American Idyll Finale: Lunking at Lassen, Looking for Lena

From the straight blacktop lines of the Nevada high desert we followed a long and winding route into the tall conifer forests of the California Cascades, to Lassen Volcanic National Park. We hiked to Bumpass Hell – no guff – and gaped at the fumaroles, steam vents and boiling mudpots adorning this natural wonder.

After overnighting at our last state park, Castle Crags in California, it was off to southern Oregon where cousin Terri Livingston Helkenn and her beloved Ed have set up new housekeeping along a beautiful stretch of the Umpqua River. They call it a ‘barn’ but the brand-new carriage house that Ed has just completed is nothing like any barn you’ve ever seen or could imagine. We’ve known Ed and Terri only three years – since the quest for Great War family history set me in search of long-lost relatives – but it’s as if we’ve been friends forever.

After three relaxing, entertaining days at Indian Bend on the Umpqua we convoyed to Tillamook on the northwest Oregon coast. Terri and I are grandchildren of two members of the noteworthy Livingstone family of Big Bras d’Or, Cape Breton. Lena, the eldest of eleven Livingstone siblings, lived and died at Garibaldi, just north of Tillamook. We mobbed the library, city hall, county clerk’s office and pioneer museum for traces of Lena, finding none. We located the grave in the Odd Fellows’ cemetery but were disappointed and more than a little sad to discover it unmarked. Except by us who never knew her, Lena is pretty much forgotten.

We camped one last night and enjoyed good fresh seafood on Ed’s 60th birthday. After a fond departure from the cousins we paused at Seaside OR to gawk at the monument marking the place where in 1806 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark reached the Pacific. Then it was on to Bellevue WA to spend one final convivial evening, with Jan’s favourite cousin Julie and husband Kim.

The rain had spared us pretty much the entire 28 days we spent in the USA. Approaching the Canadian border, rain returned. I confess to a small degree of postpartum letdown. Our adventures in American geography – Shenandoah, Black Mesa, Great Salt Basin, Zion, Cathedral Gorge, Lassen, et al – exceeded all expectations. Yep, I’m sorry it’s over.

--Alan

American Idyll 5: Zion’s Towers, 72 Murders, a Massacre & Great Basin’s Bristlecones

Beware great expectations, Jan often cautions. But given all I have read about Zion National Park keeping expectations trimmed wasn’t easy. Suffice to say Zion exceeds expectations however great they might be. Sheer three-thousand-foot sandstone cliffs of many colours, canyons so narrow and deep sunlight is scarce seen at the bottom. We climbed 1,500’ along a razor ridge to astonishing views of Zion Canyon. Brave Jan defied her fear of heights and revelled. Look at our Flickr photos and you’ll see why.

From Zion’s geographic glory we headed west, seeking out the site of an 1857 massacre of 120 emigrant men, women and children by Mormon militia acting on orders from church leaders. Thence, drawn by more small red print in the Wal-Mart mapbook, we landed at a Nevada state park tantalizingly named Cathedral Gorge. The unique and remarkable geography we found there was equal to the name. We stopped at the nearby town of Pioche, which experienced a bonanza of silver and lawlessness in the early 1870s. It is claimed 72 men died by gunshot and stabbings before Pioche’s Boot Hill cemetery accommodated its first interment from natural causes.

Twenty years ago I traveled in May to Mount Wheeler in Great Basin National Park to see some of Earth’s oldest living things, bristlecone pines growing above 11,000’. Alas, May is not a good time: I was foiled by armpit-deep snow. October proved superior. The snow and ice were navigable and we communed with the ancient pines, some of them three thousand years old.

Think of Nevada as a great washboard inclined more or less north-south. Long jagged mountain ranges alternate with high desert valleys. We drove Highway 50, billed the ‘Loneliest Road in America’, across the middle of the state. Only a few communities dot the landscape of mountains and vast expanses of sagebrush. Driving west into the afternoon sun, we crossed thirteen mountain ranges before losing count. Cross the summit of one range and you see three more against the horizon, the first dark smoky blue, the others progressively paler in the distance. When I first drove Highway 50 two decades ago Tom Waits seemed my appropriate musical companion. This time Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen and David Francey provided the counterpoint.

Having a long way to go before our Saturday rendezvous with cousin Terri and Ed in southern Oregon, we drove well past nightfall. With little light contamination along most of its length Highway 50 provides a fine dark night sky. Venus blazed low over yet another mountain range, Jupiter higher behind it, only slightly less resplendent.

--Alan

American Idyll 4: Ornithopods, Cinder-cones, D.H.Lawrence, and John Wayne too

Before seeing Oklahoma with my own eyes I imagined featureless rangeland proceeding as far as sight allows. Certainly we found some of that, especially in the western half of the Panhandle, which left me wondering afresh what the original Great Plains must have looked like before they were fenced, ploughed and converted to cattle mills. But Oklahoma delivered surprises too. The Black Mesa area at the far west end of the panhandle is very dramatic and evokes the wild west as well as anything you see in New Mexico or Arizona. While there we chanced upon our first-ever tarantula and gawked at the fossilized footsteps of an ornithopod dinosaur.

We crossed the Oklahoma-New Mexico state line and – without really intending to – found ourselves on a beautiful quiet byway, NM 456, in the far northeast corner of the state. NM 456 is lined with multi-hued mesas, one of which gave a cattle operation an apt name, the Weddingcake Ranch. We had the road pretty much to ourselves; Jan even collected a ‘lifer’ bird here, pinyon jay.

No doubt some of my friends will frown at me giving Wal-Mart a plug but, what the heck, I’ll do it anyway. The Wal-Mart Rand-McNally map book is a terrific buy at six bucks. I am especially grateful for the small red print you can find on every sheet, if you look for it. I had never heard of Capulin National Monument until the map disclosed its existence. We went there. We were astounded. Capulin is an extinct cinder-cone volcano prized for its perfect symmetry. We walked down into the heart of the crater then around the entire rim, which sits at about 8,200 feet above sea level. We learned lots about cinder-cone volcanoes and marvelled at the big views we had in every direction.

Taos, New Mexico, has been in my sights for decades. Once upon a time, long ago, I read a lot of D H Lawrence. He lived at Taos in the 1920s and liked it a lot. We arrived in Taos around midday on Saturday and quickly concluded that a city ordinance must require that every building be constructed in neo-adobe mode. Most of the businesses in the downtown area seem to be galleries and artisan studio-shops. Everyone we saw looked trim and well-heeled. We enjoyed a very good lunch at a trendy-looking restaurant and eventually asked the couple sitting next to us for directions to Lawrence’s Taos abode. They could. We went. His old cabin is in the mountains about 17 miles north of Taos. It looks much as it did 80 years ago; it was easy to imagine him writing under the big pine in front of the cabin porch. I am glad we went. The birding was good too: we added several upper-elevation birds to our trip list: Steller’s jay, scrub jay, Clark’s nutcracker, pink-sided junco.

We camped high in the Carson National Forest, at Hopewell Lake. Mountain chickadees sang in the conifers beside the camper. Otherwise, apart from a few elk hunters, we had the place to ourselves. Snow dotted the ground here and there. The hand of man showed only a little. But there was this: a small sign adorned with two American flags that read: 9-11-01, Never Forgive, Never Forget. Our overnight stay at Hopewell was perfectly quiet. Not even an owl broke the stillness.

Another US national monument crossed our path: Aztec Ruins in northwestern New Mexico. Here long-ago ancestors of local native Americans built a complex city and went about their lives for two centuries, then about 1200 AD they disappeared. We walked among the ruins and contemplated the ephemeral nature of life.

A great American filmmaker, John Ford, made a classic ‘duster’, Stagecoach, in the early 1940s. It starred John Wayne. Even today the movie is beautiful to look at. Ford made it in Monument Valley, straddling the Utah-Arizona state line. We went there late in the afternoon. The light was fabulous. Jan called the place ‘stupendous’. She is not given to exaggeration.

--Alan