Catherine Creek

We Had No Plough | Wilbur Slockish, Jr, Klickitat Tribal Member 

I am Wilbur Slockish Jr. I’m a Klickitat. This is one of my home country sites where my people resided prior to the Euro-Americans arriving. Our foods, we take care of them and they’ll come back up.

We never had to have a plow because the seeds, the foods grew seasonally and we’d go into different areas to harvest different food sources. Right now the bitter roots and the lucre is out now and the other ones are going to follow pretty soon and we’re able to harvest them now. Fortunately, my daughters and granddaughters went out and got me some and so I’m going to be good food in all winter.

So be mindful. This land was like a grocery store. Each area was like an aisle, provided different food sources.

Even the the sunflower my dad used to get the stalks and then the wild celery. So this land was plentiful food wherever you went, whether it was a forest, this kind of area like this. But as the desert part starts, there was medicinal plants in those areas and there was deer meat and elk meat and people from the east thought it was idle land not knowing it provided us with food sources.

Birds and medicines that we utilized and the deer and the elk were in that area. So they thought it would be better to be irrigated and develop corporate farms, big farms that are selling now. And that land wasn’t idle.

All of this land, the creator designed it for food supply for our people. We never had it till the land. We took care of it.

It took care of us. All the vitamins, nutrients that we needed were within the fish and the meats, within the roots and the berries. So that’s why our people were very healthy at that time.

Now we have to go to the store and get vitamin pills and other things when nature provided us with all of those nutrients that our bodies needed.

Ethical Wildcrafting Part 1 | Kristin Currin, Owner Humble Roots Nursery

Wild And Dramatic Past | Lloyd DeKay, Geologist, Ice Age Floods Institute

Welcome. As you gaze upon the tranquility of the Columbia River Gorge, you might imagine it’s existed this way forever. But the truth is, this landscape has a wild and dramatic past.

Let’s rewind millions of years and explore the forces that shaped this iconic place. You can forget peaceful. Millions of years ago, the gorge was a stage for immense volcanic activity.

Molten rock, called basalt, erupted from the earth’s crust, blanketing the area in layers miles deep. Some of these flows even reached the Oregon coast. Now look closely at the rock faces around you.

See those dramatic columns? That’s columnar basalt, formed as the lava cooled and contracted. Believe it or not, the source of this basalt is now under Yellowstone National Park, thanks to the slow movement of our continental plate. Fast forward to six million years ago, and the Cascade Mountains began to rise.

The mighty Columbia River, ever persistent, carved its path through these growing giants, following the basic path we see today. Enter the Ice Age. Enormous floods, a chaotic mix of mud, water, and icebergs, roared across Washington and the Columbia River Valley.

These weren’t your average floods. Some reached depths of 1,000 feet. They ripped away at the basalt layers, carving out the steep walls and box canyons characteristic of the gorge.

The story doesn’t end there. Evidence of more recent mud flows and landslides littered the landscape. One such event, the Bonneville Landslide, even temporarily dammed the river around 1450 AD, inspiring the legend of the Bridge of the Gods.

So, the serene beauty surrounding you is a counterpoint to its violent past of volcanic corruptions, colossal floods, mud flows, and landslides. Even the fires we see today are part of this ongoing story. Thank you for joining us on this geologic journey through time.

I’m Lloyd Dekay, a geological oceanographer and a Columbia River Gorge Chapter President for the Ice Age Floods Institute. To learn more about the Ice Age floods and the Pacific Northwest geology, visit our website at www.iafi.org.

Decrepit Is The New Vibrant | Lindsay Cornelius, East Cascades Oak Partnership Manager, Columbia Land Trust 

My name is Lindsay Cornelius, and I’ve been working in this landscape for over 20 years managing conserved oak woodlands for a non-profit called Columbia Land Trust, and much of my work has focused on Oregon white oak woodlands, which you’ll see a lot of on this trail. Oregon white oak is the almost gray barked trees with softly lobed waxy leaves and sometimes a kind of scrappy looking growth form with gnarled branches and dead limbs and cavities, and by the time you’re done listening, I hope you’ll understand how these features that look so decrepit are actually supporting really vibrant life. So Oregon white oak is Washington’s only native oak tree, and they’re abundant here, but they’re also critically important for several reasons.

So in fact, wildlife benefit from Oregon white oak in ways that they benefit from very few other plants, particularly their acorns and their cavities. The acorns they produce are a source of incredibly rich protein for all sorts of wildlife, from birds to large and small mammals like bear and deer. Cavities provide safe places to nest and take shelter, and what’s really cool about oaks is that they provide the same resources that a dead tree or a snag provides while they’re still alive, producing all the benefits of a living tree.

Their leafy crowns provide shade in the hot summer, abundant forage for invertebrates and birds, and the plants growing underneath the oaks, the perennial grasses and the flowering forbs, support an incredible array of biodiversity. They’re also fire adapted, staying greener longer into the year, and they grow in clumps which interrupts the spread of fire. They also provide bare dirt in between the clumps where ground nesting bees can thrive.

The deeply furrowed bark of an oak is thick and it insulates the tree against heat from fire. It’s also remarkably resistant to the flames themselves, and so are the leaves, which are even difficult to burn intentionally due to their waxy cuticle. These are qualities which make oaks successful in a fire-prone environment like ours and make them wonderful neighbors.

That’s Not A Bee | Steven Clark, Biology Professor, Clark College

There are so many bees. There are more species of bees in Washington than there are birds. So you’re going to see something on that flower, and it might be a metallic green.

You’ll say, oh, that’s not a bee, it’s green. No, there are green bees, there are striped bees, there are many black bees that look like little flying ants. So I don’t even worry about what it looks like.

I get up close and say, does it have pollen? If it has pollen, it’s a native bee, or a honeybee. Honeybee is a non-native. I’m going to look to see if there’s any yellow on the bee, because if there’s yellow, that means it’s pollen.

The bees are going to carry the pollen, they’re messy, so there’ll be pollen all over. But often you’ll see it on their underside of their abdomen, on their belly basically. And often you’ll see it on what looks like their hind legs on their thighs.

And if you see a little bit of yellow, then you know that’s a bee. Don’t know what kind, that’s a bee. If you get really close, you can actually listen to it.

Some bees make a special buzz when they pollinate flowers. Another thing that bees will do, and will help you know that it’s a bee, is they never move slow. When they’re on the flower, they go bzzz, bzzz, bzzz, they’re upside down, sideways, and then they’ll jump over to another flower, often the same species.

Like it’s a little bit rare that they would go from a daisy to a lupine. They’re going to go lupine, lupine, lupine, lupine, lupine, then they’ll go back to the nest. So here’s another thing.

If you’re walking along and you see some bees, you think to yourself, oh I’m in an area where there’s bees, and then you might wonder, where do they live? Almost all of those bees live in the ground. 70% of our bees live in the ground. It’s very hard to find a bee nest, but that’s where they are.

What you’re looking for is a hole smaller than a pencil, and what that hole will be is a nest chamber, and the female bee will crawl down that hole, maybe 10 inches, and she’ll brush all that pollen that she has stuck to her body. She’ll brush it off, and she’ll make a ball, and then eventually she’ll lay an egg on top of that ball, and that baby egg will hatch and eat all that pollen. So that’s what you’re looking for.

By the way, if you see a bee in May, and then you go back on that same hike in July, it’ll be a different bee. Bees don’t live that long. They’re only going to be active for about six weeks.

So when the bee is out there collecting pollen, she’ll be collecting pollen, let’s say for all of May and the first two weeks of June, and then she dies, and the only left is her little nest in the ground with 10 babies. And if you come out later, you’re going to see a different species of bee. That’s not at all surprising because we have so many bees.

Birding With Lily | Lily Carey, Interpretive Specialist with the U.S. Forest Service, Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.

Okay, don’t be scared, but have you ever seen Jurassic Park? Because basically where you are right now is exactly like Jurassic Park. Meaning that you are currently surrounded by dinosaurs.

Yep, dinosaurs. Well, I mean, I guess I should say the descendant of dinosaurs. If you look around, you might see something moving, possibly flying.

Yes, I am talking about birds. And yes, birds are the living descendants of dinosaurs. So keep that in your back pocket for next time you see a bird.

But if you take a moment to just look around you, you can also listen, more than likely the wildlife that you are going to see is going to be a bird. Birds are incredibly numerous all over the world. There are thousands of different species of birds.

They’ve basically taken an entire niche, which is the open sky, and claimed it as their own. By the ability of flight. So how exactly do birds fly? Well, there’s something called the Bernoulli Principle, which also applies to airplanes.

And in the Bernoulli Principle, you need thrust to be able to create lift. Now thrust in an airplane would be like the jet engines pushing it forward. Thrust for a bird would be the flapping of the wings.

And then as the air moves over the bird’s wings, or the airplane’s wings, there is a difference in pressure that creates lift and actually pushes the bird or the airplane upward. So those two things together creates flight. But there are also some anatomical features of birds that allow them to fly.

The first is that they have an incredibly efficient method of oxygen absorption. So for us, we have an in one way, out the same way method. So we’re not very efficient in oxygen absorption.

But for birds, they have a whole series of air sacs. So it’s what it sounds like chambers that allow the movement of the air to be unidirectional one way. So the air is never going to go back the same way it came in.

This allows for even better oxygen absorption, which is very important because flying takes a lot of oxygen for those large muscles. Now as we’re talking about muscles, if you go ahead and feel your collarbone, ours are flat, right, they go straight across our chest. Now a bird has an elongated collarbone that kind of points outward.

Think about the wishbone on a turkey or a chicken. This elongated bone allows more space for more connections of muscles to be able to power those wings to allow for thrust. Now we can actually feel our sternum.

So our sternum is flat, connects to our ribs, a bird’s sternum, just like the wishbone, points outwards, again creating more surface area to attach large pectoral muscles to power those wings. Isn’t that pretty incredible? There are all these things that allow for a bird to be able to fly. All right, so I’m pretty sure by now you are totally enthralled, you want to learn more about birds, you want to be a birder, and I have some great news.

What you’re doing right now, sitting or walking and just watching the birds around you, that is birding. You’re doing it. If you do want to learn more, if you want to figure out what kind of bird you’re looking at, there are two things you can do to kind of up your game.

The first is find some sort of method of identification, and the second is find a way to bring the bird closer to you. Now if we’re talking about methods of identification, you can go the traditional printed guidebook way. Tons of guidebooks out there.

I recommend getting one that works for you, and that also can like help you to characterize or move through the process of birding. So if it’s grouped by color or size or shape or anything like that. And then the other method is a mobile app.

So something like the Merlin app or the Seek app that help you to identify the bird either by step-by-step like the Merlin app or by using a photo. Super helpful and great for beginners. And then if we’re talking about ways to bring the bird closer to you, the best way, get a pair of binoculars.

Any kind will do. Doesn’t matter. Does not matter.

And then another way is to set up a bird feeder. Do you have space in your yard or is there a public park that has one set up? Setting out a bird feeder will bring the birds to you and then you can sit there and watch them as you please. So I hope for the remainder of your walk today you’ll take some time to notice the little dinosaurs around you.

Watch them fly. Listen to them sing. Maybe notice if you’ve seen one of these birds before.

A lot of wildlife we don’t get to see and birds are one of the few that we actually can spend time watching. Thank you so much for listening. I’m Lily Carey, Interpretive Specialist with the U.S. Forest Service, Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.

Imagine This Landscape | Brance Morefield, Botanist, US Forest Service 

Hello, my name is Brance Morefield, botanist with the U.S. Forest Service at the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. Today we are here at Catherine Creek, one of the best places to see spring wildflowers in the Columbia River Gorge. The Catherine Creek trail system was created to allow users to enjoy wildflowers by protecting them from being trampled.

One of the most important things you can do while visiting is to keep yourself and your dog on the trail. The uneven deposition of soil gives Catherine Creek an undulating topography of varying soil depths. Plants favor different soil depths and moisture content, so you can find about 300 species of plants here.

When the Forest Service acquired this land, it had been overgrazed by cattle and sheep, and the soils had become compacted, so there were very few native plants here. We knew we wanted to restore this land, but what should it look like? From observations made of the surrounding areas where we knew cattle and sheep would not graze, we were able to form a mental picture. We wanted to imagine what this site might have looked like in the 1800s before grazing would have occurred here and fire was excluded.

Imagine this landscape covered in native balsam roots, bunch grasses, bulbs, and with very few pine trees. Due to the exclusion of fire by early settlers from this ecosystem, pine trees have encroached into the areas where there are deeper soils. The trees are stressed, they are short, and some are even dead or dying.

Pre-settlement, cultural burning would have occurred at Catherine Creek about every two to four years. Cultural burning is a process using prescribed fire to manage landscapes and would have killed the young pine seedlings. Fire would have made nutrients more available, allowing plants to grow more vigorously, and would have excluded the invasive annual grasses now present everywhere.

Cultural burning would have created more foods for large mammals, birds, and insects by increasing biodiversity. This ecosystem evolved with fire and it is important that we work to get fire back on the landscape. Due to current regulations, it is difficult to put fire on the landscape, but we hope it will be possible in the future.

The native plant community has slowly repopulated this area naturally with the exclusion of grazing, but we are also helping. On a yearly basis, seeds are collected from local plant populations. We store these seeds to protect them and then distribute them in the cold wet months.

By collecting seed and redistributing, we have successfully expanded many of the native plant populations here, but this work will take years to complete. Please enjoy your visit to Catherine Creek, and please stay on the trail.

Poor, Shallow Soil | Kevin Gorman, Executive Director, Friends of the Columbia River Gorge 

As you look around, take in that you are in the midst of one of the most beautiful, ecologically significant, and culturally important landscapes on the planet. My name is Kevin Gorman, I’m the Executive Director of Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and welcome to the largest national scenic area in the country, the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. Catherine Creek is one of the most wonderful wildflower spots in the Columbia Gorge.

Every spring, it creates this show that lasts for four to six weeks of this revolving cascade of wildflowers. The western meadowlark, Oregon State Bird, shows up and serenades hikers as they walk through this area. But Catherine Creek was one of the first purchases made after the National Scenic Area Act passed.

It was a ranch owned by the Lauterbach family, purchased by Trust for Public Land, and eventually sold to the U.S. Forest Service. And there’s a reason why Catherine Creek is such a great wildflower spot, and it has to do with the Ice Age floods. When the Ice Age floods came through, it scoured those hillsides.

Catherine Creek, if anything, is a place of very poor, shallow soil. And that may not sound good for wildflowers, but it’s worse for grasses. And so the wildflowers can compete and out-compete the grasses.

And as a result, that’s why Catherine Creek is such a wonderful place for wildflowers, is because of its poor, shallow soil.

Sasquatch Calls | Mel Skahan, Klickitat Tribal Member 

Hello, my name is Mel Skahan. I’m an enrolled member of the Yakama Nation located in central Washington. I grew up on the Columbia River.

My fishing family is from down in the area and I learned how to salmon fish since I was eight years old. I know just about every square inch of the Columbia River Gorge on the riverside and I also was employed with the United States Forest Service before the Columbia River Gorge Act. In this area of Catherine Creek, there have been stories that I’ve collected along this spot where the Sasquatches swim across this little area, this narrow channel of the Columbia River and they’ve been seen on the Oregon side and then along the Washington side and then coming up from the river.

So they could have either swam from the Washington side to the Oregon side or vice versa, Oregon to the Washington side. There are fishing sites located around here that I used to watch and figure was a bear, but bear encounters in this area are kind of rare. And then you would see the impressions the next day of something large had been down there, but because we didn’t see it as kids and we really didn’t know Sasquatch stories back then, it didn’t really scare us.

After I became an adult and started hearing the stories from certain areas, I was like, you know what? I heard the same thing. I experienced the same thing that you people did about 20 years ago when I was a kid down in this area. So vocalizations in this area could be anywhere from a to a or the long, and if you’re here and at night and it’s nice, calm and quiet and the east winds are not blowing hard, you’ll hear the Sasquatch vocalization.

And it’s not a car horn. It’s not a semi. It’s not a train.

It’s Sasquatch. I’ve done that call many times out there and we’ve gotten responses for that. And usually what it means is that, hey, I just walked into your area and they’re just sending out a message to the others And or if they don’t want anybody in the area, that location call will send out to all the other ones.

And then the other violent one that you’ll get is just as long, a huge scream. And when you hear this scream, you’re trying to cover your ears, it’s so powerful and long. And then it was like, okay, you don’t want me here, I’m gone.

So that’s a lesson for you too, folks. If you hear anything like that, put your hands up in the air, say, it was nice meeting you. I’m not gonna come back for a while.

I’ve enjoyed my stay.

Thousand Foot Wall of Water | Justin Radford, Acting Park Manager, Acting Park Manager, Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area, Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail

It took just the right combination of moments and events to bring you here along Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail. This place was touched long ago by massive amounts of water and debris as cataclysmic floods traveled through the area. Imagine you were here to see those floods and witnessed a thousand foot wall of water* coming down the Columbia.

At the end of the last Ice Age, advancing glaciers blocked the Clark Fork River in Idaho, creating a gigantic ice dam. Where Missoula, Montana sits today, glacial Lake Missoula filled with the volume of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined. As the ice lobe retreated, pressure from the lake caused the ice dam to fail and a wall of water, icebergs, boulders and gravel released in a matter of hours.

Perhaps as many as a hundred floods created the Great Coulees and Channeled Scablands of Central Washington before coming this way. Powerful floods rushing down the path of the Columbia River scraped the canyon walls down to bedrock. From here, floodwaters entered the Columbia River National Scenic Area and then to Portland and the Willamette Valley, where the floods slowed and deposited the soil and rock we see today.

Finally, floodwaters reached the Pacific Ocean where they created the Astoria Fan off the coast of Oregon. Stretching miles out to sea are layers upon layer of Ice Age floods deposits. A good floods detective might spot rocks around here don’t really belong, called erratics.

Rocks and boulders from as far off as British Columbia were captured in icebergs traveling with the floods. Some were stranded along the way and you might just find some on your hike today. Enjoy your experience and time along Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail.

*Many scientists guess it may be up to 2 thousand feet high

Oak Understory Story | Lindsay Cornelius, East Cascades Oak Partnership Manager, Columbia Land Trust

People often notice the trees in beautiful places like this, but I encourage you also to look underneath the trees at the plants that grow lower to the ground. Here you’ll find perennial bunch grasses. Those are the grasses that you see growing in clumps.

These grasses have really deep root systems that help secure soil and cycle nutrients and provide habitat for soil organisms. The roots also store a lot of carbon underground, and this is an important aspect of carbon cycles where fires can regularly release carbon into the atmosphere when the above-ground foliage burns. So all that carbon that’s stored underground is not released during fires.

Because these plants are deeply rooted, they have access to soil moisture longer into the summer, and they stay green longer than many non-native grasses do. That’s an important factor for wildlife forage and for fire history. These grasses also provide nutrition to native wildlife, and they provide habitat for invertebrates and birds and reptiles and amphibians.

Another cool thing that you’ll notice is that in between these bunch grasses, there is space for other flowering plants to grow and thrive, and this is an important aspect of biodiversity in these cascades where flowering plants attract not only tourists, but hundreds of species of insects and birds and wildlife. This is essentially the base of the food chain and the root of biodiversity. One challenge that managers are working to solve in this landscape is the presence of invasive annual grasses.

These grasses fill in the spaces between bunch grasses and displace the flowering plants and the bare ground that houses things like bees and birds. As these annual grasses spread in response to disturbances like intensive or persistent grazing or fire or soil disturbance from human activities, the exotic grasses can displace native plants, and they’re far less nutritious for domestic and wild grazers too. You might have heard of cheatgrass, which has kind of overtaken dry grassland systems in the American West over the last several decades, but it’s only one of several annual grasses that is threatening biodiversity here along this trail.

Medusa head, ripgut, dovetail, ventinata, these are all grasses that could threaten the flowering plants and fire-adapted grasses that you see in the oak understory. But the good news is we can all help prevent that from happening by being thoughtful about our own behavior. We can use boot brushes at trailheads to prevent spreading seeds.

We can stick to trails to avoid trampling reproducing plants. We can seed disturbed soils with native grasses and forbs. We can also time our grazing to allow native plants the opportunity to fully reproduce in the spring every few years.

People who live and work and play in the East Cascades have long traditions of paying attention to nature and caring about it deeply. From ranchers to hikers, we are all part of a complex relationship with nature, and the best thing about being human is that we learn. We can learn from each other.

We can learn just by paying attention. We can be better and better stewards to help improve outcomes for nature and for people. If you want to learn more about Oregon white oak systems, whether it’s the oak trees themselves or the plants that are growing in the understory or how people are interacting with them more generally, you can find out more information on the East Cascades Oak Partnerships website or by contacting oaks at columbialandtrust.org by email and we can add you to Listserv.

Why Native Bees Don’t Sting | Steven Clark, Biology Professor, Clark College

Well, why don’t bees sting? Native bees don’t sting because they have little tiny nests, meaning they have one female and 10 eggs. The insects that sting have giant nests, like the non-native honeybee, which could have 3,000, or a wasp or a yellowjacket. Those aren’t bees.

But they have huge nests. They’ve got thousands of babies. So if you’re stomping along on the ground and you stomp on their hole, they come up and say, oh my gosh, somebody’s going to try and kill all my 10,000 babies.

And so of course they have an aggressive response. But if you walk along in a hole of a native bee, there’s only one adult female and eight eggs. They can sting, but they don’t.

They’re just not aggressive because they don’t have to protect seven eggs like a wasp would have to protect 10,000. So don’t be worried about it. Here’s another thing.

When bees do try and protect themselves, it’s either because they’re getting injured. Like I say, you might step on it or something by accident. Or your dog would eat an apple and there’s a bee on it.

That would get them to sting. But they don’t sting when they’re not by their nest. They sting when they’re protecting their nest.

And what you’re looking for is flowers. So you’ve got this yellowjack as they nest in the ground. They’ve got real big hives by the end of summer, could have 10,000.

And all of the yellowjackets in a half mile or a mile radius, they’re all right there. So if a predator comes to that spot, that’s a big impact on the population. If they come and they find that ground nesting bee, that’s not the only one in a half mile.

There are hundreds of them. So it just has a small impact. So evolutionarily, the big hives, they have to be aggressive because if you find their babies, their population takes a hit.

You’ve got 80% of the bees in that area, or the wasps in that area, if you find that one cache. Whereas if you find the solitary bee, you’ve got less than 1% of the bees. That’s the thinking behind the hive hypothesis.

Ethical Wildcrafting Part 2 | Kristin Currin, Owner Humble Roots Nursery

My name is Kristin Currin. I’ve been ethically propagating native plants in the Columbia River Gorge for over 20 years through my nursery, Humble Roots Nursery in Mosier, Oregon. Humans and plants have co-evolved in this place and there is a long history of people in this landscape tending the wild in resilient ways, but with recent increased interest in foraging and wildcrafting by people with only a casual understanding of what they’re doing, negative impacts are being seen.

There are ways, however, that we can harness the growing interest in foraging and wildcrafting to benefit local ecosystems. In particular, there are a number of non-native invasive species of plants that have edible and medicinal uses and harvesting these edible and medicinal invasive species from the wild can help to eradicate them and aid native plant populations competing with them for space and nutrients. Good examples of this are dandelion, salsify, St. John’s wort, and mullein.

Again, proper plant identification is essential as mistakes can be made. For example, salsify, also called oyster root, is a tap-rooted plant whose carrot-like root is edible and for that reason it was introduced to North America as a food plant by early European settlers. It has since spread rapidly and is a common weed in the wildflower meadows of the Columbia River Gorge.

The root is most tender before the plant flowers, but before it flowers this plant looks nearly identical to and is incredibly difficult to distinguish from the green-banded mariposa lily, Calochortus macrocarpus. The green-banded mariposa lily is a beautiful native plant that is important for pollinators, but some variations of this lily are very rare and the species is facing population declines in general. Accidentally mistaking mariposa lily for salsify and pulling or digging it can endanger this beautiful native lily.

While many people approach foraging and wildcrafting of native plants from the perspective of simply obtaining food and medicine, they may not incorporate the botanical and biological perspective, experience, and knowledge needed to harvest native plants in an ethical and sustainable way. Such knowledge can lead to a better understanding of when it is appropriate to harvest a particular plant and when it’s not ethical or appropriate to harvest a certain species and is instead important to refrain from harvesting. What may look like a healthy population of plants could be just a small remnant of what once was.

Having a deep connection and relationship with native plants and the places where they grow can help us to be better stewards of them and the land we share with them. We can also cultivate native plants in our own home yards, thus creating healthier ecosystems and backyard habitat where local biodiversity can thrive and we can learn about and ethically harvest native plants.

Nancy’s Legacy | Kevin Gorman, Executive Director, Friends of the Columbia River Gorge

As you look around and marvel at the beauty of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, I want you to think of one thing. If it were not for one woman, a woman from Portland named Nancy Russell, the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area would not exist today. My name is Kevin Gorman.

I’m the Executive Director at Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and I want to tell you a story about how the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act came into being. Nancy Russell was a mother of four stay-at-home mom in Portland, Oregon in the late 1970s. She had a love of gorge wildflowers, she was an avid hiker, and she was an incredibly determined and competitive woman.

She started giving slideshows about gorge wildflowers and how important the gorge was. At the same time, the pressures from Portland and Vancouver to continue development into the gorge, to frankly suburbanize the Columbia Gorge, were underway. And Nancy and others started looking at ways to protect this place, not just on the Oregon side, where she was from, but on the Washington side as well.

And so came the federal effort to permanently protect the Columbia Gorge. It started with an idea of a national park, but when you think of all the communities that are there, the highways that are there, the dams that are there, it then settled onto the concept of a national scenic area, managed by the Forest Service and with the newly created Columbia River Gorge Commission. It was a controversial issue, as so many gorge residents were concerned about their property rights and would the federal government overtake their lands.

That has not occurred, and today the communities of the gorge embrace the national scenic area as it protects the gorge lands as well as their own communities from the ever-growing population base in Portland and Vancouver. It was obvious why the gorge should be protected. It’s one of the most breathtaking landscapes in the country.

There’s gorge wildflowers that exist nowhere else in the world that are only there. It’s a recreation haven, and it’s just a special place and right next to a major population center. It would have been developed overrun as so many places in this country had been, had it not been for this woman.

It was Nancy Russell who started Friends of the Columbia Gorge and pushed for years to ensure federal protection happened. And once that federal protection came with the national scenic area designation in 1986, she continued working hard to make sure lands from willing sellers became public treasures like we have today at Catherine Creek and other places. She continued to advocate for years and years to come, even being a conservation buyer, buying lands with their own funds to in turn allow them to become trails and vistas.

The trailhead you find at the Klickitat Trail, the Mosier Plateau, the Lyle Cherry Orchard, these gems that we all enjoy today are only there because Nancy Russell stood up, became a conservation buyer, and permanently protected those lands. We are forever indebted to her, but she alone is not enough to really protect this place. The most important thing she did is carry on her legacy to make sure that thousands of people after her continue to work to protect this place, to cherish it, and to pass it along to future generations.

So the gorge will remain something that we all care about, that we all treasure, and that we all preserve for generations to come.