Journey on the Cowlitz

Journey on the

A supplement of

Journey on the

Cowlitz

2 • Saturday, July 11, 2015 • Journey on the Cowlitz • The Chronicle

Pg. 4-5Mapping the Journey: A Look at the River

Table of Contents:

Newspaper staffs begin each day with the same mission — provide a snapshot of a community by telling the stories that define and form life through words and photographs.

It’s a simple journalistic concept, one that has been carried forward for centu-ries.

In May and June of 2015, The Chronicle en-deavored to apply that tried and true idea to the Cowlitz River, a water-way that begins on the glaciers of Mount Rain-ier and travels 105 miles to its urban conclusion in Longview.

It was an idea birthed by a 2009 journey on the Chehalis River by former Chronicle staffer Brandon Swanson and myself. It was a much tamer float, one that included daily updates

from the banks of the river over the course of nearly two weeks.

For me, it was transfor-mational, a journey that changed my perception and feelings toward the rivers that cut through our area, create and sustain life and deal out bouts of devas-tating flooding.

Since that time, I’ve gazed longingly at the Cowlitz and sporadical-ly planned for a greater journey, one that would include an accompanying website — cowlitz.see-southwestwa.com — and

the special section you now hold within your hands.

When Montana native

Dameon Pesanti signed on as a reporter at The Chronicle in 2014, we suddenly had a man capable and trained in the arts of rafting and outdoor recreation. Paired with award-winning photojournalist Pete Caster, we had a duo that could travel the length of the river while providing photo-graphs and stories that truly did it justice.

We were resolved in our united vision for the project. It would include first-per-son accounts of what our travelers saw and experienced, much like its predecessor in 2009. Beyond that, though, we wanted to take a deeper look. Who were the people who used it as a means of conveyance long before the arrival of European settlers? What creates the river? Is it impacted by climate change? What of the four man-made structures that now control its once-wild flow? Do native fish stand a chance in the face of these concrete producers of electricity?

You’ll find many of the answers within these pages.

In all reality, though, it would take a publication many times the size of this one to truly tell all the stories the Cowlitz River contains within its ancient history.

We present to you our best effort, one that took months of planning and weeks of execution.

We dedicate it to those who live, work and recreate along this wonderfully wild waterway, the people who for centuries have sustained livelihoods from a winding natural wonder that extends from glacial beginnings to the Columbia River.

The Journey on the Cowlitz has been a labor of love and an honest attempt at capturing a moment in time along this transformative, beautiful and thought-pro-voking river.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Pg. 6-7An Aerial View: Photos From Above

Pg. 8-9An Aerial View: Photos From Above

Pg. 10-11Glacial Beginnings: Ancient Ice

Pg. 12-13Glacial Beginnings: Ancient Ice

Pg. 14-15Wild Headwaters: Whitewater

Pg. 16-17 Re�ections: La Wis Wis to Packwood

Pg. 18-19 Re�ections: La Wis Wis to Packwood

Pg. 20-21Winding, Wonderful: Packwood to Randle

Pg. 22-23Winding, Wonderful: Packwood to Randle

Pg. 24-25Blunted Flows: Randle to May�eld

Pg. 26-27Blunted Flows: Randle to May�eld

Pg. 28-29Powerful Structures: The Dams

Pg. 30-31Soaring to Finish: May�eld to Longview

Pg. 32-33Soaring to Finish: May�eld to Longview

Pg. 34-35Underwater Towns: Ri�e, Kosmos and More

Journey on the Cowlitz: A Snapshot in Time of a Timeless River

Eric SchwartzEditor

The Chronicle | 321 N. Pearl St. Centralia, WA 98531 | 360-736-3311 | www.chronline.com

Pg. 36-37History: Tribe, Boats and the Original Cowlitz Explorer

PRESIDENT, COOChristine Fossett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [email protected]

EDITOREric Schwartz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [email protected]

ReporterDameon Pesanti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [email protected]

Visuals EditorPete Caster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [email protected]

Design DirectorKelli Erb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [email protected]

Pg. 38-39From Bane to Boon: Toutle Provides Useful Material

The Chronicle • Journey on the Cowlitz • Saturday, July 11, 2015 • 3

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Randle

TCQE’DSkate Creek was named “Tcqe’D,” according to published Cowlitz legends.

Packwood

Cispus River

Glenoma

Ri�e Lake from above

Camping along the shore at Randle.


By Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

From about 1,500 feet up, the cities of Lewis County look like toy villages built into the

threadbare patches of an old scrunched-up shag rug. Descend any lower and hu-manity’s imprint becomes more real and you see how we’ve imposed a geomet-ric order over the natural world. Trees, like green starburst sentinels, stand in checkerboard formations, often abutting sprawling green fields or housing devel-opments at the edge of town.

Climb higher and the cities begin to lose their character to become gray and black webs floating in a choppy green sea.

Soon, the curve of the Earth becomes apparent and all metaphors are lost when Mount Rainier comes into view.

In preparation for a two-week float down the Cowlitz River, The Chronicle took two exploratory flights over the waterway, from where it pours into the Columbia River up to its glacial origins in the Southern Cascades.

Our pilot was Dave Neiser, a former

deputy with the Lewis County Sheriff ’s Office who spent the majority of his nearly 40-year career flying over the county looking for illegal marijuana grow operations.

He retired in 2009, and the state le-galized pot just three years later.

Now, he enjoys his retirement explor-ing the Pacific Northwest with his wife in his 1972 Cessna Cardinal.

The Cowlitz River begins on the melting glaciers of Mount Rainier and the wilds of East Lewis County and

stretches 105 miles to the urban, indus-trial surroundings of Longview at the Columbia River.

Aerial flights allowed us to scout the

river for potential hazards and choke points, while providing a view of the this spectacular waterway that many have never seen.

Pete Caster / [email protected]

The Mossyrock Dam, upper left, and the west end of Ri�e Lake are seen from above on Thursday, May 28, 2015.

A boat approaches the shores of Mossyrock Park. Mossyrock Park is one of a handful of recreation areas Tacoma Power built after the completion of its two dams.

The Ohanapecosh River �ows rapidly through the southeastern portion of Mount Rainier Na-tional Park.

An Aerial View of the Cowlitz Basin


A braided Cowlitz River heads through the Cowlitz Valley and meets with the Muddy Fork.


The south side of Mount Rainier is seen on Thursday, May 28, 2015. It’s an area that ultimately generates the runo� that forms the early tributaries of the Cowlitz River.

The Cispus River, lower right, merges with the Cowlitz River just ahead of the Cowlitz Falls Dam Park near Glenoma.



The May�eld Dam seen from the northwest.

The Cowlitz River winds at Randle towards the convergence with the Cispus River and the Cowlitz Falls River Dam.

The Cowlitz River slows to a crawl just south of Toledo as it rolls through farm land.

Pilot Dave Neiser, a former deputy with the Lewis County Sheri�’s O�ce, spent the major-ity of his nearly 40-year career �ying over the county looking for illegal marijuana grow operations.

The May�eld Dam seen from the southeast.


The Cowlitz River is seen just north of Longview along Interstate 5.


The Cowlitz River �ows through the Longview and Kelso area on Thursday May 21, 2015.

Above: The Cowlitz River takes one last sharp bend just south of Castle Rock as seen on Thursday, May 21, 2015.

Left: The silty Toutle River (upper right) pours into the Cowlitz River just north of Longview.


How Ancient Ice Forms a Modern Flow

Glacial Beginnings


This aerial photograph, which has been edited to include the locations of several glaciers that to-gether create the Muddy Fork of the Cowlitz River, shows the remote southeast �ank of Mount Rain-ier. Melting snow and ice from the glaciers create the beginnings of the Cowlitz River as water pours down through the crevices and valleys.


By Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

Imagine prehistoric glaciers carv-ing the land we call Lewis Coun-ty almost like a child scraping a

groove through a sandbox. Roughly 35,000 years ago, long val-

ley-filling glaciers extended from the Mount Rainier area into what is now Sil-ver Creek near Mayfield Lake.

In that area, one can still see layers of silt and sand known as lacustrine layers, which were laid down by water that was dammed by a wall of ice. As the climate changed over the course of about 20,000 years, the ice receded during what’s called the Evans Creek Period. The gla-ciers in the Cowlitz Basin shrunk away

from where Mossyrock is now and ended just a little ways east of today’s Riffe Lake.

“(There was) more than 1,000 feet of ice all the way down to ... about a mile east of Riffe Lake,” said Carolyn Driedger, a U.S. Geological Survey hy-drologist. “(Drive east on U.S. Highway 12) and you’re going to see a lot of rock that’s been deposited when the glaciers melted.”

Although those formations melted thousands of years ago, large sediment piles are all over the county.

Those massive glaciers are long gone, but people of Western Washington rely heavily on those that are still left for freshwater. Though still impressive in providing cold, fresh meltwater, the gla-ciers in Mount Rainier National Park are a shadow of what they once were.

As the earth gets warmer, Mount Rainier’s glaciers are shrinking at an alarming rate, and the sediment they’re leaving behind is often creating serious problems for life below.

There are 143 glaciers and perma-nent snowfields on Mount Rainier, 27 of which have names.

According to park documents, “Gla-cier area and cumulative net mass bal-ance (volume) are decreasing rapidly at (Mount Rainier) due to increasing tem-perature and decreasing snowfall.”

Indeed, in less than 100 years, about 21 percent of the park’s ice has melted away. Within the last 10 years, the trend has accelerated, park officials say.

“(The glaciers) are all at their his-toric minimums,” said Paul Kennard, a regional geomorphologist stationed at Mount Rainier National Park. “The equilibrium line, where accumulation equals the melt, is about 10,000 feet. If a glacier starts below that, it’s going to be in trouble.”

Glaciers above the 10,000-foot line are staying cool and getting snow.

The stereotype of glaciers as pris-tinely white, massive ice formations is far from reality.

“They’re conveyer belts of rock, espe-cially around volcanoes,” Driedger said.

As the glaciers melt, they leave huge deposits of rock that wash downstream and threaten everything from old-growth forests to roads and buildings in the developed sections of the national park. As sediment moves downstream out of the park, it chokes waterways and can leave communities vulnerable to flooding.

“Sediment is causing problems in the park and it’s causing problems outside the park,” Kennard said. “The Cowlitz (Glacier) is one of the few that doesn’t seem to be overwhelming the Cowlitz River (with sediment), so that’s good for Packwood and Randle.”

While communities along the Puy-allup and White rivers are dealing with massive deposits of gravel and boulders being washed downstream, the upper Cowlitz Basin is actually incising.

“To me, it’s somewhat consistent with the fact that you have significant clear-water tributaries to the Upper Cowlitz that you don’t have in these other water-sheds,” said Ben Wright, a biological sci-ence technician for the park.


A small creek runs through the high-country meadow along the Nisqually Vista Trail near Paradise at Mount Rainier National Park.

‘‘The Cowlitz (Glacier) is one of the few that doesn’t seem to be overwhelming the Cowlitz River (with sediment), so

that’s good for Packwood and Randle.’’

Paul Kennard,regional geomorphologist

please see BEGINNINGS, page 12


Along with several oth-er watersheds in Western Washington, the Cowlitz River traces much of its ori-gins to the glaciers on Mount Rainier.

But the Cowlitz is somewhat unique compared to other watersheds starting in the park in that it isn’t accumulating deposits of glacial material.

The Muddy Fork of the Cowlitz starts at the Ingraham Gla-cier and significantly thinning Cowlitz

Glacier. The Muddy and the smaller streams it connects with carry huge amounts of glacial silt downstream and, at certain points, are widening into gravelly braided channels, but that process stops when they travel through hard rock canyons.

Areas such as Box Canyon, for ex-ample, move water with so much force that little, if any, sediment can be de-posited until the Muddy Fork meets with the Cowlitz outside of Packwood. The Muddy’s confluence has caused sediment issues in the past, but further downstream its contents are diluted by the clean combination of the Ohana-pecosh River and the Clear Fork of the Cowlitz.

“You’ve got the big Cowlitz Glacier that’s dumping all this sediment, but it is being buffered by the Ohanapecosh and the Clear Fork of the Cowlitz, which are both significant clearwater tributaries. They’re probably contribut-

ing about 60 percent of the flow.”Due to climate change, lower eleva-

tion glaciers and snow fields are melt-ing away, park officials say. Tributaries of the Cowlitz River system that rely on other lower elevation glaciers, such as the Ohanapecosh, will likely have less water should the melt continue.

The Cowlitz Glacier, for example, is retreating at an average of 4.4 meters per year. According to Kennard, its de-cline may cause occasional episodes of huge water and sediment flows to wash downstream, but even if it were to go

away, the Muddy Fork would still get water from the higher, and thus safer, Ingraham Glacier.

So as the earth warms, the water sources may change, but the Cowlitz will continue to flow from Mount Rain-ier.

“You’re going to continue to have that. I don’t think you’re going to have the problems of the summer water sup-ply,” Kennard said. “I can’t imagine a credible scenario where the upper gla-ciers would go away.”


Mount Rainier National Park Regional Geomorphologist Paul Kennard, right, stands in the basin near the Nisqually River while explaining how excess sediment has widened the river bed . The excess sediment has caused the river bed to rise drastically, which damages trees along the sides of the river. It has also caused road damage to Route 706, the main road in the park that leads to Paradise.

BeginningsContinued from page 11

‘‘I can’t imagine a credible scenario where the upper glaciers would go away.’’

Paul Kennard,regional geomorphologist


Geomorphologist Paul Kennard explains how after an extremely heavy rainfall a large rock �ow �ew over Christine Falls more than a decade ago.

A long exposure photograph shows Paradise River.

Deer stand in a high country meadow along the Nisqually Vista Trail near Paradise at Mount Rainier National Park.


Tree damage caused by excess sediment carried down the Nisqually River is seen at Mount Rainier National Park.

The Muddy Fork of the Cowlitz River �ows under a bridge at the trailhead of Box Canyon. The bridge’s elevation from the water is 180 feet.


PADDLING: Cowlitz Tributaries Offer Extreme, Virtually Unspoiled WhitewaterBy Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

The uppermost reaches of the Cowlitz Basin is a landscape like that from another time in

history. It’s virtually untouched by the modern world, and the waters tumbling off the shoulders of Mount Rainier are seen firsthand only by the most experi-enced whitewater explorers.

The Muddy Fork of the Cowlitz, Ohanapecosh, the Clear Fork of the Cowlitz and even the uppermost stretch-es of the Cispus rivers often run through old-growth forests and into deep craggy canyons that offer class V rapids and waterfalls sometimes up to 40 feet tall. In some places, the trunks of petrified old-growth trees with some bark still re-maining poke out of the water.

“It’s one of the most scenic places out there, completely beautiful in every way,” said Dan McCain, a rafting enthusiast from Portland. “The whitewater – espe-cially on the Clear Fork – is just amazing, it’s nonstop whitewater.”

McCain is a rare breed of rafter in that he runs parts of rivers that are typi-

cally reserved to kayakers only. Rather than using oars, McCain and just one other person sit on opposite sides of the raft and paddle their way through the rapids. When they drop over waterfalls they quickly lie back in the raft and hang onto a strap running through the center of the boat.

McCain has run the Clear Fork, which is considered to be the most dif-ficult navigable stretch of all the tributar-ies, in a raft. As with all of them, many places in the canyons are very narrow and choked with boulders, but the Clear Fork is notorious for its logjams, which can change dramatically on a year-to-year basis.

“There’s been a couple years that no one even ran it,” he said. “The Ohana you can hike out of, but in the Clear you’re pretty much committed. I don’t know if I’d go in on a first descent of the season.”

Jared Page, 35, and Travis Lee, 39, are two well-seasoned kayakers who, despite

coming to the upper basin for years, had never paddled the Muddy Fork. But what started as an afternoon boat trip quickly evolved into a two-month expedition in-volving helicopters, rappelling spotters and ziplines to complete what they be-lieve was the first decent down the high-est reaches of the river.

Between the two of them they have been kayaking for about 25 combined years. Page has lived in Centralia for most of his life. Lee lives in Mukilteo, but comes down to the Cowlitz Basin on a regular basis. The two of them run the Ohanapecosh on a near weekly basis when it’s at the right levels.

The two read about the trip in “Guide to the Whitewater Rivers of Washing-ton,” a book commonly used by kayakers and rafters in the state.

“I read about this run in the book, I wanted to go check it out because I like the Cowlitz,” Page said. “It said put in (at Nickel Creek), it said easy Class V.

We put in and all of the sudden it looked more serious, and committed.”

The first drop was about 5 feet, but it seemed too big to fit the description of what was in the book so they stopped to scout.

“I don’t like the fact I was so trusting of the book because it wasn’t at all what was in there,” Lee said. “It looked good. There was a 20-foot waterfall, then fur-ther down was a 40-foot waterfall. It was, ‘Holy … this looks doable, but this is not at all what we signed up for.’”

They hiked out and returned to civi-lization to plot their course.

Page describes the river as becoming an angler fish to and they its prey. Al-though it was incredibly dangerous and required a huge amount of effort, they couldn’t help but be drawn to it.

“My sister says I was possessed for a while,” he said

A friend who happens to be a heli-copter pilot made a couple passes over the river and shot footage of the run for them, but it didn’t show everything. From August to early October in 2009, they spent the weekends at the Muddy trying to run just 6 miles. They hiked along the river, studied its features and ran it when they could. When it was time to go home, they’d leave their boats in

Rapids Are Liquid Gold in the Upper Reaches of the Cowlitz Basin

Wild Headwaters

Dameon Pesanti / [email protected]

Throw bag in hand, Jared Page watches as Travis Lee drops down the 18-foot Ohane Falls on the Ohanapecosh River on June 26, 2015. Known for its technical rapids, crystal clear water and stunning scenery, the Ohanapecosh is considered a world class whitewater run and a favorite among extreme kayakers in the Paci�c Northwest.

please see HEADWATERS, page 15

To see videos of kayakers exploring the tributaries of the upper Cowlitz Basin,

visit http://cowlitz.seesouthwestwa.com.


the water like a bookmark in a novel so as to not lose their place along the jour-ney.

“A few times we had to walk out of the river because something went wrong” Lee said. “It took us a long time to break it into pieces that were runnable.”

At points, their friends repel into the canyon as safety spotters and shoot video. One particular feature was so bad they had to run a zip line across it to fer-ry their gear and themselves to the other side. At one particular point the canyon twisted and hid the river from view.

“That canyon is very committing and from the top it, deceptively, looks like it’s runnable,” Lee said. “It’s about 100 foot deep and there’s a point at the top it’s like 5 feet. You can’t see the sky from the in-side.”

The canyon featured several big drops before the gradient relaxed. But just when they thought they were in the clear, they came around a corner to find the river swirling into a giant hole.

“I didn’t know what it was; I’d never seen anything like that before but I knew it was bad,” Page said.

The canyon formed a roughly 15-foot toilet bowl, at the back of which the water disappears underground. They thought the water might just pop out below. Af-ter all, they could see another pool just beyond the one they were in. But a closer look revealed that it was basically stand-ing still.

If the water was coming out there, it likely was deep below. They had to pad-dle against the current as it drew them toward the hole. Fortunately they found a small ledge that ran around the pool just beneath the surface and were able to rock climb their way over the whirlpool and out to the next hole.

The final run came in early October. It took the entire day to make it through the gorge and they had to find their way to camp in the dark.

They’ve never gone back to that sec-tion of the Muddy. Running it was just too hard and took way too much plan-ning for such a short run. Instead, both of them make regular trips down the Cispus and the Ohanapecosh. Those riv-ers are relatively well trodden and offer terrific paddling just a little ways off the beaten path — no helicopter required.

HeadwatersContinued from page 14

Dameon Pesanti / [email protected]

Travis Lee paddles down a small ledge in the Ohanapecosh River in late June. Lee’s 8-foot kayak is a “creek boat,” meaning it’s designed to plow through steep, shallow rapids and remain as upright as possible.

Travis Lee scouts “Petri�ed” on the Ohanapecosh River. The rapid is named for the enormous old growth tree that juts out of the stone walls.

Dameon Pesanti stands atop a tree that has fallen over the Ohanapecosh River near the southwestern entrance to Mount Rainier National Park.

The 16-mile-long Ohanapecosh River runs through the southeastern corner of Mount Rainier National Park.

Travis Lee drops into one of the falls on “Petri�ed,” a class V feature on the Ohanapecosh River. The river is a favorite among extreme kayakers.

“I’d never seen anything like that before, but I knew

it was bad.’’ Jared PageKayaker


La Wis Wis to Packwood

Early Reflections:


The Ohanapecosh River, west of La Wis Wis, Friday morning, June 5, 2015.

Emerging From National Park, Cowlitz Offers Stunning Scenery By Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

Editor’s Note: Reporter Dameon Pesanti and Visuals Editor Pete Caster set out on a 105-mile rafting trip from the headwaters of the Cowlitz River to its confluence with the Columbia River in Longview on June 3, starting at La Wis Wis Campground along the Ohanapecosh River. His writings from the river are fea-tured throughout this special section, be-ginning here with Day 1.

Day 1: The Wild Roots of the Cowlitz River

As they say, the devil fools with the best laid plans. Photographer Pete Caster and I planned on getting to the office early and finishing our work by noon to get to Mount Rainier National Park fast on June 3. That didn’t happen.

By the time 4:30 p.m. rolled around, I had finally finished my second story and we still needed a few more supplies and groceries.

After all our meandering, we hit La Wis Wis Campground at 8:30 p.m. with just enough time to pitch our tents before sunset. After setting up camp, helping Pete pitch his tent and gathering fire-wood, I had just enough time to roam the campground.

In spite of the asphalt, neatly orga-nized campsites and faux log cabin bath-rooms, La Wis Wis is a splendid place. The grove of massive old-growth trees in which the grounds are nestled harken back to a time before wood was a com-modity and these coniferous giants cov-ered the Pacific Northwest.

Come dark, I built a fire as any camp-ing red-blooded Montanan would, and set to grilling dinner. The U.S. Forest Service was kind enough to weld grills onto their fire rings, but I chose ones just wide enough to drop a bratwurst to its doom. Leave it to government to find so-lutions that are so close to right but still so maddeningly wrong.

River Diary

please see REFLECTIONS, page 17


Fortunately, what Pete lacks in tent assembly skills (employers take note) he more than compensates with pointy-stick whittling. With the Caster-made custom Douglas fir poker, our sausages were saved and we were back to the races.

We hit the sack around 11 p.m., a bit too late, considering we planned on be-ing up at 4 a.m. and, weather permitting, getting some great sunrise shots in the park. Thanks to the Ohanapecosh River whispering at my side, I was out cold in a matter of minutes. I could live 100 years and never tire of a rushing stream.

Day 2: Once More Into the Tribu-taries

As much as I’d love to hike to the Cowlitz Glacier, or as close to it as pos-sible, time (and probably physical fitness) is not on our side. As a compromise, Pete and I explored the headwaters in and outside of Mount Rainier National Park.

Our first stop was the Ohanapecosh River just outside of the park bound-ary. I don’t think I could have prepared my brain for what we were about to see: a deep, mossy, stone canyon cradling a crystal clear river. There are several tight rapids and steep drops on the Ohana, making it off-limits to all but the most advanced kayakers.

It cuts through a mountain of bed-rock and meanders around hundreds of boulders along its way to the Big Bottom. There was no soil to be had near the riv-er; the riparian plants had only the moss and bit of hummus to thank for their lives.

I simply don’t possess the language to lasso such natural beauty without re-sorting to old cliches that have since been torn down and robbed of all their might. It’s a great tragedy that more people can’t feast their eyes on this place.

I had a fascinating conversation with a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist this week. She told me the volcanic rock around this section of Rainier is some of the oldest in the entire region. At several points through history, glaciers filled nearly half of Lewis County — some-where between 12,000 and 35,000 years ago, by the best estimates.

There’s no reason, she said, not to be-lieve that the Muddy Fork of the Cowlitz


Dameon Pesanti uses the concentrated stream method to blow onto the �re at La Wis Wis Campground east of Packwood.

please see REFLECTIONS, page 18

ReflectionsContinued from page 16


didn’t create Box Canyon while the gla-ciers were still sitting above. Since the Ohana isn’t too far downstream, I pre-sume it had much the same history.

While Pete was off shooting photos, I couldn’t help but stare into the waters and think of our parallelled histories. When water was presumingly just beginning to trickle down through the bedrock in this area, humanity in Eurasia had just fin-ished the earliest known piece of human figurative art, domesticated dogs and in-vented needles and saws.

Humans came to North America 25,000 years ago. In half that time, we’d start domesticating sheep and goats. Ice would still be just outside Riffe Lake. Maybe I was caught in the moment, but in a way I felt we’ve made this journey through time together, these waters and us. Both progressing toward some great

other beyond ourselves. For these waters it has been the sea, but for us it was unfa-miliar lands and new ideas.

Now, thousands of years later, the Ohana continues its journey to the Pa-cific, wearing an ever deeper groove into the canyon, while we turn our eyes to space and dream of inhabiting new plan-ets. Oh, the things that come to mind af-ter a few hours in the forest!

A few hours later we moved up the mountain toward Box Canyon, one of the least visited sides of the park. The Muddy Fork rages through the slot canyon there about 180 feet below the bridge. Despite the beautiful weather, only a trickle of tourists drove into the area. Unsurprisingly, they were all out on family vacations, and this was just one of several stops. As of this trip, one family from Tennessee had visited every state in America, save New Mexico. Regardless of where they were from, the sentiment was the same: This place is beautiful.

Today was our last visit to the park for this trip. Admittedly, I’m a little sad for it. There’s so much to see here, I have

to come back soon. Day 3: Oars Up, We’re in the RiverFor whatever reason, neither of us

slept much last night. It wasn’t worry, at least on my end, that woke me up at 4 this morning. It was anticipation that kept me up.

After waiting for Pete to finagle the perfect shot of us before we left camp, we shoved off at about 9 a.m into the Ohan-apecosh River, which eventually joins the Muddy Fork to create the Cowlitz River.

I wasn’t sure what was downstream,

but I was transfixed by everything we came across.

The lower canyon is no less stunning than those closer to the National Park entrance. The rapids are only smaller. The bedrock walls cloister the river into a narrow pinch and are covered by large cedars, rooted into whatever hospita-ble crack they, as seeds, were fortunate enough to fall into.

As pleasant as it was, the canyon was short-lived, and before we knew it, we found ourselves at the lip of the Big Bot-tom.

Just past the final wall, we drifted through the canyon’s end and met two 20-something guys off the shore. There are dozens of primitive grounds just off the beaten path in the Gifford Pinchot, and these guys were taking full advan-tage.

They were traveling north from the Oregon coast after finishing up seasonal jobs in Colorado. These next few weeks, they planned to spend a couple days ex-



A camper skips a stone into the Ohanapecosh River while hanging out o� of Forest Road 1270 east of Packwood.

please see REFELCTIONS, page 19

Even into Big Bottom, the Ohanapecosh is as

crystalline as water comes, a stark contrast to the

slate gray slurry that is the Muddy Fork of the Cowlitz.


ploring Mount Rainier while they’re be-tween jobs. We chatted easily, as people in nature do, about other parts of the country we’ve seen and how gorgeous and strange those landscapes were.

After handshakes, we were off again and rolling downstream.

The Big Bottom awaited. Here the river splits numerous times

into a network of braids and dead end channels. Navigating this was like run-ning a maze where turning back wasn’t an option. We could hardly ever see what was around the bend until we were right upon the course.

Still, most of the time, our guesses were correct and we avoided log jams and dead washouts. We did get stuck sev-eral times, but only twice did we have to get out, grab the ropes and hulk our craft over the stones.

Several times, the channels we chose were barely wide enough to fit the raft. Squeezing in both oars was nearly im-possible.

Even into Big Bottom, the Ohana-pecosh is as crystalline as water comes, a stark contrast to the slate gray slurry that is the Muddy Fork of the Cowlitz. Their confluence comes at a small bend just outside of Packwood, and from there on the Cowlitz itself is turned a luscious aqua blue. Now, sitting here outside the Skate Creek Road bridge in Packwood, that color has carried us downstream.

The world is an entirely different place from in the center of a river.

I think I drove Pete crazy by ask-ing him at least a dozen times if we had passed Packwood.

We saw several animals along the way. There were at least two river otters lolling in the current ahead of us, though they were swifter than Pete’s draw for his camera. We also were graced with the presence of two eagles and a number of ducks. The avians seemed annoyed we were coming down the river, spiraling into the sky at the very sight of us.

Now into the main Cowlitz, the river is solid, albeit a bit lazy.

There’s a window of highwater and, like Indiana Jones diving into the gap at the last second, we’re doing this float just before it closes. I was grateful for the rain earlier this week. It pushed the river up a few inches, just enough, I’m guessing, to help us through. If we were to start this again, I think I would have started about a month earlier. Sure, the weather wouldn’t have been as nice, but the river would have been more swollen and the rapids more entertaining.

Here’s hoping for a wet summer and an even wetter winter.

Onward.



With the camera upside down, the tree line across the Ohanapecosh River is seen near a sand bar.

An osprey glides through the sky over the Cowlitz River east of Packwood.

The Ohanapecosh River, west of La Wis Wis.A close up of the shallow rapids along the Cowlitz River east of Packwood.

A logjam sits along side the shores of the the Cowlitz River near Packwood.


River’s Course and Contents Require a Strong Back and Deft Rowing By Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

Day 4: A Long Day’s Float Followed a Campground So Sweet

Possibly the best element of a trip like this is falling into the rhythm of the natu-ral world.

Sure, I’m still working just as hard — if not more so — as I do when I’m in my office back in Centralia, but the hours are more fluid and take on a different mean-ing.

Whether it’s self-created or an adapta-tion to someone else, I think there’s har-mony lying below the surface of life. You wake up at this time, go to work at that building with these people, pick the kids up at this place, go to that store before it closes, pay your bills on this day, go to bed at that hour.

In my life, those behaviors are so far below the surface they’re practically au-tomatic. But for these two weeks on the river, those routines have gone out the window and I’m left with the cycles of the sun and the tendencies of the river.

We rowed hard from the morning well up to dusk on Friday after departing from La Wis Wis Campground along the Ohanapecosh River.

Part of the joy in exhaustively pushing myself through a long day’s work is savor-ing the flavors I otherwise wouldn’t give much thought to. Realistically, yesterday wasn’t so much about pushing as it was pulling — pulling our raft through the canyon, over rapids, around rocks, onto

shore — but mostly pulling it down the lazy upper Cowlitz River by about 6 feet per stroke.

As far as rivers go this time of year, she’s a lazy, wide-mouthed stream, now that humans have anesthetized her fi-ery personality with three hefty concrete dams. But that doesn’t mean she’s without risk or personality.

While most of the time the Cowlitz is slow to anger, all in Southwest Washing-ton know her fury.

Each river has an attitude. Any river rats worth their neoprene

will tell you of the polite but antagonis-tic relationship we have with the water. A stiff current is always great when you’re seeking a little excitement, but can also be absolutely maddening when you need to slow down or get back up stream. Even the smallest currents can drive you nuts.

Ask anyone about their first few days at the oars.

I think of rafting and kayaking as dancing with a strong-willed partner. It’s

best to understand right away that she will do whatever she darn well pleases, and the best way for you to get what you want out of the engagement is to make your move around hers. If you don’t like it, then you can just prepare to die.

The outcome isn’t always that severe, but make no mistake: The river will al-ways win.

If you’re too bold with her, she’ll pin your craft against a logjam with the force of all the water she can muster from up-stream, or she’ll trap you in a recirculating hole from which escape is not guaranteed. Sadly, even those who do pay her the re-spect she commands still occasionally are found on the wrong side of the surface.

Washington state is full of angry wa-terways. Fortunately, for the purposes of our journey, the Cowlitz is a kind mistress — save the occasional snarl and snag.

We had every intention of stopping for camp around Packwood, but we couldn’t

River Diary

Packwood to Randle

Winding and Wonderful


A spooked goose �ies o� of the shore and skims across the Cowlitz River east of Randle on Friday, June 5.

please see WINDING, page 21


find a worthwhile spot. There was a god-awful wind blowing upriver. Every beach was a rock garden, and most of the forest-ed sides looked like private land.

I’m a pretty charming guy, but I’m not sure I could talk my way out of a confron-tation with an East County rancher who spotted two trespassers squatting on his place. So on we rowed, and rowed, and rowed and rowed toward what we knew was a campground somewhere up ahead.

By the time we saw the RVs poking out of the trees near the U.S. Highway 12 bridge between Randle and Packwood, my back muscles were ready to slip off my spine. We stopped just upriver of a few campers and scrambled up the bank and through the brush to get to the property.

When an older woman sitting outside her camper spotted our rough mugs com-ing out of the trees, she turned to her com-panion and said, “Oh, look. Bush people.”

We found Jim Shepard, one of the employees of the Cascade Peaks Fam-ily Campground, and explained who we were and what we were doing. He lit up at the idea of our journey and offered us a free place to stay for the night.

Under typical circumstances, receiv-ing gifts as a journalist is a huge no-no, but because this trip and this diary is not a typical pursuit of journalism, I felt in this instance it was acceptable.

As dusk settled in, I set to build a fire, but we didn’t have paper to start it. My trip companion and Chronicle Visuals Editor Pete Caster tried to use some moss, but it proved too damp to catch.

Here, dear reader, is where I give you a bit of knowledge.

Tortilla chips are excellent, if not the best, fire starters. I can’t speak to all chip varieties, but the grease left over from the creation of those crisp, golden, triangles of deliciousness is enough to ignite, with the drop of a match, a flame that burns large and hot enough for even the thickest of kindling.

Even in spite of a fire, you don’t real-

ize the vacuous dark of the night sky until you escape the city lights. As much as I wanted to savor it, after I got some food in my belly, it wasn’t long before I hit the sack.

Day 5: A Hot Sun and a Daunting Task

As fun as this trip has been, it was hard leaving that campground. We float-ed from Cascade Peaks down to Randle. By car, you could make that drive in un-der 10 minutes. Take a raft down this slow and incredibly meandering section of the Cowlitz, and plan on spending about eight hours pulling at the oars.

For the first few miles, the river banks

yawn wide, the current relaxes and gravel bars snake just a few inches below the sur-face before suddenly giving way to deep, turquoise channels.

Buzzards hovered in the breeze around us and occasionally flocked to the dead trees scattered along the shore. I didn’t know Washington had buzzards until recently, and I think they stared at me just as curiously as I stared at them. They’re oddly beautiful animals. Even in the wind, the scavengers glide easy on ebony wings, their red heads seemingly the only things that distinguishes them from ravens. A couple bald eagles combed the water, as did a number of low flying-osprey.

At one gravel bar, we met a group of people standing around a couple quads and admiring the water. Ken and Karen Egger were over from Yakima, visiting their in-laws Don and Kathy Palen.

As soon as the good weather hits, the Palens leave their camper at the riv-er and visit nearly every weekend. The

please see WINDING, page 22

‘‘Buzzards hovered in the breeze around us and

occasionally flocked to the dead trees.’’

WindingContinued from page 20

ABOVE: Four turkey buzzards gather on the shoreline of the Cowlitz River east of Randle. BELOW: Old cars that were dropped into the the river to protect the shoreline from erosion are en-tangled in roots and vegetation along the Cowlitz River near Randle .

ABOVE: A dying salmon splashes in the Cowlitz River in Randle. BELOW: A group of camping chairs surround a camp�re at a campsite at Cascade Peaks Campground east of Randle as people walk along the shores of the Cowlitz River.


Vancouver, Washington, residents aren’t allowed to build a permanent structure on their property — it’s in the flood zone — but they make maximum use of their little slice of the Cowlitz Valley each year.

Ken Egger said it’s a welcome reprieve from the pace of life where he lives in Vancouver and owns and operates a mo-bile RV repair business.

They were all too happy to tell us sto-ries and point us in the direction of a few elk upriver.

Our chance encounter with the group highlights what we have seen throughout the early portions of this journey — abso-lute, unfettered kindness.

Having exchanged names and infor-mation, we turned our raft west and again began the slow journey downriver.

At midday the current picked up, but the trees and submerged logs became so thick I almost thought the river had swal-

lowed a forest. So far, no area has tested my oarsmanship as much as this one. The bossman himself, Chronicle Editor Eric Schwartz, joined us for this leg of the journey. He and Visuals Editor Pete Cast-er acted as lookouts for the many sunken lurkers that threatened to slice our floor in two. Heeding their warnings, I bobbed and spun from one side of the river to the other. More than once, we collectively held our breath as I missed some logs by only a few inches before spinning us back around to dodge another.

The trees begin to clear where the riv-er twists into such tight serpentines that going around a bend almost feel like go-ing backward.

I spun the nose upstream and put my back into the oars. Eric and Pete sat on the tubes in front of me and paddled between my strokes. Despite our efforts, we moved at a little more than a crawl. If there was ever a time for chain gang work songs, something to imply finality to seemingly endless and futile work, this was it.

Salvation came in the form of a big steel and concrete bridge in the heart of Randle.

Burned, dehydrated and exhausted, we scaled the sandy bank and headed for town. Maybe it was a trick of the brain or some vague hallucination, but I swear I heard angels at the sight of the Mount Ad-ams Cafe.

With its classic diner feel and tasty American food, the place is a gem on U.S. Highway 12. The food was delicious, but I hardly had a chance to taste it because I ate so quickly. We chatted and swapped river stories with the owner, Don Lund. He, too, tried to float the Cowlitz years ago, but a nasty encounter with a logjam cut his trip short.

In a fortuitous twist, Lund offered to haul our raft across Riffe Lake in the

coming days. Not looking to waste un-necessary time but still hoping to travel along the entire course of the river, his kind offer provides a compromise of sorts.

In one last gesture of the friendliness we absorbed from Packwood to Randle, he picked up our check, scrawling a note across the top.

“Thanks for not misquoting me,” it said.

Still hungry, and itching to write a bit later, I went across the street to the Big Bot-tom Bar & Grill, another Randle gem, for a mountain of curly fries, a glass of beer and a couple hours at the keyboard. After a game of pool, I was too tired for more than just a few sentences. So I crossed the highway and pitched my tent on a sandy bank of the Cowlitz River.

In the coming days, we’ll approach the three dams that give the Cowlitz River its form.

As daunting a task as this 105-mile journey seems, the events of the last few days have given us the mental fuel to move forward.

WindingContinued from page 22


Dameon Pesanti walks back to the raft after investigating a shoreline east of Randle.

A small bird glides just above the water along the Cowlitz River east of Randle.

Recreational vehicle enthusiasts bid farewell to Dameon Pesanti, Peter Caster and Eric Schwartz as they head back on to the Cowlitz River.

‘‘In the coming days, we’ll approach the three dams

that give the Cowlitz River its form. “


By Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

Nothing along to the Cowlitz River is safe from the water’s corrosive tenden-cies, and few people know that as well as Victor Khvoroff.

Khvoroff’s land sits on what are called government lots, meaning that as the river moves, the boundaries of his property changes, unlike those of surveyed lots which are static no matter what a waterway may do.

“If the river moves the neighbors may gain land, or I will because the river moves toward me,” he said one morning.

The most dramatic example of the river’s movement comes at one particular bend of his roughly 460-acre cattle ranch. If you’ve ever driven down U.S. High-way 12, you’ve seen it, even if you don’t realize it.

The river has dug so far into the bank that it’s begun to threaten the highway between Packwood and Randle. Khvoroff said he tried for a number of years to get the Washington Department of Transportation to halt its advance while it was still hundreds of feet away. But they didn’t intervene until the river came just within feet of the highway, he said.

When The Chronicle first wrote about his plight last October, there was still about 4 feet of river bank between his fence and the water.

Now, parts of his fence are hanging over it. Khvoroff resisted WSDOT’s plans to purchase from him just under 10 acres of

land to fix about 2,000 feet of shoreline. Eventually, the issue escalated to a court hearing that gave the state authority to condemn the property using fee simple ownership. Before the state can take full possession of the land, the two parties will go to a compensation trial sometime between November and January 2016, unless the two settle beforehand.

Khvoroff’s biggest battle now is over the estimated 3,600 cubic yards of dirt that will be dug out of the area before the project is completed. The state, he says, is acting as if they already own the dirt and are making plans to take it elsewhere. He wants to keep it and use it around his property.

“Maybe at compensation trial I can make them pay for the dirt. But I don’t want the money, I want the dirt,” he said. “It’s more valuable to me than money. I would build a critter pad for the floods …. I have low spots on my land I could even out.”


Dameon Pesanti �ies o� of a rope swing along the shores of the Cowlitz River near Randle.

Pete Caster takes control of the oars, if only brie�y, east of Randle.

Two deer run up the shoreline east of Randle.

Cowlitz River Continues to Wander, Causing a Randle Rancher Woes


Victor Khvoro� stands among wooden debris that �oodwaters from the Cowlitz River has depos-ited onto his ranch.


Stream Slows As It Approaches and Passes Three DamsBy Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

Day 6: Randle to Scanewa Is Hot, Flat, Beautiful and Tiresome

Forgive me dear readers, for I have lied to you.

Although it wasn’t intentional, I sold you a bill of goods when I said Sunday’s trip was the most difficult. The truth is, Monday was the worst. Unless we end up having to row across Mayfield Lake, I can’t foresee any future days on this blessed journey becoming more difficult.

I wish I could tell you about how I physically prepared for this trip months in advance. I’d claim I passed the weeks before departure with a banner of the word “Cowlitz” high over my home gym where I exercised as if I were reenacting a “Rocky” movie, but alas, that would be a lie.

If it were on film, my exercise mon-tage would definitely have “Eye of the Tiger” playing in the background, but in-stead of me jogging around Philadelphia and punching sides of beef, I’d be jog-ging to this tasty Indian restaurant just around the corner from The Chronicle’s office and shamelessly devouring mas-sive quantities of food at the all you can eat buffet.

My cut scenes and B-roll would be a mix of my biceps flexing as I heaped huge piles of food onto my plate, my face frozen in a sweaty grimace as I hauled the load back to my table, my jaw mus-cles clenching over and over, and the whole thing would end with a closeup of the buttons on my shirt stretching to their maximum.

I did go for a few intense bike rides from time to time. If you saw any of the photos or videos of me doing back flips off the raft these past few days, you should be as impressed as I am that my legs were able to get that belly of mine over my head.

With all that work I did, I’m still try-ing to figure out how it got there.

Visuals Editor Pete Caster and I start-ed our day with two massive breakfasts, coffee and a bit of work at the Mount Ad-ams Cafe in Randle, and we left feeling pretty good.

That all changed when we returned to our beach campsite below the Cowlitz

Blunted Flows, Manmade Diversions:

River Diary

please see JOURNEY, page 25

Randle to Mayfield

Blunted Flows, Manmade Diversions:


The Cowlitz River moves beneath the U.S. Highway 12 bridge between Morton and Mossyrock, an isolated and remote stretch of the waterway that begins after the Mossyrock Dam.


River bridge. It was a million degrees outside, I swear. It was so hot that neither of us could do anything to put our camp away for about 15 minutes; we just stood there paralyzed by the blistering heat.

Once I did get moving, the sand burned my knees and the palms of my hands, and the surface of our rubber raft all but took off the first layer of our skin.

The heat made every minor detail a huge issue. A couple empty Gatorade bottles and a few plastic bags on the floor of our raft got me so annoyed with the perceived haphazard condition of our boat that I just started tossing things out and repacked it all over again.

As is almost always the case, life was better on the water.

It was still very hot, but I oared us under the shady overhanging trees for most of the float, which made a world of difference. The cerulean current car-ried along gently. Song birds called out at every bend. Calves and cows greeted us by the riverside, until we got too close and they scampered up the bank. A bald eagle taunted us by launching out of the trees, flying over the river and hiding somewhere in the timber ahead.

But about 2 miles after leaving Ran-dle, the current slowed and then stopped entirely as the headwinds laughed up-stream. Even with me putting my back into the oars and Pete paddling hard, we moved at a snail’s pace.

If we stopped, the raft stopped.Either that, or it turned sideways and

drifted a little upstream. It was this way for about 11 miles. We estimated our pace to be about 6 feet per stroke, a rate we figured would get us to Lake Scanewa sometime next month.

The seemingly endless flat water and mild sun exhaustion trapped me in a philosophical quandary that typically only comes up on late nights in a college dorm.

“When is a river a lake?” I wondered.I mean, if it’s blocked by a dam, isn’t

a river just a faster flowing part of the lake? Where is the defining line? How slow does it have to be before it’s con-sidered lake water? Lakes have currents, why aren’t they rivers? What do the words “water” and “current” actually mean anyway?

Clearly, I’m not a scientist.It wasn’t long before the evening set

in. We hadn’t seen a person in miles. Our conversations slowed to a halt and the world was silent, save the rhythmic squeak and splash of my oars at work.

As we got deeper into the lake, the shore pulled away from us a little more with every stroke. At one point near a boggy spot of the lake, a splash broke the silence and Caster exclaimed he saw what he was sure was an otter.

Hoping for a photo, I oared as hard and quiet as I could toward the ripples.

Behind us, I saw another brown head flick the surface before diving again. We sat with bated breath, waiting. Then some grass rustled near the shore, sounding like something ran off. Feel-ing a little defeated, we rowed on, only to hear another splash upstream.

I spent more time on the phone than I care to admit. Back in cell service, I vol-

leyed calls between my editor, Tacoma Power, the U.S. Geological Survey, Lewis County PUD and another reporter.

Somehow, Pete and I had to get our-selves around the Lewis County PUD’s Cowlitz Falls Dam at the west end of Lake Scanewa and meet with USGS for a story before 9 a.m. the next morning.

Later, we’d also have to meet with the dam operators for another story. With the newsroom on deadline Tuesday morning, a ride from Editor Eric Schwartz wasn’t an option, and PUD wouldn’t help us get our raft around the dam. Apparently, the Risk Management Department thought we were too much of a liability.

As usual, when we finally landed at about 8 p.m., Pete and I were exhausted.

Then things got complicated on the shores of Scanewa.

Initially, I improvised a plan for re-

porter Justyna Tomtas to pick us up where we camped at 8:30 the next morning. Then we’d all go to the dam and divide and con-quer the stories.

But that didn’t solve our raft issue. There’s only one boat launch on

Scanewa, and it’s a busy one. We didn’t want to leave our rented raft and all of our other equipment tied up for three hours in such a busy location unattended. Plus, the grounds are covered with signs that say “day use only.”

I hiked around looking for a spot to camp, but thought better of it for fear of our stuff getting stolen.

We needed a better plan.We called Reporter Justyna Tomtas

and had her come get us and the gear We checked into a hotel in Morton just

after midnight.

JourneyContinued from page 24


A heron takes �ight from a stump along the Cowlitz River in the gorge below the Mossyrock Dam.



It wasn’t an easy decision. In fact, it was pretty frustrating, but

we got the stories taken care of and the raft moved around the dam.

Still, it meant missing the Cispus River confluence and a little bit of the lake. Given our other responsibilities, it seemed like the correct call.

The Cispus and I aren’t done.

Day 7: Far, Far From Glamping at Riffe

Our Tuesday morning started with a trip up Riffe Lake to see how the U.S. Geological Survey measures water levels below the Cowlitz Falls Dam.

We rode with them deep into the canyon and were back onshore before 1 p.m. There was ample time for us to get on the oars and row out, but Don Lund, the owner of the Mount Adams Cafe in Randle, offered to give us a tow across the lake the next day.

Staring out at that 23 miles of choppy, windswept water, it was a ride neither of us wanted to miss.

For at least one day, we were stuck. There’s a free camping area just be-

fore Taidnapam Park on Riffe Lake that we decided to stay at.

It’s a known and popular spot for hang gliders and campers who aren’t willing to pay for the more developed campground down the road.

For the purposes of our trip, on Tues-day night the price was right and the view was great.

Unfortunately, it was the worst camp-ing spot so far.

Evidence of human carelessness was everywhere.

Just off the road, there’s a big parking lot area and an outhouse surrounded by huge bags of garbage and glass bottles.

Move down to the lake, and at several places you’ll see where people had ig-nored the “no vehicles” signs and driven off the road and through the marsh areas lining the water.

Down at the shore, there were tags from this and pieces of that poking out from the rocks. Needless to say, we didn’t have a campfire. Without trees, there was no shade to escape the midday heat. Pete and I just set up our tents and did what we could to stay cool.

It wasn’t until after we broke camp that we realized there was a dirty diaper and several baby wipes sitting in our fire pit.

I feel like you see peoples’ true sides in extreme, or at least abnormal, situa-tions.

This campsite is a prime example. Of course, if you chide them and have a garbage can every couple feet, people will clean up after themselves, but left to their own devices, they’d much rather just leave their garbage everywhere than be inconvenienced with having to carry it out themselves.

Shame on all who think it’s fine to leave garbage lying around.

Maybe the blame can’t be entirely on the litter bugs, because aside from the two outhouses and a few signs preach-ing responsible recreation, there were no dumpsters or facilities to speak of.

There were several other people camped near us and more than a dozen day-use types came and went, but none were all too friendly.

One couple even parked their SUV about 10 feet away from our tents, stared at us for a few minutes, then set their lawn chairs on the other side of their ve-hicle. Maybe they thought we were trav-eling salesmen, religious fanatics or saw our raft and thought we were pirates.

I’m not sure. Either way, none were interested in conversation, except for a couple women.

Near the evening, Kim LaFrance, of

Mineral, and Dena Niemi, of Glenoma, came out to try their new paddle boards, but the wind and high waves put a stop to those plans. So, rather than get out on their boards, they watched the sun sink behind the hills.

“It’s not like it’s wasted time,” Niemi said.

In spite of it all, she was right.

Day 8: Hang on and Stay Warm for Riffe Lake Haul

Our ride was coming at 9 a.m. and we still weren’t packed, but we didn’t panic until they drove past with a friendly honk and wave on their way to the boat launch on the opposite side of Riffe Lake.

Not wanting to make the Lunds wait, we scrambled to throw everything into the waterproof bags and then into the raft.

What had been just days ago a neatly packed, highly organized excursion craft had morphed into a floating version of the Clampett family truck. But we got it out on the water and rowed into the waves with plenty of time to spare.

We met the couple in open water. They had just recently purchased a

handsome mid-80s boat named the Mer Sea and were taking it out for only the fourth time. Determined to say we were in our raft for as much of the Cowlitz as possible, we roped the raft to the Lunds and hung on for the ride. Because the raft has a soft rubber floor, neither of us could move around too much, Pete sat on one of the thorts and I perched myself on a tube.

For the next two-and-a-half hours, Pete and I bounced and splashed along behind at the mercy of the Mer Sea. Don pulled us at only about 8 knots, a pace comfortable and safe for all of our equip-ment, but just fast enough to be a chal-lenge.

It kind of reminded me of trying to pin down a giant fish in really shallow water for about two and a half hours.

Nearly every wave was coming over the top and nailing us in the face while simultaneously hitting the tubes with enough force to make the whole raft bounce.

Although we weren’t doing any row-ing, the ride was a lot of work.

However, it was much better than the alternative. Riffe Lake is 23 miles long, and a brutal wind likes to blow east across it, kicking up sometimes 3-foot waves. In a boat, that would make for an uncomfortable afternoon, but in a raft, it would be nothing short of an exhaustive nightmare.

Without the help of the Lunds, I fig-ure it would have easily taken us three days to get to the other side.

With about 20 minutes to go, Don called us up into the boat with them, and we had some sandwiches and talked of life in East Lewis County.

I can’t thank the Lunds enough for their kindness, which mirrors much of what we encountered as we traveled from La Wis Wis Campground to Randle those first few days.

We landed at Mossyrock Park just short of 1 p.m. to find the place largely empty.

We set up camp and spent time talk-ing to Tacoma Power, trying to organize a visit and shuttles around the dams.

You’ll see how successful we were in the coming days, as we prepare to cross Mayfield Lake before setting our raft in the direction of Longview and continu-ing our journey.

It’s still Columbia River or bust as far as we are concerned.

Day 9 and 10: Below Mossyrock Dam Is a Canyon So Stunning

From Randle down, everything about the Cowlitz River changes.

At this point, the wild spirit of the river is broken by human ingenuity and



Water splashes up onto the front of the raft as Dameon Pesanti and Pete Caster get towed across Ri�e Lake by Don and Kathy Lund.


People riding a wave runner speed along the shoreline of May�eld Lake..




Larry Burnett, Cowlitz River Project manager, points to a crane atop the Mossyrock Dam during a tour.

yoked into obedience. Trees and pastures give way to lake houses, resorts, boat docks and a whole new kind of recreation for which a whitewater raft is ill-fitted.

Early Wednesday morning, we caught a ride from Riffe Lake around the Mossyrock Dam from Tacoma Power. Cowlitz River Project Manager Larry Burnett and Assistant Project Manager Chad Chalmers gave us a tour of the powerhouse at the bottom of the dam. Looking up at the 606-foot-tall behe-moth, I thought of the James Bond mov-ie “GoldenEye” and half expected Pierce Brosnan to come leaping off the top.

Tacoma Power was more than gener-ous to the two of us.

Getting across and around Lake Sca-wena, Mossyrock and Mayfield was by far the most challenging part of this en-tire journey. Not only did Tacoma Power make time to show us the inside of their facilities, but they also sent employees Chad Taylor and Rick Hill with a trailer to move us around the Mossyrock Dam on Thursday and the Mayfield Dam on Friday.

I’m not sure how we would have done it without them, though at one point the idea of lowering us over the dam in a crane was mentioned (in jest I’m sure).

Still, I’m very ambivalent about dams. I recognize electricity as the corner-

stone of modern life and all its benefits. As an environmentally conscious per-son, I much prefer hydropower to coal. But seeing the river choked reminds me that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Blocking off the Cowlitz effec-tively halted salmon and steelhead runs that had been moving up stream for a millennia or more. It’s true that in recent years Tacoma Power has done well with their hatchery programs to restore some of what was lost, but nothing replaces Mother Nature.

As a boater, I can’t help but be sym-pathetic to the “never forget, always la-ment” kind of attitude held by the state’s kayaking and rafting communities about the 42 miles of white water rapids now sitting beneath the lakes. Whitewater types are like the spicy food lovers of the world. It’s a taste not commonly held, but the people that like it really like it and they’re disappointed when their tastes aren’t met.

For everyone else, the lakes and the surrounding parks and campgrounds created since the dams were installed have created a world of recreational op-portunities much more accessible to the general public than a deep and narrow river canyon. Riffe and Mayfield are loaded with boats used by anglers, family vacationers and water skiers all enjoying the water, not to mention the dozens of businesses that have cropped up to cater

to them, bringing much needed dollars to the east end of the county.

On Thursday, Tacoma Power’s Chad Taylor dropped us off at Ike Kinswa State Park. While loading up at the dock, we met Dan Barton, an Onalaska resident with a day off and a mind to slay some fish. Seeing that his battery was low and we were about to row across the lake, he gave us a tow. Not only did it save us work, but it charged his boat up enough for a day of trolling. With the wind still low, Pete and I rowed west until Dannie Richardson met us about midway. He volunteered to tow our raft back to his place, the Lake Mayfield Resort and Ma-rina, and give us a place to stay for the night.

Richardson is a character as kind as he is entertaining.

A former helicopter pilot who in the military flew missions in Vietnam, then, as a civilian, flew professionally to re-mote locations around the world, Rich-ardson divides his time between running a resort and fishing the lake in his new boat. He has a rare skill to tell stories of his world traveling experiences that are engaging without being braggadocios.

He took us deep into what remains of the Cowlitz canyon below the Mossyrock Dam, a world virtually unseen to those without a boat, and one I’ve been dying to visit since I moved to Lewis County.

Though I’d become jaded by our per-ceived return to civilization at the lakes, I was awestruck by what we found below

the U.S. Highway 12 bridge. The water, which upstream ran with a turquoise hue, has been filtered by the dams and now looks like over-steeped green tea.

With a fish finder, you can see where the river channel snakes between under-water cliffs. Often in just a couple feet toward one bank or the other the depth goes from 12 feet to around 80 the entire way up to the dam. Gradually, the lake’s shores squeeze inwards and upwards and the banks reach high overhead. In this place, all traces of humanity are gone. Despite the prominence of the Highway 12 bridge, it makes only a short appear-ance before being lost behind the canyon walls. Life here thrives in green abun-dance as moss, ferns, wildflowers and trees cling to the cliffs and compete for the sunlight (see photos on pages Main 8-9). If brought to this place blindfolded, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a tributary deep in the Amazon.

“If this were the Blue Nile that’d be the perfect place for an alligator,” Rich-ardson said as we cruised past one of the small coves that dot the gorge.

Bird songs filled the air. At one point, a great blue heron stood perched on a rock and warily watched us roll by.

“If he’s here you know there’s fish here,” Richardson said.

Within a couple miles of the dam, the current gently returns and licks tiny swirls past gentle upwellings. It begins to knock the boat around in rocky channels almost too narrow to turn back. Unex-

pectedly it all opens up again about a mile from the dam. There was still lots of water to explore, but Richardson’s re-sponsibilities forced us to turn around.

We spent the afternoon on the flat, comfortable and grassy shores of the Lake Mayfield Resort. Sleeping on a leaky bedroll gives you a whole new ap-preciation for even ground. As nice and luxurious as these campgrounds are, I’m dying to return to the moving water.

We’ll do that when we return to the river early Monday morning after a brief return to civilization over the weekend.

We plan to reach Longview in the coming week.


ELECTRIC: Tacoma Power Dams Produce Enough Energy to Power More Than 135,000 HomesBy Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

The city of Tacoma relies on hydro-electricity for more than half of its power supply. Of its four projects, none pro-duce more electricity than those on the Cowlitz River.

The Mayfield and the Mossyrock dams produce enough power for more than 135,000 Pacific Northwest homes. The two dams work in synchronic-ity to ensure the right amounts of water are moving through the system to keep power production and water levels where they’re supposed to be.

Over the last several years, Tacoma Power has been gradually updating several major elements of the Mossyrock Dam at the west end of Riffe Lake. Currently, a 300-ton crane is parked at the top of it where crews are working to remove the two headgates. Headgates control the wa-ter flowing through the dam and entering the turbine inside the powerhouse. Taco-ma Power plans to remove and refurbish them one at a time, a move they hope will save ratepayers close to $1 million.

Tacoma Power generates about 40 percent of its energy needs from its four hydroelectric projects around the state, most of which comes from the Mossyr-ock and Mayfield dams.

The Mossyrock Dam creates the 23.5-mile-long Riffe Lake. While the dam’s primary function is for power pro-duction, it also plays an important role in flood prevention. For example, when the 2006 flood raised water levels to 25.2

feet in the Randle area, the Mossyrock dam held that water back in Riffe Lake.

“In 2006 they stored all of it,” Cowlitz River Assistant Project Manager Chad Chalmers

Inside the powerhouse, which sits at the base of the 606-foot-tall Mossyrock Dam, a loud hum of an enormous spin-ning turbine echos through the cavernous building.

In 2006, the city of Tacoma approved a $50 million project to replace much of the antiquated technology that had reached their lifespans. At several areas through the dam, equipment that has been online since the dam went into op-eration in 1968 sits in stark contrast to the modern counterparts that are replacing it.

Inside the control room, green panels with analog displays sit next to new gray ones that utilize a combination of digital and analog meters.

There are two turbines inside the powerhouse, both of which were replaced in 2010 and 2011, respectively.

Currently, only one of the dam’s tur-bines is in operation. The unseasonably dry winter and spring has put water flows at levels much lower than normal. It’s the kind of thing officials aren’t used to see-ing until typically closer to early July.

“We’re running at about 3,000 cubic feet per second,” Cowlitz River Project Manager Larry Burnett said. “Normally, for this time of year, we’d be at 5,000. We could even drop to 2,500.”

There is room for one more turbine to be installed, but that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. The utility has considered adding another one, but with a contract to purchase power from the Bonneville Power Administration good until 2038, the cost is too prohibitive.

“Eventually it’ll happen. I’m guessing it’ll be after I’m retired.” Burnett said.

Mossyrock Dam Upgrading, Still With Room to Grow

NEAR-RECORD NUMBERS: Lewis County PUD’s Cowlitz Facility Generates a Third of Power Used by CustomersBy Justyna Tomtas

[email protected]

COWLITZ RIVER — There’s a fine balance to the work being done at the Cowlitz Falls Dam.

The facility, owned by the Lewis County Public Utilities District, gener-ates enough electricity for 30 percent of the county’s PUD customers while also striving to help salmon recovery efforts through a number of partnerships.

The project, situated about 13 miles downstream from Randle and a few miles from Riffe Lake, is the uppermost of four dams on the Cowlitz River.

The 140-foot high concrete gravity dam functions as a “run-of-the-river” op-eration, generating electricity solely with the water that comes through the facility.

As the water moves through the ener-gy-generating units, so do fish, spurring a plethora of efforts to help ensure low mortality rates.

“There is a balance, and we want to be able to have power and fish,” John Serl, a fish biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, said. “We want to get all the benefits we can from the river.”

Power ProductionThe Cowlitz Falls Dam is a 70-mega-

watt hydroelectric facility that spans ap-proximately 700 feet across the pictur-esque Cowlitz River.

Two units, each equipped with a gen-erator and turbine, help produce up to 35 megawatts each when at maximum ca-pacity as water flows reach approximate-ly 5,000 cubic feet per second.

That equates to about 2.24 million gallons a second.

Because the dam generates electric-ity based on the volume of water entering the units, it solely depends on the river for energy production.

This year, record low water flows have the facility generating at 13 megawatts, re-sulting in a 33 percent decrease in power production for the month of May.

With only 1,900 cubic feet per second funneling into the facility, one turbine re-mains offline while the other processes the incoming water.

Each turbine, along with the shaft and rotor, weigh approximately 210 tons and are capable of rotating 150 times per minute.

The turbines cannot operate below 12 megawatts without getting damaged, so the facility is almost at its minimum operating range as stream flows are 31 percent of normal.

Joe First, project manager at Cowlitz Falls Dam, said he expects June to also see a deficit, although it may not be as low as 31 percent.

Don Powell, a journeyman operator at the facility, said in his 21 years of experi-ence at the dam, he has never seen water flows this low, adding the numbers they are seeing now are typical of late August when river flow is at its lowest.

First predicted that by the end of sum-mer, water flow will be down to 800 CFS, a number typically seen during that time.

The low production levels of the facil-ity will not impact Lewis County PUD customers because of a long-term contract with Bonneville Power Administration.

Under the contract, which began in 1994 and will continue through 2032, BPA pays all the costs associated for the operation and maintenance of the dam, which is owned by the PUD.

In return, BPA purchases 100 percent of the power generated at the facility. Lewis County PUD then buys its power back from BPA, helping to provide coun-ty residents and businesses with service.

When water levels reach below the 12 megawatt minimum to produce power, the facility uses a 2-foot operating range to essentially “pool up” the water. The generator is turned off during this pro-cess and switched back on once the water is high enough to continue operations.

“That part is a normal cycle we do ev-ery year,” First explained. “But we will be doing it earlier than we have in an av-erage year.”

The energy created at the dam is then directed to a substation located 6 miles away in Glenoma. From there, the pow-er travels through a transmission line to Mossyrock, while a separate line brings

Low River Flows and High Fish CountsCowlitz Falls Dam Attempts Balance With Energy, Fish Restoration

please see FLOWS, page 29


USGS Measurements Help Inform on Cowlitz River FlowsBy Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

COWLITZ RIVER — About a quarter of a mile be-low the Lewis County Public Utility District’s Cowlitz Falls Dam, three workers from the U.S. Geological Survey slowly comb from one side of Riffe Lake to the other, blan-keting the water with sound.

The sound waves aren’t audible, but like sonar, they give the researchers a picture of what’s happening beneath them.

The red, white and blue acoustic Doppler current pro-filer (ADCP) is a little bigger than a coffee can and hangs vertically off the side of the boat and into the water.

It shoots sound waves about 13 feet down to the bottom of the lake. The waves interact with the particles floating in the water before bouncing back to the ADCP.

Ken Frasl, USGS field office chief for Western Wash-ington, cruises the boat from one bank to the other several times so the machine can get a good reading.

USGS stream gauger Dan Restivo watches the mea-surements on a burly, waterproof laptop computer as they come onto the screen.

A thin smile of periwinkle and royal blue comes across the screen as it mimics the shape of the lake bed and in-forms the researchers where the particle flows are the most dense.

There are 10 sites along the Cowlitz River from just outside of Packwood down to Castle Rock. USGS visits the location just below the Cowlitz Falls Dam twice a year to verify the flows the dam operators believe they’re produc-ing.

The Cowlitz is just one of roughly 400 gauging sites around Washington state where USGS measures stream-flows.

When all the data is compiled, it creates a linear picture of how a river’s flow changes through the year.

The information is then used for a wide range of stud-ies by the National Weather Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, private companies and many counties. It helps everything from flood warning systems to road and bridge construction.

The measurements are done around the state through-out the year, but USGS does them more often during ex-treme flows.

“It’s really important for us to get those extremes, oth-erwise we’re just guessing,” Restivo said.

At the Cowlitz, it’s important for the dam’s release to be at a certain flow so Tacoma Power can know how much water is coming into Riffe Lake, which is harnessed by its own dam.

For operators at Cowlitz Falls, the readings help ensure turbines are working properly, which ultimately helps them ensure a balance between the need for energy production and the health of fish populations into the year.

The delicate balance is made even trickier by drought. “We had no snowpack this year,” Frasl said. “The lakes

are full right now, but less water means less for power, for fish and for recreation, the whole thing.”

After several readings into the river particles, the ma-chine reads the bottom of the lake to make sure it hasn’t moved around.

The dam operators estimated their water release to be 2,000 cubic feet per second, but the USGS machine read just over 2,300. The reading was higher, but not high enough to be of a concern.

“If we’re within a certain percentage, we go with what they have,” Frasl said. “More is typical, but it’s within rea-son.”

energy to the Packwood area. From Packwood, it travels

down to Chehalis, creating a “backbone” of power for the coun-ty, First said.

Salmon Recovery EffortsSituated just downriver from

the dam is the Cowlitz Falls Fish Facility, an anadromous fish col-lection site. The building, currently owned by Tacoma Power, permits the reintroduction of salmon and steelhead in the upper Cowlitz River Basin.

Fish are funneled into four flumes located at the top of two of the dam’s spillways. The flumes have a 20 cubic feet per second flow, attracting the fish into the slide-like structures, which later conjoin to create 80 cubic feet per second of water flow.

The fish are sorted by size through a grate system, and the ju-venile fish are filtered into the fish facility where they are counted and tagged.

Two groups work side by side to count and tag fish as part of the dam’s biological opinion put in place by the Federal Energy Regu-latory Commission. The stipula-tions and requirements of the bio-logical opinion mandated by the federal government require Lewis County PUD to perform studies and take action to help with salm-on restoration, First said.

Officials with the U.S. Geo-logical Survey are tasked with implanting radio tags into salmon smolt. Smolts are salmon in the process of heading out to sea, and typically range between 3 and 5 inches in length.

Brian Ekstrom, a biological sci-ence technician with USGS, said his crew was looking at the surviv-al of juvenile fish through the pas-sage routes of the dam. Antennas located at the entrance of the dam help track the radio-chipped fish.

Due to the low water levels, only one passage route through the dam exists, which is through the turbines. Next year, the hope is to expand the study to look at sur-vival of fish that pass through one of the three spillways at the dam, if water levels allow.

The other group working at the fish facility is the Washington De-partment of Fish and Wildlife.

These officials, hired by Ta-coma Power, use a coded wire tag that is inserted into the nose carpal of the smolts. When the fish return

as adults, the magnetized wire strip helps determine what river the fish came from. Those with a strip originated in the Cowlitz or Cispus rivers, while those without most likely originated in the Til-ton River, which feeds into May-field Lake and essentially joins the Cowlitz.

Although water flows have significantly decreased power pro-duction for the Cowlitz Falls Dam, it has had positive effects on the amount of fish coming through the facility.

Fish counters are seeing a near-record amount of smolts.

For the past two weeks, the av-erage amount has been between 6,000 and 8,000 a day.

In all, Serl said they have seen approximately 175,000 fish and will continue counting until the end of August. Last year, just over 93,000 smolts came through the facility. The numbers have already surpassed the average of 155,000 fish typically seen during the sea-son.

Mike Kohn, the Cowlitz Falls Project biologist, said the numbers are high this year in part due to the drought. Typically, when the water flow is higher, the collection numbers decrease because fish pass through the turbine units or through the spillways.

The low water levels have al-lowed fish collection in the 90 per-cent range, he said.

Once the fish are marked or tagged, a trap and haul program is used. The smolt are put into trucks and are transported down-stream below the barrier dam in Salkum, where they are released before continuing their journey to the ocean. The adult fish return to the area and are then collected again in trucks and transported above the Cowlitz Falls Dam to be released.

Tacoma Power North Shore Fish Collector

Much of the salmon recovery project is shouldered by Tacoma Power because the Mossyrock and Mayfield dams the utility com-pany owns blocked upstream and

downstream passages for fish. The problems the dams caused

were in place prior to the construc-tion of the Cowlitz Falls Dam. Although the PUD facility has ob-ligations for fish restoration, First said the bulk of the restoration ef-forts were designated to Tacoma Power by the federal government.

To help increase fish survival rates to 95 percent, as mandated by the Federal Energy Regula-tory Commission, Tacoma Power is currently in the process of con-structing a $35.5 million fish col-lector at the Cowlitz Falls Dam.

Kirk Kessler, professional en-gineer for Tacoma Power, said a license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2002 assigned the company with the responsibility for downstream fish passages because of its larger dams located downstream.

The best place to build the fa-cility was on the uppermost dam, or the Cowlitz Falls Dam, he said.

Lewis County PUD is work-ing together with Tacoma Power on the project, although Tacoma Power is funding it.

Work began last week and the hope is the collector will be opera-tional by April 2017.

The purpose will be to capture downstream migrating salmon and smolt through an entrance that will be bored through the gravity sec-tion of the dam.

“We’re basically saw cutting the hole through that dam to con-nect the reservoir with the fish col-lector,” Kessler said.

Matt Bleich, the fish biologist in charge of the collector, said the project should increase fish collec-tion at the Cowlitz Falls Fish Facil-ity.

A number of challenges were addressed during the initial pro-cess, he said.

Officials had to determine how to get out-migrating juvenile fish to discover the collector, enter the artificial system and retain them.

“A lot of energy was put into the design and will be put into the evaluation into effectiveness based on those kinds of metrics,” he said.

The Cowlitz Falls Fish Facility will also undergo a redesign to ac-commodate for the growth of the fish collection program.

“This is one of the key cogs within the overall system we are working in the Cowlitz Basin,” Bleich said of the collector.

FlowsContinued from page 28


Cowlitz Falls Dam is seen on Tuesday, June 9, 2015


Mayfield to Longview: An Urban Conclusion for a Wild River

Soaring to the Finish

By Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

Day 11: Barrier Dam to Toledo Is a Step into a Wholly Different Type of Cowlitz

It’s hard to ignore the pungent smell of dead fish at the Barrier Dam boat launch and even harder to escape it. For fishermen, it’s a sign of a

promising hole. For three sleepy newspa-permen, it’s good incentive to blow up the raft and get to better-smelling waters.

On Monday, Visuals Editor Pete Caster and I were joined by Sports Editor Aaron VanTuyl to kick off the final third of our journey down the Cowlitz River.

We were greeted by grumpy fishermen, fellow adventurers and a number of beau-tiful homes.

In order to keep things as live as possible, we took the weekend off and started anew Monday morning. With the speed Pete and I have moved down the river, we would have finished this trip be-fore today’s newspaper was printed. It felt like cheating, but sleeping in my own bed was a refreshing experience.

We also skipped the mile or so of water between Mayfield Dam and Bar-rier Dam. Rebuilding and breaking down the raft for such a short trip seemed like far too much effort for such little reward. And, while it’s true Barrier Dam is small enough to float a raft over, traversing a low head dam is a wholly stupid and ex-tremely dangerous idea. They don’t call them “drowning machines” for nothing.

Everything about the Cowlitz changes below the Barrier Dam. The river’s spirit returns again, but it’s not the beast it is at the mountainous upper reaches. For bet-ter or worse, the metered discharges from the dams and reinforced banks are like fluvial Prozac; they do away with the riv-er’s hostile behaviors and bring it down

to manageable, predictable levels. Side effects may include swollen reservoirs, increased energy, unnaturally consistent flows and decimated fisheries. Talk to your power company for more informa-tion.

I don’t think I have to tell you about the number of fisherman that flock to barrier dam when the fish are running. Even on a Monday morning the place was full of anglers — most of whom weren’t very friendly, on this day at least.

At one point, we floated past three chubby guys in their late 50s fishing out of a drift boat who chuckled at us and made feeble cracks about “the dangerous falls” up around the next bend.

“We almost lost grandpa up there years ago,” one said.

While some fishermen could be ob-noxious, there were none worse than the client-carrying fishing guide. This is not true of all, but some think they own the whole river — especially the prime fishing holes. It was nothing for them to scream upstream at full speed just a few feet away from us, but God forbid our non-motorized craft float within 30 feet of them when they’re floating in the cen-

ter of the river with poles out. I get it, it’s a service job and they’re

out there to ensure customers have the best possible experience, but a little con-sideration!

Aside from us, the only other float-ers out there today were a group of four people in a very stout drift boat. In the center was one man in a red life jacket pushing hard at the oars, treating his job like it were an exercise regimen, not a joy ride. Turns out, it was both.

They all declined to give their last names, but two couples — Jeff and Betsy and Miller and Sharon — were all in their mid-60s with a host of shared wilderness adventures under their belts. Monday they were warming up for a 211-mile ex-cursion down one of the most famous and wild waterways in the West — Idaho’s Salmon River.

Their boat was a handsome silver and red aluminum drift boat, welded and re-inforced into a whitewater basher named “Latikuf.”

When asked about the name, Jeff just laughs and says it was his midlife crisis

please see FINISH, page 31


A heron takes o� from the Cowlitz River near the Barrier Dam in Salkum.

River Diary


boat and leaves it to you to figure out. “When there’s kids around I tell peo-

ple it’s an old Norwegian name with all of these special meanings,” said Betsy. “But it makes more sense to the dyslexic.”

The closer you get to Toledo the shallower the river becomes, but there’s always at least a few feet beneath you. The submerged forest groves of the east are non-existent, but a few trees have tumbled off the hills to spend their final days reaching out to the middle of the river. Dozens of homes, some of which resemble mountain chateaus, also start to appear along the banks. Occasionally we saw people lounging on their porches, sipping at drinks and gazing onto the wa-ter. Some didn’t notice us, but others of-fered full-arm hellos as we drifted by.

We completed the day in Toledo at about 1 p.m., much earlier than I an-ticipated, but still with plenty of time to file this report. Tomorrow we’ll head to Castle Rock to find what awaits us at the Toutle’s confluence.

Day 12: The Big Push from Toledo to Castle Rock and on to Longview

In its continuous march to the sea, the Cowlitz River has meandered like a snake slithering through the grass. Wind-ing through Southwest Washington, it has eroded curved stretches of the shore

while leaving rocky banks on the other side.

In the handful of places along its path the earth has resisted and the vegeta-tion has held firm, but, undeterred from its path, the river simply captures bits of land in a watery embrace, forming long slender islands along the way. In the area around Toledo, people block its path with great piles of jagged stone and built hous-es above the banks.

Downstream from the Interstate 5 bridge, the slow pools begin to grow, the little slides of swiftwater that follow get shorter and I found myself leaning hard into the oars.

About a dozen fishermen were out trying their luck. All were friendlier than what we encountered earlier, but none re-ported catching anything. One such duo, Tom Staudinger, 60, and his grandson, 16-year-old Kaleb Carroll, were out chas-ing steelheads. Staudinger, a Castle Rock native, has fished this river all his life and knows it well. He’s passed on his passion for the sport to his grandson and it has become something for the two to bond over.

“All I remember is fishing with him,” Carroll said.

“We go together as much as we can,” Staudinger said. “With weather this nice, we should be out every day.”

The swift river we found ourselves in between Barrier Dam and Toledo lost its momentum, slowed to a crawl then practi-cally a dead stop for several miles around Vader. Locals call it the frog waters, be-

cause unlike the rest of the river, the wa-ter is supposedly slow enough for a frog to live in. I couldn’t see the bottom, but I knew it was deep. Floating through here I understood why paddle boats seemed like a viable business so long ago.

With the nose of the raft faced up-stream, I pulled hard on the oars while Visuals Editor Pete Caster and Reporter Kaylee Osowski, who was visiting with us for the day, sat in the front and paddled along. Our efforts fell in and out of sync and the raft sort of twisted and waddled its way toward Castle Rock. The going was slow and the sun was hot, but our time was made easier by the frequent deer, low-flying eagles and the osprey nests we came across.

The water remains virtually motion-less until the Toutle River pours in and reinvigorates the current, but with the ex-tra flow comes a ton of silt from Mount St. Helens. Seeing the two rivers merge is like staring into a sink as someone rinses paint from a tray. We’re all thrilled for the extra speed, but I was made nervous by the lack of visibility. There are still a number of trees and a whole host of new sandbars lying invisible below the sur-face. I would have hated to float into the wrong branch, so I asked my friend Alex-is Eggertsen to sit behind me and probe the waters with a paddle so we could feel our way through the murk.

When we came upon the Al Helen-berg Memorial Boat Launch in Castle Rock at about 4 p.m. we smiled at the docks as if they were old friends await-

ing our arrival. Osowski and Eggertsen headed home. Caster and I camped on the sandbar that, to the dismay of the city, has built up between the shore and a dock. We rested that night and pushed to Longview the next day.

Day 13: The Final PushI expected to be awoken early by a

stream of boats pouring into the river at Castle Rock and motoring out for the catch. Instead it was the sunshine that got me.

This section of river has been long on my mind. I’ve fished here once be-fore and I’ve seen how congested it can be, but I was pleasantly surprised to find only one guy on the docks working his boat out of the water.

Chronicle Reporter Justyna Tomtas joined us for the final stretch. She took to the oars quicker than anyone else and rowed us for quite a ways. To save energy and move faster, she came up with the idea of putting one person on each oar and rowing simultaneously. It was such a simple but effective plan that Caster and I couldn’t help but wonder why, in two weeks, we had not thought of that before.

In these roughly final 13 river miles, the current is slow and the river is wide. Of all places, I don’t think humans put more pressure on the Cowlitz anywhere else. During a fish run, boats zig zag all over the water and people line the banks, houses become a more frequent sight

please see FINISH, page 32

FinishContinued from page 30


A young man looks at rocks along the banks of the Cowlitz River in front of what appeared to be a �shing shack south of Castle Rock.

A man casts his �y �shing rod along the shoreline of the Cowlitz River near the Blue Creek Trout Hatchery in Ethel.

Mount Rainier looms in the background as seen from the Cowlitz River between Toledo and In-terstate 5.


and noise from I-5 is constant. Yesterday though, we didn’t see another boat until Kelso, and before that there were only a couple fishermen standing on shore.

Tomtas and I were rowing while Cast-er paddled at the back of the boat when we came upon two men fishing from shore. They were sitting in lawn chairs on a beach with their poles in the water and Jeep parked behind them with tire tracks leading up the dune behind them.

“You guys look like you’re working too hard,” one of them said.

“You guys look like you’re in a Jeep commercial,” Pete called back.

After sharing in a good laugh the same man yelled, “Watching you is wear-ing me out, I think I’m going to have to have another beer.”

Silt from the Toutle deposits in big banks all over the lower portion of the



A bald eagle �ies o� with a �sh in its talons 5 miles west of Toledo.

please see FINISH, page 33 A snake slithers through the rocks along the shoreline of the Cowlitz River.



Cowlitz and the entire river shallows up dramatically. Close to Kelso the natural world is left behind and the river feels like an inconvenience on man’s meticulously planned com-munities. Bridges span the Cowlitz at several points, houses fill the shore, trash floats in the water and fills the banks. The trees all but disappear. We see several homeless encamp-ments tucked into the bushes and under the bridges. At one spot a younger couple was digging deep into the sandbar as if they were installing a basement for their tent.

In Longview, the water starts to stink, going from a swampy odor to that of garbage, depending on how the wind blows. In its last few miles, the Cowlitz drifts through an in-dustrial part of town and past a garbage transfer station, a junk yard, a lumber mill and a paper mill. For the first time since departing from the La Wis Wis Campground east of Packwood two weeks ago, I started to question the quality of the water floating at the bottom of the raft and wondered about pollution. Seeing the area just before confluence while remembering the beautiful headwaters was a staggering and unpleasant juxtaposition. I know people have to make a liv-ing, but there’s nothing beautiful about it.

About a mile away from our destination an old spray-painted flat-bottom boat rambled toward us. A man in greasy clothes, who appeared to be in his 20s, was at the back oper-ating a loud and smokey old engine, while a pit bull looked out the front.

“Ya’ll gotta light?” he asked, flicking his thumb up and down to imitate a lighter.

“Sure, man, come on over,” Caster responded.The man pointed our way and cloud of smoke plumed up

from the engine. Seeing us, his dog started pacing the boat, barking and yipping in anticipation.

“Quiet, Sophia!” he yelled. She was having none of it and continued to jump around wildly. He tried to slide in along-side us but overshot our raft and drifted away by about 30 feet. Then he tried to motor back to us, but the engine kept lifting out of the water which clearly made him nervous.

“Just a sec, I’ll get it,” he said gunning the gas and hug-ging the motor with both arms to keep it in place. In no time he was just a few feet away and I could see his prop whirling toward our rubber raft like the blade of an overturned lawn-mower.

“Hey, watch your motor!” I yelled.He grabbed the throttle but killed the engine and then

drifted off even further away than before. He made several other passes, but couldn’t get within 20 feet without killing his motor and yelling at his dog to quit barking. Seeing this was going nowhere, Caster threw the lighter to him.

“Just keep it,” he said.“Thanks! My old lady kept mine and left me at the launch.

I’ll get you back someday!” he said before lighting a ciga-rette. With a final yank to the pull cord the engine coughed to life and he was back on his way upriver.

Burnt, exhausted and anxious for home, the spectacle was exactly what we needed for the final mile.

At about 4 p.m., Chronicle Editor Eric Schwartz and Sport Editor Aaron VanTuyl met us at the take out just a cou-ple hundred feet before the Cowlitz pours into the Columbia. Although we’d floated nearly all of the 105-mile-long river there was little fanfare to mark the occasion, we just loaded everything into my truck and headed back to the office.

Driving home I tried to replay it all in my head, tried to mark where and when the river changed, but it was impos-sible to do. There were no defining transitions, just one con-stant flow following gravity through the landscape.

Still, even though the Cowlitz is one river, it’s a river with a thousand personalities.


Garbage is spread across makeshift campsites undern the Main Street bridge on the Longview side of the Cowlitz River.

A verdant bank sticks out along the Cowlitz River. A family of ducks skim across the water along the Cowlitz River.

The silt-�lled Toutle River mixes into the Cowlitz River . A young osprey �aps its wings while standing in its nest.

Deer stand along the rapids of the Cowlitz River. Grass hangs from the mouth of a cow as it grazes in a �eld.


BENEATH RIFFE LAKE: Several Formerly Thriving Communities Are Now Submerged MemoriesBy Brian Mittge

For The Chronicle

Underneath the waters of Lewis County’s largest lake lie the former townsites of Kosmos,

Nesika and Riffe, the town that gave the lake its name (although it took a few years. More on that later).

For the better part of the 20th century, until construction of the new direct high-way between Mossyrock and Randle in the 1960s, the town of Riffe was the cross-road between Mossyrock, Morton and the Big Bottom country of the upper Cowlitz.

The long-gone community of Riffe — and, in a roundabout way, today’s lake — take their shared name from a pioneer named Floyd Riffe. He arrived in the area in 1893 from West Virginia and estab-lished the post office in Riffe in 1898.

Buddy Rose, who lived in Riffe from his birth in 1948 until Tacoma City Light took possession of the area in 1963 under eminent domain laws, published a book of stories about his hometown in 2013.

His family owned nine houses and a service station in the middle of town, fed via an elaborate system of underground pipes from a hillside spring.

In 1960 or so, when Rose was about 12, Tacoma City Light surveyed the area that would become the high water mark of the future reservoir. Rose and a group of his friends climbed the hills south of town up to the survey line.

“We could go up and see where the lake was going to be. It was kind of amazing, really. We’d stand there and look across the valley. It seemed impossible — how could they possibly fill this valley with water? It would take a hundred years.”

He paused and laughed as he told the story.

“It took eight months.”Rose estimates that about 1,500 peo-

ple were displaced by the lake. About 350 of those people were in or near Riffe. The town resembled a more compact version of today’s community of Glenoma. It was a crossroads about 7 miles east of Moss-yrock with stores and gas stations. For a

brief time it even had a pirate radio station that played popular songs, taking requests and dedications.

By 1955, when Tacoma had permis-sion to build the Mayfield and Mossyr-ock dams, the people of Riffe knew their town’s days were numbered. Rose and oth-er baby boomer children grew up with the unsettling feeling of knowing their home-town was doomed. The Riffe post office closed on May 31, 1966. By the spring of 1968, the town was under several hundred feet of water from the rising lake.

Early DaysRose’s book recounts stories back to

the earliest settlements of Riffe. One par-ticularly tragic event took place exactly 100 years ago. It shows the sometimes har-rowing early days of the Cowlitz, where the untamed river gave life to the area but sometimes also brought death.

In May 1915, five residents of Morton drowned at Riffe while trying to cross the Cowlitz on a ferry as they headed to Mass at the Catholic church in the community of Harmony. The wagon’s front wheels had made it onto the ferry when the two-horse team suddenly panicked and tried to back up off the boat. Instead, the horses ended up pushing the ferry away from the dock.

The wagon and its passengers fell into the river. Two women and three small children drowned.

Rose’s aunt, Thelma Hancock, was a young girl who witnessed the accident. She told him that the screams of the vic-tims as they were swept downstream haunted her for years.

That tragedy led to construction of a 170-foot bridge across the Cowlitz. It was pur-chased in Oregon for $25,000, disassembled and hauled to Riffe by rail, and rebuilt on the road running north toward Morton. Dedica-tion of the Riffe bridge in 1919 was a lavish affair, with attendees dressed in their Sun-day best and a musical performance by the Centralia Concert Band.

NesikaUpstream from Riffe was the com-

munity of Nesika, where the 1914 dedi-cation of a bridge over the Cowlitz was greeted with equal fanfare. Just four years later, floods changed the course of the riv-er and damaged the bridge approach. Over

the years two more spans were added to accommodate the meandering Cowlitz.

The 848-foot bridge lasted until No-vember 1967. It was set to remain open for a few more months as the valley neared in-undation, but repair workers using cutting torches accidentally set fire to its creosote planking. The blaze destroyed 200 feet of the bridge and it was shut down for good. The steel bridge was sold to a Tacoma sal-vage company, which blasted it from its concrete footings during disassembly and managed to lose the third span — it was swept away in the river channel.

The elevation of the old Nesika bridge deck was 595 feet above sea level. Riffe Lake, at full elevation, is 778 feet — al-most 200 feet above the old bridge and the small neighboring community.

Nesika was marked by a famous land-mark near the east end of the bridge — an enormous “balanced rock” perched along-side what was known then as Highway 5.

The area was also home to a longtime community of Cowlitz Indians, including property owned by famed Cowlitz elder Mary Kiona, and their cemetery along a waterway known as Indian Creek.

KosmosThe town farthest upstream under

today’s Riffe Lake was Kosmos (pro-nounced CAUSE-muss), whose residents originally thought the new hydroelectric impound would give them lakeside prop-erty. As Tacoma’s plans developed, how-ever, the dam proposal increased in height

— and so the newly created lake became bigger, too.

“Those people of Kosmos didn’t antici-pate having to leave,” Rose said.

When the water level is very low in Riffe Lake, the old Kosmos townsite emerges, ghostly and skeletal, from the water. The buildings are all demolished and gone, but the concrete below them is still there. So, too, are remnants of the bridges that once crossed the three creeks that met up with the Cowlitz River near Kosmos. Most prominent is the concrete and rebar jumble of the Steffen Creek Bridge.

With the town dismantled and water creeping up the valley, the Army Corps of Engineers blew up the bridge as a training exercise in 1968. The Corps spent a week setting off small charges on and around

the bridge to see how much damage was done by different amounts of explosives.

“Finally, they just loaded it up and blew the whole thing apart,” George Cooper, of Glenoma, told The Chronicle in 2002.

The most prominent feature of Kom-sos before inundation was the Kosmos Timber Co. mill. It was moved toward Morton and became U.S. Plywood, even-tually merging with Champion Papers.

What’s in a Name?The 23-mile long lake formed in 1968

by the Mossyrock Dam was originally named after Ira S. Davisson, a musta-chioed former Tacoma utilities commis-sioner.

Davisson, who had died at age 91 in 1951, was unknown in Lewis County and the name Davisson Lake was never popu-lar here.

In advance of the 1976 national bicen-tennial, dozens of local groups, from the countywide Pomona Grange to the Lewis County Historical Society, successfully pushed for a name change to recognize the history of the submerged Cowlitz val-ley, rather than a Tacoma bureaucrat.

Davisson was not the only unusual name suggested for Tacoma’s projects on the Cowlitz.

Tacoma City Light had originally pro-posed naming the dam at Mossyrock af-ter a onetime socialist turned Democratic U.S. senator with a passion for publicly owned hydroelectric facilities. If approved, the tallest dam in Washington would have been known as the Homer T. Bone Dam.

•••Brian Mittge is a community columnist

for The Chronicle. Reach him at [email protected] or twitter.com/bmittge.

Underwater Towns of the Cowlitz River

The Chronicle / File Photo


IN THE DEEP: Before the Lake, Area Was Home to Ghosn’s Blackberry Packing Plant and the Churning ‘Devil’s Eyebrow’ GorgeBy Brian Mittge

For The Chronicle

Nearly 200 feet below the surface of Mayfield Lake, the contours of canyons and remnants of old

towns trace the lines of memory for the former residents of this now-flooded re-gion of the Cowlitz.

“The river was the lifeblood of the area, really,” said Gaylen Brown, now 83, who grew up in the towns of Winston Creek and Mayfield in the 1930s and 1940s. “We fished and swam in it all the time. There was always something going on in the river.”

The town of Mayfield was perched on a narrow shelf, maybe 150 yards wide, above a deep canyon where the Cowlitz River churned near the site of today’s May-field Dam.

He and other children of the town would sometimes go down to the river there and play in a cave at the river’s edge.

The high arched bridge into Mayfield crossed the deep, narrow Cowlitz gorge about halfway between the current bridge over the lake and the Mayfield Dam.

Brown said the bridge into Mayfield was about 120 feet above the Cowlitz River. Tacoma Power estimates the reservoir now sits about 50 feet above the old townsite.

“The kids and I would throw gasoline over the edge and light it as we’d throw it over,” he said, then watch the stream of flame descend into the river.

One time a neighborhood boy threw Brown’s wire-haired terrier over the bridge, too. The dog somehow survived and man-aged to make it back to their house. It lay in the yard for a few days and eventually fully recovered. There was also the time a drunken man jumped off the bridge. He landed halfway down the slope. It was a steep bank, but he also survived.

That bridge even helped form Brown’s family. His stepfather came to Mayfield to work on painting the bridge. He boarded in town, got acquainted with Brown’s mother, and they ended up marrying.

The Devil’s EyebrowUpstream, near where the Highway

12 bridge crosses Mayfield Lake today, a

churning spot in the river was known as the Devil’s Eyebrow.

“It was a place where the river came down in a narrow gorge and ran head-on into a rock abutment and made a sharp left turn, then went back to other side of chan-nel, hit a rock and turned downriver again,” Brown said.

In those days the big spring chinook salmon were thick in the river.

Locals used to go down to the Devil’s Eyebrow and gaff the fish, using hooking techniques similar to those of the Native Americans before them.

“Of course it was illegal, but everyone did it,” Brown said. “People used to net them. It was just a way of life. There were plenty of fish and I don’t think we did any harm to them.”

A feat of derring-do in the Cowlitz can-yon is still talked about to this day.

A lad named Herb Looney, who grew up in that section of the river, swam down the gorge from Mayfield to Winston Creek, about a mile. It was a risky maneuver through a canyon of solid 30-foot rock walls on both sides.

“In those days it was quite a feat,” Brown said. “We didn’t dare go down there. Once you got in, you couldn’t get out.”

Looney survived, emerging to the pop-ular swimming hole in Winston Creek to acclaim.

His youngest brother Warren wasn’t so lucky during a different outing on the Cowlitz. The boy was building a raft with a brother. The watercraft got into the cur-rent. The boy, who was about 11 or 12, got scared and tried to swim back to his broth-er. He didn’t make it.

Brown wasn’t much of a swimmer, but he dog-paddled a couple hundred feet across the Cowlitz where it was smooth and green — but deep — at the Winston Creek swimming hole a time or two.

“Of course my mother didn’t know,” Brown said. “She’d have died.”

The kids would fish for sea-run cut-throat there. They fished year-round, with flies in the summer and bait in the winter.

The Benefit of Being a DemocratBrown grew up all over the Mayfield

area. His family once owned and farmed the land that is now the Lake Mayfield Re-sort. For much of his life they lived in a pair of converted logging boarding houses that his family moved from the nearby town of Winston Creek into Mayfield, where they joined them into one building. His mother ran the post office there. She

had been appointed to the political pa-tronage post, Brown thinks, because the other applicants in town — two different storekeepers — were Republicans during a Democratic presidential administration.

“She happened to be the only Demo-crat,” he said.

Logging was the major industry in the area, with trains running in from Cheha-lis to pick up railroad ties that were loaded from elevated docks in the now-submerged town of Winston Creek.

Trucks would also haul logs, but it was a steep grade up into Silver Creek. Kids would grab the back of the log trailers and ride the 2 miles up the hill. The driv-ers would see them in the rear view mirror and offer them a smile and a wave, Brown said. The steam logging machines, called Skagits, were powered by wood. A guy would stoke the engines with 2-foot-long logs throughout the day.

“You could hear ’em a mile and a half away,” Brown said.

The Blackberry King of MayfieldPaul Ghosn, 83, is a living link to a re-

markable entrepreneur of the Cowlitz Ba-sin. His father, Ghosn Ghosn, owned stores up and down the valley. He also ran a suc-cessful fruit packing business that shipped the region’s evergreen blackberries to cus-tomers across the continent.

Starting in the mid-1920s, and running until the lake formed, the Ghosn Canning Co. provided summer income for families and students who wanted to make some spending money for school shopping.

In fact, in years when the blackberry harvest was late in the season, the Mossyr-ock School District would shut down for a week so the students could go pick, Ghosn said.

The plant employed 20-30 people on three shifts during berry season. They would pay berry pickers as much as 13 to 15 cents a pound. Hundred of families made extra spending money by picking the berries for the plant.

“It was pretty handy during the Depres-sion,” Ghosn said. “They could pick a hun-dred pounds easily and make three or four dollars a day.”

The plant shipped its berries to Califor-nia, Chicago, Texas and beyond in No. 10 gallon cans. Restaurants and pie producers snapped them up.

“The berries went everywhere,” Ghosn said. “One year he shipped 10 (rail) car loads of berries. That’s a lot of blackber-ries.”

They also processed beans for buyers, largely in New York.

The Ghosn plant was on property that is now partly submerged by the lake, north of the old townsite of Mayfield, off what is now Baker Drive.

The elder Ghosn also ran a small gen-eral store in Mayfield, but sold it to con-centrate on his other enterprises. Those include the G Theater in downtown Moss-yrock, which he built so the children of town could have some entertainment.

Where Was Mayfield?Drivers crossing Mayfield Lake on U.S.

Highway 12 can glimpse the old road to Mayfield.

The modern-day highway takes a sweeping left down the hill from Silver Creek toward Mayfield Lake. If you were to continue straight instead, you’d be on the old road down to the now-submerged Mayfield Bridge.

When dam building began in 1955 and Tacoma City Light took possession of the area, the town of Mayfield was vacated. The houses were bulldozed and burned, Brown said.

Brown moved to Toledo in adulthood and went to work for the state highway de-partment helping lay out the route for In-terstate 5. He became a certified engineer, retired after 30 years with WSDOT, and now lives near Scott Lake.

Brown remembers his youth in May-field fondly.

“It was a good time,” he said. “We had a good life in those days.”

Remembering Mayfield, the Town Beneath the Lake

Submitted by Lucille Pakar

This 1920s photo was taken on the old May�eld Bridge, which provided the main route to Ran-dle and Packwood, which at that time was the end of the road.

the Town Beneath the Lake


By Kaylee Osowski

[email protected]

If today’s Cowlitz River anglers and recreationists were on the river 100 to about 150 years ago, they may

have run into some steamboat and ferry traffic from Toledo to Longview.

For decades, riverboats traveled back and forth on the Cowlitz River at Toledo and the Columbia River in Portland trans-porting goods and passengers with regular boat schedules emerging in 1878 and last-ing until 1918.

A one-way trip took 24 hours, including stops at river towns between the two hubs.

The changing river with shallow depths in the summer and flooding and sometimes frozen waters in the winter, along with sandbars, trees and snags, made navigating the river a challenge for riverboat captains.

According to Sandra A. Crowell’s “The Land Called Lewis: A History of Lewis County, Washington” the first riverboat to navigate the river may have been the Bea-ver, a side-wheeler riverboat said to have floated the Cowlitz for a short time begin-ning as early as 1836.

In the 1850s, attempts by two steamboat charters to provide service on the Cowlitz granted by the Washington Territorial gov-ernment were unsuccessful.

According to “The Land Called Lew-is,” restrictions and deadlines made it im-possible for the boats to provide services.

The first steamer on the Cowlitz, the Bell, traveled the river in the early 1860s. In 1864, the Monticello and Cowlitz Landing Steamboat Company built the “Rescue” in Monticello, a town located at the mouth of the Cowlitz. It was mostly destroyed by a flood in 1867.

The Oregon Steam Navigation Com-pany launched its steamer, the Express, in direct competition with the Rescue. The Monticello and Cowlitz Landing Steam-boat Company sued claiming the Express violated exclusive navigation rights granted by the government.

Courts ruled the rights granted by the Washington Territorial Legislature were void, and both boats provided transporta-tion. The fight to get passengers led to rates as low as 25 cents, Crowell wrote.

The low prices and other competition didn’t keep the companies floating for long.

Residents in Cowlitz Landing, located about 1 mile downstream from modern day Toledo, organized to form the Cowlitz Steam Navigation Company. When the citizens set their steamer the Rainier out on its maiden voyage, it breached after hitting a snag in the river. Crowell notes that it is

unclear if the steamer made more than the occasional trips after that.

It wasn’t until Joseph Kellogg and Company formed and built its steamboat the Toledo, in 1878 that regular service on the river began.

According to Fritz Timmen’s “Blow for the Landing: A Hundred Years of Steam Navigation on the Waters of the West,” Kellogg, his brother and two sons that made up the company headed the naviga-tion just above Cowlitz Landing. Kellogg eventually convinced some settlers to move to the area to start a community there. It was called Toledo after the riverboat.

According to a 2012 post by Matthew Roach on the Washington State Library Blog “Between the Lines,” a June 3, 1887 issue of the newspaper the Cowlitz’s Advo-

Riverboat Captains Faced Challenging Waters on the Cowlitz

COWLITZ TRIBE: The River Was Used as a Source of Food, TransportationBy Justyna Tomtas

[email protected]

For one American Indian tribe, the Cowlitz is far more than a river: It’s a place they used to call

home, a resource that provided them food and a channel for transportation.

The Cowlitz Indian Tribe once had the largest land use area in the state, stretching into six counties Southwest Washington and covering approximately 3,000 square miles.

The river ran through the area from its source on top of Mount Rainier down to the confluence of the Columbia River, creating a “source of life,” said the Cowlitz Tribe’s honorary chief Roy Wilson, who now lives not far from the river near Winlock.

At one point, 43 villages scattered the banks of the Cowlitz, housing a variety of dialects of the tribe.

“The river not only provided water for survival, bathing, for cooking and trans-portation, but it also provided our food,” said Wilson, who is also the chairman of the tribe’s Cultural Committee.

The tribe’s origins are estimated to date back between 10,000 and 15,000 years, although radiocarbon artifacts can only pinpoint their existence to just over 5,000

years ago, Wilson said. Bill Iyall, tribal chairman, said the river

also played a key role with how the natives traveled.

“The Cowlitz River, in addition to be-ing a lifeline as far as food and resources, it was also a transportation route,” he said.

The canoe was a main method of trans-portation for the tribe, Wilson said, and provided routes to what is now Portland and Olympia, among other places.

Known as the salmon people, the Cowlitz tribe harvested the fish, along with other wildlife that thrived along the water’s banks.

“I can remember when I was a boy you could go down there when the salmon was on and if you were lucky you’d walk across the river on the backs of the salmon,” Wil-son said. “They’re not there anymore.”

The change is credited to the arrival of the “white man.” The first white set-tler stepped foot in Cowlitz country when the Lewis and Clark party arrived in 1806. Along with them, later settlers brought measles, smallpox and other diseases, near-ly eradicating the tribe.

Wilson said in the 1830s the tribe’s population was approximately 50,000 people and by the end of the decade, only 2,400 were left.

With the new settlers, a lot changed. The tribe’s land use area was homesteaded and turned into wilderness areas, national forests and state forests. According to Wil-son, much of the land was given to Wey-

erhaeuser and the railroad, creating change throughout the area.

The water of the free-flowing Cowlitz was later subdued by dams, which were built on the upper portions of the river, hindering fish populations because of the blockage of the upstream passages.

“All of our villages on the river disap-peared,” Wilson said. “Today the river is still important to us … there’s not only a sad feeling, but sometimes in many ways the Cowlitz have become very angry (about the changes).”

Much of the tribe has since dispersed, traveling to other reservations where ser-vices were available, Iyall said. Aborigi-nally, he estimated about 50 percent of the tribe was located along the banks of the Cowlitz, while now although the tribe still uses the river for resources, only about 5 to 10 percent remain in Lewis County.

Iyall said the tribe resisted the changes, but the new landscape created by the de-

velopments can also provide the Cowlitz a measure of insurance to restore and main-tain the resources for future generations.

“They are sacred waters all the way to the source on Mount Rainier: It’s the transportation corridor, the lifeblood of our people, and it will also be our asset sym-bol as we restore our ability to recover our reservation,” Iyall said. “We will be able to make better use of the river.”

The tribe has been working on creating habitat for the fish, one of its top priorities. Several conservation projects are in the process to help secure and maintain good conditions, Iyall said.

The tribe is also working on getting state recognition for its right to fish, some-thing Iyall said the tribe will recover.

“I think that the very importance of the whole system is the most important aspect of the river and looking at how it impacts the community,” he said. “… It’s a cultural component of our life that’s really critical.”

Creating a Life Along the Cowlitz

please see BOATS, page 37

Roy Wilson, honorary chief of the Cowlitz Tribe and chairman of the cultural committee, talks about the villages that were once scattered along the banks of the Cowlitz River.


By Dameon Pesanti

[email protected]

T he Cowlitz River was once a fa-vorite recreation spot for Wolf Bauer, a man many consider the

father of mountaineering and kayaking in the Pacific Northwest.

Although his efforts to stop the con-struction of the Mayfield and Mossyrock dams were in vain, the experience was the catalyst for his efforts to protect the Green River Gorge and other waterways around the state.

Born in 1912, Bauer was in his 20s when he made the first accent to Ptarmi-gan Ridge on Mt. Rainier and then began teaching the first generation of American mountaineers the basics of European-style high elevation summiting. In the 1940s, Bauer was considered one of the best climbers around when he shifted his gaze from the mountains to the rivers.

After World War II, he and several friends brought the sport of foldboating to the Pacific Northwest. De-signed in the Bavarian region of Germany in the 1920s, foldboats were es-sentially the forefathers of the modern white-water kayak. They were long, made with a wood-en frame wrapped in a rubberized canvas and

made to be disassembled and folded into two or three small bags. To build interest in the sport, Bauer taught foldboating classes at local YMCAs for over 25 years.

With a snorkeling set and belays from climbing friends, Bauer taught himself about river currents at different depths. Lat-er on, he and his mountaineering friends made the first descents in many of the ma-jor rivers around Washington. He mapped many of the rivers around the state and ap-plied the now-standard river rating system (class I-V) to every section they encoun-tered. In 1948, he founded the Washing-ton Foldboat Club, which later became the Washington Kayak Club.

Below what are now Riffe and May-field lakes in the Cowlitz River Basin were Mayfield and Dunn canyons. Together they made up more than 40 miles of interme-diate whitewater rapids. The canyons were unique in that while most rivers in Western Washington run on a bed of glacial till, the Cowlitz had dug itself deep into solid bed-rock, forming walls 80 feet high in some places.

The Cowlitz River Canyons were rare geographic beauties that were favorites of Bauer’s.

In 1946, the city of Tacoma had started planning to dam the Cowlitz. The project was mired in controversy from the begin-ning. Fishing organizations, both commer-cial and private, tried to block the construc-tion of the Mayfield and Mossyrock dams, citing the impact they would have on fish-eries. But construction went on anyway, of-ficially beginning in 1955.

In “Crags, Eddies & Riprap: The Sound Country Memoir of Wolf Bauer,” written by him and Lynn Hyde, Bauer was de-scribed as “an engineer who liked to play in the mountains” who was concerned about natural resource exploitation.

According to the book, he would later transition into one of the state’s biggest environmental advocates, but first, “It re-quired a catalyst to galvanize his thoughts, turn his energies to conservation, and change the direction of his life. That cata-lyst was Tacoma City Light’s plan in the 1950s to dam the Cowlitz River.”

In 1958, Bauer and the relatively small Foldboating Club threw themselves into the mix. He invited Bob and Ira Spring, two renowned photographers, to join him and several others on a trip through the canyons to document the splendor that was within. The Seattle Times ran a full-color Sunday edition about the trip on July 13 of that year. Some images featured boaters wearing enormous old Army surplus life-jackets while floating through large wave-trains beneath abandoned railroad bridges. Other pictures show them camping along the shores and huddled around a campfire. The whole spread ended with one kayaker sitting at what was the start of a Tacoma City Light cofferdam.

It was too late for Bauer to save the Cowlitz, but it galvanized his resolve to spare other rivers from the same fate.

In the mid-1960s, he focused on the Green River Gorge. He and his wife ex-plored and photographed it, then showed the images in a slideshow to the Wash-ington State Parks Department. Later

on, he penned an article for The Seattle Times about the gorge called, “A Ribbon of Wilderness in Our Midst” in which he described the canyon as a remote and beau-tiful place within commuting distance of a million people.

Public pressure moved the state to set aside money to buy the surrounding land from a number of stakeholders and thus protect the gorge.

“Recalling the high points in one’s life becomes a growing pleasure with age. There are those that you cherish, and those that others have recognized. Of those I own, the Green River Gorge experience overshadows all the others,” he wrote in his memoir.

Bauer sought to capitalize the success by rolling the momentum into other con-servation projects around the state. Trou-bled by unregulated development along the state’s waterways, Bauer drafted the “Natu-ral Shorelines Act” in 1969 as a softer ap-proach to erosion control. The measure didn’t pass, but the ideas were rolled into the powerful Shoreline Management Act, which was passed in 1971.

His conservation work inspired him to shift careers from engineering into an in-fluential shoreline resource consultant and became a founding member of the Wash-ington Environmental Council.

In a 2005 interview for the article “Wolf Bauer, Eighty Years on the Sharp End” in Northwest Mountaineering Jour-nal, Bauer said, “I think my most lasting contribution will be my work in ecology, since I switched from engineering to envi-ronmental education.”

The Chronicle tried to get an interview with Bauer, but at 103 years old, time has robbed him of many of his memories and the invitation was politely declined. An ac-quaintance of his referred the newspaper to his book and a few of the clubs and organi-zations he founded. Our pursuits of those people were also mostly fruitless since Bauer has outlived many of his contempo-raries. To the people that knew Bauer, he is a living legend.

As a sidebar to the story about him, the Mountaineering Journal ran a quote from Jim Whittaker, the first American to climb Mount Everest.

“Wolf Bauer has been an inspiration to me and my brother Lou, a real hero for us. I can’t say enough about him. Wolf brought mountaineering from Europe to the North-west — skiing, climbing, mountain rescue — the whole ball of wax… As a moun-taineer, you climb on the shoulders of your predecessors. When I stood on the summit of Mount Everest, I was standing on the shoulders of men like Wolf Bauer.”

A River Dammed, A Legacy ShiftedHow Tacoma Power Plans for the Cowlitz River Inspired One of the State’s Greatest Adventurers Into a Career of Conservation

The photograph above shows Wolf Bauer and the Cowlitz River.

BoatsContinued from page 36

cate detailed two sameday riverboat inci-dents involving the Toledo.

The first occurred near Castle Rock as the Toledo was coming in to make land-ing. Whittle’s ferryboat, which ran on a cable wire, struck the steamboat. The two riverboats pushed against one another until Captain Orrin Kellogg detached the cable from the cord, and eventually the ropes from the cable to the ferry separated. The Toledo, which had received minimal dam-age to the pilot house and whistle pipe, towed the ferry to the landing. It also had minimal damage. The reporter of the colli-sion boarded the Toledo. A mile down the river, steam began escaping, first alerting passengers with its hissing and then en-compassing the boat in steam. Apparently the steam escaped from a pipe damaged it the collision with the ferry.

According to the article, the steam caused “a terrible commotion.”

“Women screamed and fainted; men threw down their cards and rushed out on deck, vowing, if saved, they would do bet-ter in the future,” the article says.

The captain assured passengers they were not in danger. After landing and fix-ing the damage, the riverboat continued its journey. The Toledo was sold to another company in 1891 and wrecked on the Yam-hill River in Oregon in 1896.

During the height of steamboat travel on the Cowlitz — the 1870s and 1880s — round trips from Portland to Toledo were made three times a week. The distance be-tween the two port towns was 62 miles. A round-trip ticket was $2.50 on average.

Many of the steamboats that traveled the Cowlitz were designed to float shal-lower water during the dry season, accord-ing to “The Land Called Lewis.” The boats were typically single or double deck stern-wheelers 100-135 feet long and 20-30 wide. Some had rooms for overnight travelers.

Along with people, the steamboats moved livestock, food, furniture, building supplies, machinery and other goods. People along the way flagged down riverboat captains to pick up supplies along their route. The last regu-lar steamboat, the Chester, made its final trip in 1918. However, the Oregona made the last steamboat trip on the Cowlitz a month later in April of that year. While some credit the steamboats decline to the railroad, Crowell writes that Dr. Wayne Galvin found that rail shipping rates were higher than river rates. It was the increase in car and truck transport and a vehicle bridge across the Columbia River that had a bigger impact on the riv-erboats’ ultimate disappearance from the Cowlitz River.

Wolf Bauer1950s


DEVELOPMENT: Volcanic Sands From the 1980 Blast and Landslide Keep GivingBy Hal Bernton

Seattle Times staff reporter

CASTLE ROCK — In this southwest Washington community, a 60-acre pile of sediment dredged out of the Cowlitz River is a reminder of the titanic power of the Mount St. Helens eruption.

This is a tiny sliver of the largest land-slide in recorded history, which cut loose on May 18, 1980, to trigger the blast, and flushed downstream a roiling mass of earth and debris.

Thirty-five years later, these moun-tain remnants are once again on the move.

All spring long, trucks have been hauling off loads of volcanic sands sifted from the pile and transporting them to the Puget Sound region. Some is worked into the greens of manicured golf cours-es, and other loads are mixed with com-post to spread on homeowner yards or help grow the turf for playing fields.

“It’s a beautiful clean product that comes right out of the belly of the Earth,” said Greg Miller, of Walrath Trucking. “Safeco Field, the Seahawks training fa-cility, they use it. There have been some very famous shoes that have trod upon this material.”

The sediment pile is managed by the city of Castle Rock, which earns thousands — and in some years, tens of thousands — of dollars a year selling the volcanic sands. This money helps fund a broader effort to turn dredge sites around the town from liabilities to surprisingly versatile assets that have helped this ag-ing logging town carve out a new niche in outdoor recreation.

Over the years, Castle Rock has re-formed dredge piles to create a skate-board park, a boat launch and a trail system. Volunteers donated some 3,000 hours of labor to turn dredge sediments into a mountain-bike park. And, in the most ambitious transformation, the city planted sod on a large dredge pile and created five baseball diamonds and two soccer fields.

“We’ve kind of defined our economic development as quality of place. You can be fishing, playing ball or just enjoying the view,” said Dave Vorse, director of Castle Rock’s public works department.

Castle Rock Was at RiskAfter the 1980 eruption, Castle Rock’s

future was far less secure.The community was spared the se-

vere flooding from the landslide’s initial downstream rush of mud and debris. But north of the mountain, a transformed Spirit Lake posed more long-term risks.

The lake received enough sediment to raise the surface level by 210 feet and block the outflow. There was concern that the dam formed by this debris might fail, sending enough water downstream to put Castle Rock under dozens of feet of water.

Even if the lake stayed put, there was a greater likelihood of severe flooding from winter rains and snow melt. That’s because debris that settled in the Cowlitz River drastically reduced the flow capac-ity by more than 90 percent.

“There was a lot of fear of what was going to happen. A lot of anxiety,” recalls Vorse.

In the year after the eruption, Castle Rock’s population declined from 2,100 to 1,800 people, he said.

Over time, the fears eased.By 1985, a 1.6-mile outflow tunnel

had been drilled through Spirit Lake so the water level could be maintained at a safe level. The Army Corps of Engineers built a retention dam on the North Fork of the Toutle River that helped slow the downstream flow of sediments.

The Corps also carried out a mara-thon dredging effort that began right af-ter the eruption and continued through the early 1980s. The dredging removed enough material from the Toutle, Cowlitz and Columbia rivers to build a 12-lane highway from New York City to San Francisco, according to the U.S. Geologi-cal Survey.

Vorse says some of the first dredge piles had higher contents of ash and set up almost like concrete as they piled on the banks. So it was difficult to get grass to grow.

But later dredging produced much lighter, almost fluffy materials.

“If you weren’t careful you could sink into them,” Vorse said.

Old Threat Re-EmergesIn the first few years after the volca-

no, the 60-acre dredge pile sat stark and bare.

Then, scotch broom, a yellow-bloom-ing invasive shrub from Europe, took hold on top, along with mosses, grasses and eventually alders and willows. The cover lured rabbits. And that attracted beagle, basset hound and dachshund clubs for seasonal field trials.

Others used the area as a dump site,

leaving the landscape strewn with trash.The state owned the land. But it was

viewed as such a liability that part of the acreage was transferred to Castle Rock, which eventually assumed management responsibilities for the entire property and worked to clean up the trash.

“They required us to lease the prop-erty for 40 years, and be responsible for whatever happens out there,” Vorse said.

Early on, the market for dredge sedi-ment was weak.

By the late 1980s, across the river, one of the city’s dredged piles began to be used as fill for Southwest Washing-ton construction projects. It didn’t pay to transport the material very far.

But as sand supplies in the Puget Sound area played out, prices rose high enough that Walrath Trucking could make money hauling the St. Helens ma-terial north.

Last year, with Puget Sound growth surging, Walrath began excavating sand out of the 60-acre mound and separating out multicolored volcanic rock for use in landscaping.

No one can say how long it will be until the mound disappears.

“It’s all market dependent. It could be six years. It could be 60,” Vorse said.

If Castle Rock should run low on dredge materials, more keeps washing downstream.

The Army Corps has proposed rais-ing the retention dam to capture more of the sediments.

Meanwhile, an old threat has re-emerged that again could put Castle Rock at risk.

Army Corps inspections have found significant narrowing of a midsection of the tunnel. The agency’s engineers are concerned that during high water the tun-nel could back up, creating pressures that could destroy it and — in a worst-case scenario — lead to the failure of the dam and catastrophic flooding in the area.

Officials say there is no imminent danger. But the Corps is pushing to un-dertake a short-term repair this fall and also working to come up with a long-term fix.

“That tunnel is very important to Castle Rock, and everyone else who lives downstream,” Vorse said. “We’re encour-aged that the Corps has identified the problem and come up with a plan. But if they don’t get funding, things won’t hap-pen.”

St. Helens Sand Turns From Bane to Boon in Castle Rock, 35 Years After the Eruption

A TIMELINE OF THE EXPLOSION: WHAT HAPPENED WHEN MOUNT ST. HELENS ERUPTED

At 8:32 a.m. May 18, 1980, a 5.1 earthquake rumbled 1 mile beneath the volcano.One second later, the mountain’s north flank collapsed, creating the largest land-

slide in recorded history. In less than 10 minutes, debris filled nearly 25 square miles of the North Fork Toutle River valley to an average depth of 150 feet.

Rock and hot gases exploded sideways at 220 to 670 mph. The blast felled trees up to 12 miles away in a 180-degree arc north of the volcano. Some 57 people were killed, most by suffocation.

A slurry of melted snow and ice, boulders and sediment swept down mountain streams around the volcano. The largest mudflow, or lahar, raced down the North Fork Toutle River valley at up to 27 mph. It deposited more than 45 million cubic yards of sediment in the Columbia River, blocking oceangoing shipping for 13 days.

A vertical column of ash and steam rose 15 miles above the mountain. The cloud drifted to the northeast, depositing more than 3 feet of ash near the volcano. By 11:45 a.m., ash fell in Spokane. The ash cloud eventually circled the globe.

Hours after the avalanche and blast, super-heated pumice and gas flowed from the crater and into the valley north of the mountain. Temperatures of these pyroclas-tic flows reached 1,300 degrees F.

The eruption subsided about 5:30 p.m. after ejecting 540 million tons of ash.Sources: U.S. Geological Survey, Seattle Times archives


Murky, silt-�lled water of the Toutle River mixes into the Cowlitz River north of Castle Rock.


St. Helens Sand Turns From Bane to Boon in Castle Rock, 35 Years After the Eruption


A man jumps o� of a 30-foot tall cli� at a Blue Hole along the Ohanapecosh River near La Wis Wis campground on Saturday, June 27, 2015.

PARTING SHOT: See More at cowlitz.seesouthwestwa.com

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Journey on the Cowlitz