire of 1910, The Big Burn, that shaped today's forest service. It ended the innovative reign of Gifford Pinchot, who not only created the forestry service at the time but also funded a new forestry school at Yale, to educate on the conservation of America's lands. He himself had been educated by the forestry school of France, where he found the study to be closer to gardening than to his vision of consolidating lands for public use and natural conservation. But he became an adversary of the great conservationist John Muir, for whom forests were temples.  Pinchot, a utilitarian, thought of forests as crops, and even advocated dam-building in National Forests. It was also his policy to let fires take their natural course. In 1910, he lost his job.

John Muir quoted on this grave

The Big Burn, the largest US forest fire ever, savaged three million acres in the Idaho Panhandle and surrounding states and killed 87 people. A Forest Ranger named Ed Pulaski and his crew took shelter in a mine near Wallace, Idaho, and when his men grew restless, he pulled out his gun and held them there--they all survived. Other firefighters who were not so fortunate are buried in a solemn circle in St. Marie, Idaho.

Firefighters buried in St. Marie

Congress was persuaded to direct the Forest Service to try to extinguish all wildfires, a policy that has come to be moderated in recent years. Many stops along our journey commemorated firefighters and explained the necessity of controlled burning. And the many flags at half mast, from Salt Lake City up to the Panhandle, were for men or crews who fell this summer, fighting fire those weeks we were in the West.

Eastern Idaho's Prairies and Craters of the Moon National Monument

A butte of Idaho

We rode out along the Peaks-to-Craters scenic byway, Highway 26, along scrub, wheat-colored grasses and the sagebrush of the arid land. On these apparently barren sage meadows pronghorn deer, marmots, coyotes and foxes dwell invisibly. More than 400 species of plants shelter 250 wildlife species here, including elk. Buttes rise up like phantoms, sometimes with antennae on them, remnants of volcanoes from several thousand years past, or of hot magma that has bulged out through the earth's surface, pink and hazy purple, on tawny green prairie.

Sage prairie

We drove past the Idaho Nuclear Laboratory (the Department of Energy's leading research and development site in nuclear) that lit up the town of Arco, pop about 1,0000 on July 17, 1955. It was the first town in the free world to be served by electrical energy developed from the atom. Since 1949 over 50 nuclear reactors have been built on this plain, more than anywhere else in the world. Their purpose is peaceful.

Our hosts in Idaho Falls (a home exchange though we were coexisting this time) both had nuclear engineer fathers. George was born and raised in Idaho--his mother taught in a handsome stone grade school which is now boarded up. Now George is the superintendant of schools, a thoughtful educator and advocate of progressive project-based high schools, and an outdoors guy. He and Nancy talk with regret of how nuclear energy held so much promise, but it's been Europeans who have taken the ball and run with it. "We do store nuclear waste here in Idaho," they mentioned. "Sort of controversial?" I asked. "Not at all," they said. They credit the state of culture in Idaho Falls--an art museum, a symphony---to the nuclear scientists who have moved there.

Signs along the road told us that mammoths were hunted here 12,000 years ago, and have been found in men's stomachs. 8,000 years ago bison were hunted, and fed the Indians till they disappeared or till the Indians were chased away. Native American hunting and gathering parties have left behind stone tools, ancient campsites and pictographs. Tribal members continue to work with the Idaho National Laboratory Site to protect resources.

And we saw more evidence of the earth's active fire beneath, of the moving earth, advancing southwest over hot magma, creating the Snake River Valley in a series of eruptions beginning 17 million years ago.

Craters of the Moon National Monument is a lunar landscape of lava that has erupted over millions of years over the Great Rift, a line of volcanic activity perpendicular to the Snake River Valley. The lava has been transformed into pumice and different kinds of basalt: pahoehoe, a smooth snaky flow frozen in time, and a'a rock, also named in Hawaiian from the way you shout when you try to walk on its rough hard surface. The hot turbulent past has jumbled into caves and pillars, subterranean tubes and rugged walls of volcanoes that had been transported by lava.

Two thousand years ago, nearby volcanoes tore themselves apart and sent rivers of lava with chunks of craters to a section of the park called Devil's Garden, after a visiting minister declared the jumble of barren rock and twisted trees a garden fit for the devil himself. With time, seeds of brabbitbrush and limber pine took root in the sparse soil. Dwarf mistletoe, a parasitic plant called witch's broom in these parts, took over many of the pines, choking off nutrition from branches in chaotic snarls. Forest rangers of the early 20th c. took it upon themselves to poison, burn and destroy the unsightly twisted pines that were besieged by witch's broom. Thousands of trees were destroyed. Now signs along Devil's Garden pose the question: what is natural? What should be eliminated? Both limber pine (so named because its suppleness enables it to thrive in the most hostile conditions) and dwarf mistletoe are native to this place, and their interaction is no more unnatural than the distorted rock themselves. A walk through the Devil's Garden poses the ecologists's puzzles and tragedies.

We walked up a high cinder cone where later we watched tiny figures climb the stark black silhouette. Then we peered into the burned pits of small scatter volcanoes when it began to storm, a windy squall the likes of which we'd experienced at Yellowstone, so we ended our visit, while a chipmunk peered out at us from beneath a tree root.

It is in this unlikely region that Basque shepherds have settled for the past century. Their sheep roam over the steppes that cover the basalt. But the last shepherds are departing, and only a few stalwarts, who live in tin-roofed wagons without water or electricity, maintain the Basque herds and serve wonderful Basque food.

The Northern Shoshone used to pass through annually on their way to the Camas Prairie, leaving behind rock structures and stone circles. Even the astronauts of the 60's came to Craters of the Moon to learn volcanic geology from its medley of barren rock. A little boy wrote, on visiting:

Geologic and Yellowstone

The work of heat  and time at Yellowstone

Idaho's Snake River Plain stretching across southern Idaho is witness to earth's incessant movement. While the North American Continental Plate has drifted steadily southwest over millions of years, a hot spot in the molten earth's core has remained stationary and has erupted about a dozen times in the past 17 million years, releasing massive amounts of rhyolite magma and ash. The resulting craters, 10-40 miles wide, have laid down the path of today's Snake River. In between the super-eruptions fluid basaltic lava has continued to flow from more then 8,000 shield volcanoes and numerous lava cones in southeastern Idaho. The basalt, 3,000-6,000 feet deep, is now carpeted above with the sage prairies and buttes of Eastern Idaho, while the Snake River waters wondrously fertile land.

Yellowstone River

The hot spot, a deep thermal mantle plume of molten rock, is now under Yellowstone National Park in neighboring Wyoming, home to 10,000 geysers, hot springs, mud pots and steam vents--more than anywhere else on earth. Another eruption of the Yellowstone Super Volcano, which will happen sooner or later, would plunge the Earth into darkness.

Yellowstone National Park was created by an act of Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. It has been designated a US Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage Site, and is one of the largest national parks in the lower 48 states. We entered the great park from the west, along sparkling waters and lower grassy marshland, darkened in places with red-tipped Indian grasses. On a little island three male elks chewed, their monumental antlers turning this way and that. It is impossible to describe how pristine the sagebrush and wild lavender are, an environment enveloped in sharp and sweet fragrances.

Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

We headed for the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. It is a more aesthetic and compact experience than its eponymous neighbor, with brilliantly colored walls of old rhyolite lava flows and foaming green waters, the Yellowstone River snaking in and out of sight between layers of geologic time and thermal coloration. It is more than 1,000 feet deep in most places, up to 4,000 feet wide, and 20 miles long. Every lookout on the drive is worth the hot and laborious parking. Large birds hidden high in pines called and rustled loudly through the treetops. A raven made herself comfortable on an SUV, scolding.

The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone was born thousands of years ago and is still being changed by the heat and gases of the Yellowstone Volcano. An icecap that melted 14,000 years ago began the river's flow, sculpting of the old rhyolite lava, aided by wind, rain and gravity. Heat and gases continue to soften the canyon walls and catalyze their constant transformation. The river's waterfalls thunder into mist, covering the walls with cool hanging gardens.

Elk on the village green

Our second day at Yellowstone we entered from the arid northern deserts of Yellowstone to visit the thermal world. Mammoth Hot Springs heats the ground and has attracted elks for a century. Its perfectly molded terraces in seashell and molusk shapes are colored by bacteria that catalyze bright minerals like iron and sulfur dioxide. Shoshone and Bannock people used to collect minerals here for their white paint. The brighter ochre colors come from thermophiles, heat-loving organisms, whose color indicates the temperature of their environment. Atop Mammoth Springs grow twisted pines, bleached barkless trunks. a forest of gnarled spirits. Some of the limber pines are said to be 500 years old.

Mammoth Hot Springs

The Obsidian Cliff, further along the road, bears no marker--visitors are discouraged from this national historic monument, because they have carried off so much obsidian as to dull the glass wall. Obsidian collected here was traded across North America by Native Americans.

Porcelain Basin

All day we stood over the steam vents of smoldering earth, sapphire and turquoise pools whose clarity and luminosity suggested coolness, not heat, painted around with ochre and umbre and mustard yellows, belching heated gurgling bubbles or steam or shooting geysers, sometimes surprising us with short intense fountains.

Sapphire Pool

At the Porcelain Basin at Norris, the park's hottest exposed basins, Jacques had to test the toxic shallow water, seething and bubbling over a beautiful palette of blues.

At Midway Geyser basin, pools rumble and bubble, all witnesses of intense dynamism, all emerging from the shifting, restive magma that has the power --someday, in a thousand or ten thousand years --to obliterate our hubris. The beautiful paradise burns into whiteness, the animal droppings are dry pies around the hot cracked environs.

The ochre and red colors come from miniature forests of microorganisms. For thousands of years, microbes have grown in the runoff channels extending from nearby Grand Prismatic Spring, then were buried alive under a crust of silica minerals. The resulting mats, layered upon each other, contain living and nonliving components. Surface microorganisms perform photosynthesis, while deeper inside, as if on a forest floor, organisms feed off the upper layers, an entire ecosystem in a few centimeters.

The Grand Prismatic Hot Spring has a layer of turquoise steam rising from the surface. It is the park's largest spring, approximately 200 ft across, at 160 degrees F. Deep beneath, magma from the active super volcano heats water that rises to the surface through fissures in the rocks and pours almost 500 gallons of hot water each minute into the Firehole River.

Grand Prismatic

Excelsior Geyser Crater erupted during the 1880's in bursts 50-300 ft high, till it apparently blew out in 1890. On Sept 14, 1985, Excelsior roared back to life with 47 hours of major eruptions.

Though its eruptions have been erratic, the geyser's outflow is nearly constant, pumping more than 4000 gallons of boiling water per minute over the crater rim into the Firehole River.

Old Faithful at rest

We finished our tour at Old Faithful, where crowds gathered to wait for the eruption. A guide had begun to explain the mechanism which makes Old Faithful periodic and relatively predictable--a narrowing in the vertical canal lets heat build up till its force is tremendous, expelling 3,700-8,400 gallons of boiling water to a height of 106-184 feet. Just as the guide reached the point of eruption in her story--there she blew!

Old Faithful in action

In the distant past, volcanism covered the earth.  Now it is the environment of Yellowstone that teaches us about the ancestral life of earth's vast biodiversity.

Eastern Idaho's Falls

The Idaho Falls

Our home in Idaho Falls was an apartment in a lovely Arts and Crafts brick house with an elaborate garden. But head off towards the river, cross barren gravel and railroad tracks to the other side, and you're in a trailer park of prefab houses and dilapidated grimy siding. One house for sale has rubber tires bulging out of broken glass windows and two nice pink velour sofas on the lawn. Mixed in the neighborhood are an authentic log cabin and venerable flagstone saltbox houses painted white. One front door had a wreath of thorns with an American flag. I greeted a man with a big belly and thick glasses whose property was posted with no trespassing signs.

Our garden in Idaho Falls

Across the busy peripheral road abundant willows and sycamores border the rapid waters that rush to Idaho's Falls. Further on are the jet spires of the Mormon Temple, the gleaming white space ship to heaven. A man in a bulldozer was continually smashing into a tree.  "Why doesn't he just cut it down?" asked Jacques.  Another man directing us away from the commotion said, "Big men, big toys, you know?" At the Visitor's Center Jacques argued with a self-satisfied old codger who had served as missionary, as far away as Albania, about the insurance policy of faith. "That was Pascale's argument," said Jacques. "Believe, just in case there's a god." "It's your soul we're talking about," said the codger.

An Idaho Falls bumper sticker reads:

Get a taste of religion: Lick a witch

Just across the tracks

Signs in town have a moral ring to them:

Dangerous Water. Stay Out and Stay Alive.

Hypnosis - Change your Mind, Change Your Life

Work Zones: Pay Attention or Pay the Price

and then:

Warning to Tourists: Do Not Laugh at Natives

Auto repair shop

Outside Idaho Falls are horse farms and cattle feeding on the emerald valley. At a filling station, a man has a t-shirt that reads:

I used to have supernatural powers, but my therapists took them away.
At the side of the road a deer arches her neck in a fresh puddle of blood beneath her sleek tawny body. In the sage prairies are elephantine cliffsides of rock.

Palisades Reservoir

Swan Valley parts for the silky gleaming Snake River, with cottonwoods and aspen and firs and willows dripping green. Below, tiny people in inflated boats race over rocks, a sheen of white light and green waters below alpine slopes. The rapids open out into a river valley of leisurely massive trees and the pristine Palisades Reservoir. Across blue waters pine woods harbor all manner of foxes, bobcats, bears. Abundant cutthroat trout nourish raptors that return to their nests each year.

Near Harriman State Park

The slopes are alpine near the water, with poplars, pines and log chalets. Away from the Snake arid hills are balder, but everywhere sleek horses and cattle graze. There is snow in the rocky mountains ahead.

Billboards read:

sWINDle:
Not clean - not cheap- not good for Idaho

Paid for by the Energy Integrity Project (with a picture of windmills)

Idaho Armory - guns and ammo

Trophy Elk Hunting

Pig Out at Dave's, 15 miles ahead

Bleeding Cowboy Tattoo

Emergency Preparedness - Survival Items in Idaho Falls

Mesa Falls

Harriman State Park was a cattle ranch that Averell Harriman gave to Idaho in 1977. The cattlemen had found the land thick with game and fish while they drove their beasts (there's still a stockyard series of wooden traps in Idaho Falls). Pristine conservation preserves the park's stately alpine beauty.

We were joined by American families with myriad--at least 6 each--children, taking photos of their young adolescent girls who stare in aggressive competition.

At Mesa Falls we entered the mist that surrounds broad violent thundering waters that pass 387 million to 967 million gallons per day into the Snake River. The falls seem mythic, surrounded by volcanic rock, smooth tuff on one side, while hexagonal columns of basalt support the cliffs on the other. Then, through green woods to the lower falls, a hiking trail teaches you the names of plants and trees and berries enjoyed by the Indians and bears. We spotted a marmot and a magnificent field bird ruffling its feathers.

Mormon Pioneers

Salt Lake City Temple

An immense melon moon rose in Utah. We arrived late and in suffocating heat to begin a month in the American West. Distant purple mountains--the Wasatch Range--beckoned, but our first task was to discover the pioneers who came here first, the Mormons. A hidden sun beamed up pearly cirrhus strips.  

In Salt Lake City's wealthy and immaculate center a light rail carries you past perfectly restored turn of the century urban architecture to Temple Square, center of the Mormon empire.

The Mormon pioneers who settled this land strove, like all pioneers, against terrible odds. In 1847 Brigham Young (Joseph Smith had by then been meted out frontier justice) struck his staff in the unprepossessing flat and barren land (occupied seasonally by Shoshone, Ute and Paiute Indians) and declared the city of his visions.  It was surveyed out, and the pioneers began to construct the Mormon empire, far beyond the troublesome United States that had persecuted them. Today there are as many Mormons as Jews worldwide (about 13 million), and Salt Lake City has been, over the years, a wealthy crossroads of the West.

Spotless and tightly controlled, Temple Square's message is delivered relentlessly by young girls from all over the world who pop up everywhere in their modest dress, serving as missionaries (just as Mitt Romney did in France). The message is that the true scripture is found in the Book of Mormon, taken by its adherents on a leap of faith despite the obvious discrepancies with scientific knowledge. (For example, the modern horse mentioned many times in the BOM was not on the American continent between 200 BC and 400 AD.) It is drilled into you by elderly men, self-satisfied and friendly. On large screens with high production values giant colorful people enact the Mormon story, or testify to their living faith. There's a lot of money being devoted to telling this tale.

Where are the young men, or the older women? Some of them are in the Family History Library, the huge repository of genealogy that enables the Mormons to convert the dead along with the living. It is purported to be the Mormon's offering to you, so that you can discover the joy in connecting to your long lost ancestors.

Joseph Smith

The Conference Center is the largest in the world, its four-acre roof planted with a meadow. And everywhere giant wide-eyed colonial figures tell stories of religious persecution and life-saving faith, of the wonders the Mormons have built. Pioneer spirit shows in the 1882 Assembly Hall, and the home of Brigham Young, Salt Lake City's colonizer. The majestic Utah Hotel with its Florentine Renaissance ceilings and its marble staircases, was bought by the Mormons, and there a powerful documentary presents the story of Joseph Smith, pioneer and prophet.

What the documentary does not cover are some details about Joseph Smith, now being explored by a blog called Mormonthink. His more than 30 wives (nowhere on Temple Square is polygamy discussed) were in some cases already married to other men. He apparently propositioned many other women, blackmailing them into sleeping with him. Nor is there any mention on Temple Square of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, where non-Mormon pioneers were promised safe conduct and then murdered. An airtight pomposity on Temple Square raises many questions and exhausts the questioner with its obstinent silence.

On the other hand, it's the presence of Mormons in Utah and southeastern Idaho which contribute to an arresting brand of courtesy and cleanliness.

Bear Lake

On a more interesting level, it's easy to see how Tony Kushner arrived at the link with the gay culture in Angels in America. The museum has many large format paintings of Smith manning up--the one powerful beautiful man, glowing in light before handsome, naked Indians.

Other Salt Lakers are fun, friendly, willing to please, chatty--Spanish and British accents, Chinese spoken, some denizens are tattooed and costumed, others are debutante blondes. Public spaces are large and perfect, and the old turn of the century commercial buildings exquisitely restored. The ambience is not unlike New Mexico or Colorado, common sense threaded with serious outoor people and with Native Americans. And the seamless mass transit system is free.

Driving out of Salt Lake City toward Idaho, billboards read:

Wax on the cars, not in the ears! We hear you!

100% breast augmentation! How cool is that?

Mineral composition at Honeyville Hot Springs

The Wasatch mountains beckoned from the background, in a mist of dust and the smoke of nearby forest fires. It is easy to see how the Mormon pioneers were bound to their charismatic leaders by the majesty of these ranges. In the foreground:

alpinechurch. org

4 locations - 12 services

you choose

Paris Tabernacle

As we left Salt Lake City the land unfolded majestically. The Wasatch ranges waited in repose, sleeping beasts, tawny and green. America's immense lands of sage, pine, sycamore, gambrel oak. We stopped for temples and tabernacles and then a hot springs in Honeyville, family pools of concentrated mineral waters under the blue sky and Wasatch mountains, where Spanish and Russian were spoken.

We drove through beautiful Logan Canyon and Cache Valley, where natural stone grew high like ancient columns of mythical giants on the sides of our passage, then young tender trees reached across the road nearly joining hands.

Inside the Paris Tabernacle

Between 10,000 and 16,000 years ago, camels grazed in thick grass here, giant mammoths lumbered, herds of bison and horses roamed and grizzly and short-faced bears hunted. Bones and tusks and remains of such ancient giants have been found in Cache Valley.

The Canyon brought relief from the 95 degree heat, as it had for the trappers and pioneers. From a windy overlook we saw turquoise Bear Lake. We drove along Bear Lake into Idaho, where suddenly everything seemed a bit more free. Farmsteads and livestock seemed more relaxed on ranging pastures, by dilapidated old wool sheds and barns.

His grandfather's carved doors

In Paris, Idaho we found a quite beautifully proportioned Tabernacle in roseate stone. Mormon converts from Switzerland had brought elaborate skills in stone and wood for such hardy pioneers. Our fat bellied affable guide chuckled us through the Tabernacle, where his grandfather had carved the entrance doors. He told us of the laborious building of the Tabernacle, whose stones had been hauled 18 miles over the winter ice of Bear Lake. Each post of each banister was carved by hand. A shipmaker made the wood ceiling like an inverted boat. All this at the command of Brigham Young and in witness of God's glory. These people surrendered fully to the patriarchal will.

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In Montpelier, where the population explodes to 2,000, is a bank which Butch Cassidy robbed in 1896. But Main St. seems worn away to nothing. Perhaps that's Idaho.