Fort Cascades Trail

Significance Doesn’t Come Easily | Pat Barry, Former Park Ranger and Visitor Center Manager, Bonneville Dam

My name is Pat Barry and I was the supervisory park ranger for the visitor facilities at Bonneville Dam for 27 years. And the important thing about Fort Cascades, it’s nationally significant. And nationally, national significance doesn’t come easily.

So there has to be a real good reason for that. And the real good reason for Fort Cascades is that it was kind of a focal point of a lot of historic events. There were native people that passed through there.

Lewis and Clark passed through there. People migrating to Oregon passed through there, early settlers of the area. There was a military presence there to protect those settlers.

In fact, there were three forts. There was Fort Cascades, Lower Cascades, which is this place. There was Fort Raines, which was kind of, they called it the Middle Cascades.

And then up above what used to be the big rapids near Cascade Locks was Fort Luganville. So this was one of a series of three military forts that were really there to protect settlers as they came through. Now, the forts were abandoned after a while, around the time of the Civil War, because all the soldiers went back to fight the Civil War.

And then the locals basically took over the fort site for a community. They built buildings there. There was a hotel there for a while.

There were stables to house the vehicles that people used to get to the hotel and so on. Later on, there was a land claim. It was pretty significant.

There were lots of things. And then in the 1890s, the people who were living at the Cascades Dam site decided to move the official records up to Stevenson. And the timing was great because the 1896 flood came through and wiped out all the buildings, removed a lot of topsoil, and really, really changed the area.

It made it a place that people chose not to inhabit anymore. The focal point of this place is really before Bonneville Dam, because Bonneville Dam was built in the 30s. And the purpose of Bonneville Dam was to get vessels around the Cascade Rapids.

And the purpose of this fort Cascade site was to help get settlers around the Cascade Rapids. But it’s a place that’s been used, as the Native people say, since time immemorial. So it was felt that this was of national significance because of the many events that occurred on this piece of ground.

Starting with indigenous people all the way through really today, because today it’s used as a recreation site.

Invasive Species | Ethan Coggins, Natural Areas Specialist, WA State Department of Natural Resources

Hiking is a wonderful way to experience the outdoors. Many folks carry the memories formed on a nice hike for a lifetime. Unfortunately, that may not be the only thing people take away from a hike.

Many weedy plant species like puncturevine, cheatgrass, and bircher wool are well adapted to cling to clothing and can pose a serious threat to native plants and wildlife. Species like this can often hitchhike on dirty boots and are frequently transported to new locations by unknowing individuals. These non-native species are like a virus for which local ecosystems have no immunity.

This can lead to popular recreation areas being overrun by noxious species that can degrade the ecosystem, reduce habitat for wildlife, and ultimately lead to negative outcomes for both humans and our native species. Fungal spores introduced on the feet of unsuspecting recreators have even been implicated in the spread of white-nose fungus, a devastating disease affecting our local bat species. Thankfully, you can help stop the spread of harmful species by cleaning your footwear before heading out on an adventure.

Please make sure to clean off any dirt and seeds before heading out on the trail. I’ve been Ethan Coggins with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, and I and your local ecosystems thank you for helping to stop the spread of these harmful species. For more information about invasive weeds, check out the Columbia Gorge Cooperative Weed Management Area website.

When Lewis and Clark Passed Through | Dr. Rick Chromey, Lewis and Clark Historian 

Well, my name is Dr. Rick Cromey. I’m a Lewis and Clark historian. And I have a bias, really, or a prejudice towards studying original documents and trying to understand them the best we can.

And so I stick right to the journals. But as they’re going down, they’re going to be in the Bonneville area. They’re going to be there around November 2nd as they’re heading downriver and April 6th through the 9th as they’re coming upriver.

The thing that they caught onto in this neck of the woods was the waterfowl. Clark says they saw a great number of waterfowl of different kinds, swan, geese, white and gray brants, ducks of various kinds. Now, you see ducks, but various kinds of ducks, gulls, and plovers.

They do talk about flooding a bit more as they’re moving upstream. They talk about there must have been some sort of a spring flood going on. They notice the water’s different.

This was something to keep in mind. We talk about how the water has changed a lot, especially since the dams have come through. Most of us don’t realize that Portland used to flood every single year.

But when they put Bonneville Dam in in 1937, one of the positive things about it was they could literally regulate the water flow that kept Portland from flooding. And of course, when they put the dams in further upriver, they’re able to manipulate the water all the way down, allowing also for irrigation of the area. But they had a high spring flood going on down by Bonneville at that point, and they make note of it.

Outlaw Fishwheel | Pat Barry, Former Park Ranger and Visitor Center Manager, Bonneville Dam 

My name is Pat Barry and I was the supervisory park ranger for the visitor facilities at Bonneville Dam for 27 years. If you’re standing at site number one, which is the Warren fishwheel site, and Warren was the operator of it, you can look out into the river and you’ll see this structure. It looks kind of like a jetty, but it’s kind of parallel to the bank, and the idea was it would divert the fish into this fishwheel.

They would be scooped up, they would be dropped on a deck of some kind, and then the people who worked there would collect them and get them down river to the cannery. And there were dozens and dozens of fishwheels. The Warren fishwheel, you can really see the remnants of it, and with a little imagination you can see how it worked.

Fishwheels were river-powered devices that captured salmon. So the device was powered by the river, which had open scoops on it, and as the salmon were coming upstream, this thing would scoop them out of the water like a ferris wheel and drop them onto the deck. And some of them were land-based, some of them were on scouts that could be moved.

Fishwheels were terribly efficient at capturing salmon, so much so that I believe by the 1920s, I think they were outlawed in Oregon, and then 1930s, I believe they were outlawed in the state of Washington. So you can no longer use them on the Columbia River, but they were very effective and they fed a lot of salmon to the canneries that were abundant at that time. The fishwheel itself is gone, but what you can see is this, it’s like a peninsula in the water.

It’s a jetty-type thing that you can see. And that was what the operators of the fishwheel used to direct the fish to the fishwheel. So you can see that remnant.

And there was a battle between the people who operated the fishwheels and the people who used gillnets down below. And they were both accusing each other of decimating the salmon runs. And this is a long time ago, this is back in the 1930s, before really any of the dams.

And it turns out that the gillnetters had more political clout, so they got the fishwheels banned. In fact, there’s a great book called Fishwheels on the Columbia that is a good resource if you want to know more about them.

Great Flood of 1894 | Pat Barry, Former Park Ranger and Visitor Center Manager, Bonneville Dam 

My name is Pat Barry and I was the supervisory park ranger for the visitor facilities at Bonneville Dam for 27 years. So another tangible that you can see on the Fort Cascades Trail is the remnants of the 1894 flood. If you’ve ever been in or near a flood you know how powerful water can be.

In this case as you’re walking along you’ll go down and the reason you’re going down is because the soil was washed away and you’ll get into a very rocky place because the rocks were too big for the current of the river to move. But it’s a noticeable change because you go down and in 1894 the flood just washed away the buildings that were there, washed away really any remnants of town that was there, and washed away lots of topsoil. So that’s the reason for this decline in the trail, this drop of maybe, I don’t know, 10-15 feet lower than what you had walked on previously.

So it’s kind of a tangible of what the power of the Columbia River can do. And that’s, I think the 1894 flood is the largest recorded flood, you know, historically recorded flood. Now of course the Ice Age floods were much, much bigger, but this one, as long as we’ve been keeping records, the 1894 flood is the one.

It was even bigger than the Vanport 1948 flood.

New Deal Dam | Pat Barry, Former Park Ranger and Visitor Center Manager, Bonneville Dam

My name is Pat Barry and I was the supervisory park ranger for the visitor facilities at Bonneville Dam for 27 years. The area near Fort Cascades is a great vantage point for seeing the dam. And the dam was built back in the 1930s.

It was a public works project built during the Great Depression. And there were really three purposes. One was to generate power, generate hydropower.

And I think today it generates enough for about a half a million homes. It was also built to allow vessels to get past the Cascade Rapids because the reason for this, a lot of what went on at Fort Cascades was a portage. So if you have a lock to move vessels past the dam, you don’t really need the portage anymore.

And another reason for building the dam was to get people working during the Great Depression. It was one of the official public works sites. It was dedicated by Franklin Roosevelt back in the 1930s.

On the same day, he dedicated a WPA site, a Work Progress Administration site, called Timberline Lodge. And anybody who skis or snowboards or just likes to get up on the mountain knows about the Timberline Lodge. It’s still up there.

And they were both dedicated. They were both New Deal projects. They were both dedicated on the same day.

And when you see the dam, the dam was built in stages. The original powerhouse and spillway and the original lock, which is no longer used, were built back in the 30s. In the 40s, during World War II, they added to the first powerhouse to increase the capacity.

And a lot of the energy was used to build ships and aircraft to fight World War II. And a lot of the electricity was used during that time. Shipyards in Vancouver and Portland, for example, and the aircraft construction up near Seattle, a lot of that power went there.

And then as the area grew and more people moved to the area and more people plunked things in, the second powerhouse was added to really double the amount of generating capacity. So there’s that. And that was completed in 1982.

And then one more big change. The original lock that was started in the late 30s was replaced in 1993 by a larger lock. And the larger lock was needed because the other seven locks upriver on the Columbia at Snake were all built of a uniform size and all larger than the original lock.

So that made the original lock at Bonneville a bottleneck because the tugboat companies would have to split their loads, take two through at a time and come back and get two more or three more or whatever. So it cut travel time down quite a bit. So a lot of changes have taken place.

And I think the changes really have mostly been in response to changing societal demands and more of an emphasis on fish. You know, the Endangered Species Act was certainly important and that started to list some of these fish species. And since the 1970s, probably, or 60s, there have been so many changes to make it safer for a juvenile salmon, especially to get past the dam.

It’s not so difficult for the adult salmon to get upstream, but it’s much more challenging to get the juveniles down safely. And that’s where a lot of the research and funding has been placed over the last decades.

Pittsburgh of the West | 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.

The entire Pacific Northwest is bisected by the Cascade Mountain Range and its rain shadow effect. West of the mountains is green and lush, while east of the mountains is brown and dry. Where you are standing right now is a sea-level passage through that mountain range that allows people to experience rainforest in the West Gorge and high desert landscapes in the East Gorge, all within a 50-mile drive.

The gorge is a one-of-a-kind wonder, home to the largest concentration of waterfalls in North America and hosts over 800 species of wildflowers, including 15 that exist nowhere else in the world. And as the gorge was and is a human travel corridor between the east and west sides of the mountains, it has significant tribal history, and today Native Americans live, work, and engage in the National Scenic Area. Though filled with hiking trails and water recreation, the Columbia Gorge is not a national park.

Because the gorge is made up of federal, tribal, state, county, and private lands, the concept of a National Scenic Area was created. It takes tremendous cooperation from a number of agencies and partners to both protect this natural area and ensure the local communities thrive. There are a number of reasons why the gorge needed this kind of protection, this federal protection, in the early 1980s.

The threat of sprawl coming from Portland and Vancouver was evident, but also evident was a history of over a century of development schemes that were plotted out that fortunately never occurred. Schemes such as having the world’s tallest elevator that would lead to polo grounds and golf courses up around Angel’s Rest and Devil’s Rest. It seems like a nuclear power plant, what is now at Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

Local boosters talked about making the gorge the Pittsburgh of the West and filling the mid-gorge with steel mills to draw cheap power from the dams. Fortunately, none of these development schemes played out, and by the 1980s, the threat of suburbanizing the West Gorge was very real and pushed a number of people to move forward in calling for federal protection.

Petroglyph | Pat Barry, Former Park Ranger and Visitor Center Manager, Bonneville Dam 

My name is Pat Barry and I was the supervisory park ranger for the visitor facilities at Bonneville Dam for 27 years. So a little further down the trail you come to a petroglyph and the petroglyph we’re not really sure of the significance of it but this is a replica of the original petroglyph that was there. The original petroglyph was moved to the city of Stevenson and it was placed in such a way that the only way to bring it back to that location at Fort Cascades to its original location would be to destroy the building that it was planted next to.

First they planted the petroglyph then they built the building around it I suppose. We didn’t want to do that. Nobody wants that building, well I shouldn’t say nobody, but most people don’t want that building torn down so they decided to make a cast of the petroglyph and make a new one out of concrete and that’s what they did back in the 1980s when this trail was established.

So what you’re seeing there is a replica but it’s a very accurate replica of the original petroglyph that was there and it’s just evidence of the indigenous people that were there.

Elders Smiling | David Sohappy, Jr. Native Fisherman 

Hello, my name is David Sohappy. We used to have songs for everything, but now that’s being lost. Even our language is being lost, but slowly it’s coming back.

Every time an Indian says an Indian word, there’s an elder smiling about. Some are happy that the Indians are learning, keeping their tradition, their culture alive. Salmon, we call the Nusuk salmon, Wiconish salmon, salmon meat.

The Amish is deer. Goat is wowl. Horse is kussi-kussi.

Dog is kussi. There’s a lot of names that’s being lost. Rabbit, what is rabbit? Weelalit, isn’t it? Yeah, weelalit.

But different tribes have different names for, like Muckleshoot language, it’s crutchidate, or rabbit. A lot of our teachings are taught from father to son, mother to daughter. That’s how they learned.

Your tape recorder is right there, in here. Sohapi, it used to be Sohapi. But the white man couldn’t pronounce it.

It means putting something under the shelf. There was a brother a long time ago, they were hunting for him. That’s how he got his name, he was hiding under that shelf.

Another tribe was looking for him, they couldn’t find him. He hid under that shelf, that’s what that means, under the shelf. Instead of fighting it, we just said Sohapi.

Just like Chief Seattle, which is Seattle. A lot of them couldn’t say it. She-ah-tle, Chief She-ah-tle.

That’s where Seattle came from.

100 Year Conflict | Henry Franzoni, Former Data Management Coordinator, Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission

My name is Henry Franzoni. I’ve worked in the Columbia Basin for over 30 years. I’m a fishery scientist and a computer scientist.

I worked mainly for the tribes. I worked on the problem of getting fish up and down the river, while still allowing for dams to produce power generation, irrigation, navigation, and flood control. This problem has a long history.

The problem of getting salmon and the dams to coexist goes back to the Bonneville Dam being turned on in 1937. There has been a hundred-year-long history of conflict regarding the treaty rights of the tribes to the fish across the Columbia Basin. It had grown violent and intense before these treaty fishing rights were acknowledged by both the Belloni and Bolt decisions.

In 1969, Judge Robert Belloni of the U.S. District Court rejected the state of Oregon’s claim to regulate tribal fishing on the Columbia River without acknowledging or protecting treaty fishing rights. This opened the door to what is known as the Bolt decision. The Bolt decision is a famous decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. This decision has been affirmed a few times since it happened in February 1974. A tangible consequence that occurred due to the Bolt decision was that the Columbia Basin tribes, with specific language in their treaties, obtained access to 50 percent of the harvestable fish.

To summarize the specific treaty language, the treaties say the tribes can, quote, fish in their usual and customary places in perpetuity, unquote. Initially, this language was interpreted by the court to mean a 50-50 split of the harvest, but has been extended to include co-management of the fisheries resources across the original area covered by the reservations, which includes a large portion of the Columbia Basin. Therefore, the tribes have co-management responsibilities of the fisheries resources across the Columbia Basin today.

Canoe Envy | Dr. Rick Chromey, Lewis and Clark Historian

Well, my name is Dr. Rick Cromey. I’m a Lewis & Clark historian. Well, let’s talk about the stretch of the river between the Dalles and what we call Cascade Locks today and Stevenson, Washington.

And when you look at it from Lewis & Clark again, when they leave the Dalles, they’re going to zoom through this area. In fact, they’re really through this particular stretch of the river on October 28th through 29th. And even coming back upriver, they’re coming up at a pretty good pace too, April 14th to the 15th.

So two days down, two days up, they pretty much cover this stretch of the river. And that’s fascinating to me because you would think coming back up, it would be a fairly, maybe two or three days longer than coming down, but they’re coming along at a pretty good pace going up as well as down. And one of the things that slowed them down in October were the headwinds on the Columbia.

The headwinds were so hard as they were going down that, in fact, I’ll read from the journal here from John Ordway. He says:  “the wind rose so high from the Northwest that it obliged us to halt on the large side under some cliffs of rocks. And the Indians came in their canoes to our camps.”

So they literally had to stop. It was so windy. And you can have sometimes three foot waves coming at you.

And that’s just difficult for these guys in dugout canoes to traverse. They started to find that these natives were living in houses. They were used to the tribes living in more like cloths, tents.

The language was different. In fact, some of them had knowledge of English words. In fact, some of them were already dressed in British trade type of items.

The British had been trading down the Northwest coast for a long, long time, probably for 30, 40 years already. And a lot of this was starting to make its way up the Columbia River. William Clark says: “I entered one of the houses in which I saw a British musket, a cutlass, and several brass tea kettles.

I saw them boiling fish in baskets with stones” which was a British way of cooking fish. So they were learning and picking up white European type of customs and fashion as they went down. They also noted, Lewis and Clark did, the superior Chinook and canoes at this point.

The Chinooks were starting to come up this far on the river. And they noticed that they had a high front end to their canoes. And that was fascinating to them because they were running a dugout canoe that they had dug out from the Nez Perce.

And they were used to having water coming over the top of their front of their canoe. But these Chinooks had no problem going through these waves on the Columbia River. And in fact, they talk about this.

William Clark says: “the wind, which is the cause of our delay, does not retard the motions of those people at all, as their canoes are calculated to ride the highest waves. They’re built of white cedar or pine, very light, wide in the middle, and tapers at each end.” They started to covet that particular canoe.

And it’s part of their story. In fact, before they leave Fort Clatsop, they’re going to steal one.

Why Are You Watering The River? | Pat Barry, Former Park Ranger and Visitor Center Manager, Bonneville Dam 

My name is Pat Barry and I was the supervisory park ranger for the visitor facilities at Bonneville Dam for 27 years. So it’s really not part of the trail but around where the trail makes a big loop between sites number eight and nine there’s a fish facility and there’s a sign explaining how the fish facility works but basically I think it’s called the smolt monitoring facility. The way fish get through that facility is they’re diverted by fish screens which route them through underground pipe around the turbines so they’re not passing through the turbines they go around the turbines and they’re released at a point downstream and a lot of people are familiar with this site because during the migration season you’ll see water being sprayed over the river and people say why are you watering the river and the idea behind the sprinklers the big the big sprays is to deter avian predators from eating the smolts that come out of this system because they’re near the surface so the spray keeps the birds away and the pipes allow the fish to avoid going through the turbines and they’re deposited downstream so that’s what that that’s what that building is all about and it’s monitored there’s a staff down there that keeps keeps an eye on things to make sure that all the equipment is operating they can also remove tagged fish at that location or they can even remove fish and taggers at that location if they need to use them for some kind of research study yeah the smolt monitoring facility is intended to assist juvenile salmon that are migrating downstream past the dam because there are several ways that they go through the dam they can either go through the spillway which is usually open during the migration season they can go through the turbines or they can go through the smolt bypass the bypass consists of some screens that screen the fish away from the turbines and through a pipeline that leads them down through this facility and then back into the river so that’s the that’s the purpose of this and it’s not really part of the original forecast gains historic site of course because it was it was built much much later but it was it’s one of the many attempts that the corps of engineers has made and i believe fish and wildlife service the national fishery service have used to get fish downstream more safely past the dam

We Honor the Salmon | David Sohappy, Jr. Native Fisherman

Hello, my name is David Sohappy. I’m 65 years old. I’m a native fisherman.

Always been. I started fishing in 1963. Still fishing to this day.

61 years I’ve been fishing. I have a lot of knowledge on fishing. In our belief, we’re not supposed to hunt or fish or kill anything on Sunday.

That was our way of conservation. Non-Indians, they don’t see it as our conservation. Is that enough? We’re taught to catch our first salmon.

We share it with the people. So we come back plentiful. We honor the salmon.

The salmon was put here for the Indian people, along with the deer, the roots, the berries. So anytime they come anew, we honor the salmon for giving us strength, nourish our bodies. A lot of just roots.

They don’t have sugar. They don’t have salt. And salt is really affecting our Indian people, along with sugar and plastic.

It’s affecting the salmon in the ocean. They have microplastics that the salmon ingest, thinking it’s food. It’s colorful.

They make it look like eggs. The salmon bite it and they ingest it. There’s a lot of plastic in the ocean.

There’s a lot of plastic in the river that affects our salmon. It’s a lot of pollution, a lot of fertilizer. We didn’t have this much seaweed back in the day in the early 60s.

The water was cleaner.

Lichen Are Wonderful | Andrea Ruchty Montgomery, former US Forest Service Botanist

The Feisty Folk Singer | Sarah Fox, Hear in the Gorge Podcast 

This is one of those stories that at first glance doesn’t seem to make any sense. Woody Guthrie is one of the most iconic folk singers in U.S. history. He sang about the Dust Bowl, he sang about the Great Depression, he wrote songs about what life was like for the common, everyday American.

And in the middle of it all, he spent one month in the Pacific Northwest. And in 30 days, he wrote 26 songs promoting dams on the Columbia River. And the government paid him to do it.

Which makes for quite a story. Feisty folk singer, the federal government, and songs about dams. But here’s the thing.

No one was telling it. Because for a long time, this story was lost. Most folks didn’t even know it existed.

And then four decades after it happened, a government employee in Portland, Oregon stumbled upon something he never expected to find. And then the story sprang back to life. You’re listening to Here in the Gorge, stories that will change your sense of place.

I’m Sarah Fox, and in this episode, we learn what happened when Woody Guthrie came to the Pacific Northwest and went to work for the government. And what it means to have a bit of our history in his words.

Sunken Forest | Dr. Rick Chromey, Lewis and Clark Historian 

Well, my name is Dr. Rick Cromey. I’m a Lewis and Clark historian. Well, let’s talk about another portion of the river where Lewis and Clark are going to have a scream and halt to their story.

The Cascades were much faster water, and when they got into this particular nick in the gorge, they ran into, I think it was almost a mile of Cascades, according to the journals. Part of this was due to a landslide that occurred around the 15th or 16th century, geologists again proposed. Off of Table Mountain, the whole mountain just fell, and there was a great big dam, a land dam that dammed up the Columbia River.

It created a water backup, a reservoir for 35, 40 miles that covered over everything and explains that sunken forest that Lewis and Clark saw, which we don’t even see today. It’s so far underwater because of Bonneville Dam. We don’t even know it exists, but they actually experienced this sunken forest.

I’m guessing some of the trees actually came up out of the water still. They were seeing that type of phenomenon, but the water eventually ate its way through this dam because water will eventually do that. It got through, and the Native Americans thought that this was a great little bridge of the gods.

It was something that was given to them by their gods, and so they walked across it, and it became a nice little land bridge. This is also the place where they saw something they’d never seen before. Well, they’re going to portage this particular part of the Cascades, and they have what they call the Great Chute.

They literally unloaded their canoes to get them past these rapids, according to the journals. They go over some rocks that are eight or ten feet high, and it’s most fatiguing business, says Patrick Gass, one of their sergeants. He says, we got over two of them.

It’s a distance of about a mile, and the fall of the water was about 25 feet in distance. Of course, they portaged the Great Chute. The portage itself was 1,000 yards, so think of that.

You have to pull everything out, including the canoes. Well, the canoes, they pretty much kept in the water. They just put them down, but sometimes they’d lose canoes that way.

Occasionally, they’d even try to carry those around, but they took everything out, portaged them around. It was almost 1,000 yards of a portage there, so that’s one of the longer ones. They have four large canoes that they’re working with.

They do take it through the rocks using poles placed across them, and that’s how they get them down. It says three of these large canoes had injuries to them, which basically means they were damaged, so they had a delay at that point in trying to get there.

Old Portage Railroad | Pat Barry, Former Park Ranger and Visitor Center Manager, Bonneville Dam 

My name is Pat Barry and I was the supervisory park ranger for the visitor facilities at Bonneville Dam for 27 years. So one of the one of the nice things about Fort Cascades is there are trail markers that along with the descriptions on the brochure give you an idea of what was there. Because of that 1894 flood and subsequent activity that went through there like you don’t see a lot of tangible evidence of what was there.

There is one thing that I’d like to add and that’s actually two things. One is the remnants of the old portage railroad. The portage railroad was used to really move fish around the rapids down to a lower landing where the fish could be loaded onto vessels to convey them down to the cannery.

So this railroad was in use for quite a while but it was replaced by the one on the Oregon side eventually. So what you can see on the trail is there are some actual wheels of some of those trains and some rails that were preserved and you can actually see those things. They were removed from the site and then they were put back to the site.

It’s not original and authentic but they are the actual rails and the actual wheels from the train. So if you looked at the portage around the whole Cascade Rapids you would start up above the location of Bridge of the Gods and you would portage down below Fort Cascades because those rapids were not impassable but they were very challenging and people did lose their lives as they went through there. Six miles is probably not far off because from up above Bridge of the Gods which is where Fort Luganville was located all the way down to Fort Cascades, again three forts and Fort Raines in the middle.

The difficulty with that particular site, portage railroad site, is that you have to get up. So if you’re in a wheelchair or if you have difficulty climbing hills it’s challenging.

McNatt’s Grave | Pat Barry, Former Park Ranger and Visitor Center Manager, Bonneville Dam

My name is Pat Barry and I was the supervisory park ranger for the visitor facilities at Bonneville Dam for 27 years. All right, so the other place I wanted to talk about is the last site, assuming you go clockwise around the loop, it’s called McNatt’s grave. And Thomas McNatt was an entrepreneur.

He had a hotel, he had a stable, his gravestone was there. And there’s some discussion about whether he or not he’s buried there, but it was like a little family plot. And the only stone that was found there was his gravestone.

And it was broken and we ended up taking it up to a guy in Goldendale, Washington, who was good at restoring gravestones. So he restored it. He had some theories about the symbolism on the gravestone itself.

And he built that aluminum frame and a new base to make it safe and more bamboo resistant than perhaps it would have been. Because that’s always a concern in a site like this. You have people out there and sometimes things get vandalized or taken or whatever.

So it’s firmly mounted there, but he was part of the history of this site.