North Bonneville Discovery Trail

Town Relocation Part 1 | Russel Fox, Retired Professor Evergreen State College 

Welcome to the town of North Bonneville. Where you are standing is a special place that has an interesting history. Without significant community activism and participation in the relocation of this town, where you are standing would not exist.

I’m Russell Fox, a former professor at the Evergreen State College, and I’m going to share a story about this town with you. To start, North Bonneville was not the first settlement here. Native Americans established communities here to provide portage through and around the rapids to facilitate the exchange of goods among tribes on both sides of the Cascades Mountains.

Early European explorers and traders did the same. The town of North Bonneville was initially established as a construction town for the building of the Bonneville Dam in the 1930s. Upon completion of the dam and powerhouse in 1938, Congress also authorized the construction of a second power plant adjacent to this new facility.

However, this wasn’t acted upon until the late 1960s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planned to open a new channel of the river on the Washington side, where the town of North Bonneville was located. The residents and businesses of North Bonneville had to be relocated. The Evergreen State College, local residents, planning firms, and others worked to relocate the town, which was inaugurated, where you are standing, on July 4, 1978.

If you would like to hear a more detailed version of the relocation story, please visit the Hamilton Discovery Trail.

Sasquatch Sightings | 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. I worked for the Wind River District in the Mount Adams District.

According to witness statements that I’ve taken along the Columbia River Gorge within this trail systems, the size of the Sasquatches can range from little infant size that are about a foot and a half to two feet tall all the way up to 12 foot tall and they could be a range of different colors from a light brown to a dark color. Just like us, Sasquatches age and when they do, their hair also becomes silver or white and then associated with the brown or black. I get a lot of reports of them multicolored.

On potential Sasquatch sightings, people go through a lot of mental thinking of what they’re looking at. A lot of the reports are associated to bears because bears are the same build, dark in color and about almost the same size when they’re on all fours. What differentiates between a Bigfoot and a Sasquatch report is as people continue to view it and watch it stand up on two legs, which bears do as well, but then they notice the human form of it as it’s standing still because they have long arms down to their knees at times, long legs depending on the height that they could be.

The legs could be five and a half feet long, as tall as an average person. When that mode goes from, oh, I’m looking at a bear to that’s not a bear, that’s a Sasquatch. Then the event changes totally and then people are fixated on what they’re looking at.

When you do take your eye off of it, be aware that when you lose focus of what you’re trying to view and then turn away just for a second and then turn to look back, it could be gone.

Bumblebees | Rich Hatfield, Senior Conservation Biologist, Xerces Society | www.xerces.org

Hi, my name is Rich Hatfield. I’m a senior conservation biologist for the Xerces Society, a non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon, dedicated to protecting the 90 percent of wildlife that most people never think about. The invertebrates are animals without a backbone, the bees, butterflies, beetles, mollusks, and fireflies of the world.

My specific focus is on bumblebees, the fuzzy, buzzy animals you find in your backyards, gardens, parks, and in the flowery meadows that fill the Columbia River Gorge. I wasn’t always interested in invertebrates and bumblebees, but I have always wanted to help make the world a better place and knew that I wanted to practice conservation. I started working on bumblebees 25 years ago because of their ties to pollination and to the food we eat.

You’ve probably all heard that one out of three bites of food we eat can be attributed to pollinators, which is true. I figured that if we could show decision makers how important bumblebees were to the economy, then we might be able to influence positive change that would help protect them. While I still know that to be true and continue to make that argument when appropriate, which has positively influenced policy, I’ve also come to appreciate so much more about them and their contributions to the world around us.

The take-home there is that bumblebees and other pollinators are not just feeding the human population, but they are working to keep the vast majority of wildlife on the planet fed and sheltered. Most animals, from the small mammals that scurry through the forests and meadows and the songbirds that fill those habitats with song, all the way up to the bears and cats that sit atop the food chain, they all depend on plants for either food or shelter, and oftentimes both. Without bumblebees and other pollinators, many plant-based foods and the structure and shelter those plants provide just wouldn’t exist.

So as you walk through the trails today and observe the beautiful wildflowers, and hopefully the bees visiting them, and as you hear the songbirds and see signs of the large mammals that roam these beautiful lands, know that all of them have a pollinator to thank for their existence in the world. You can do the same as you eat your picnic lunch or while you sit down to dinner tonight. Pollinators structure the way our world looks, and they continue to help our environment function.

In return, you can thank them by planting a few native plants at home, choosing not to use insecticides, and by purchasing your food from producers that practice sustainable agriculture that help protect the bees doing this important work. Enjoy your walk, and I hope this audio snippet enhances your experience.

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 these 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.

Sasquatch Fishing | Mel Skahan, Klickitat Tribal Member

Hello, my name is Mel Skahan.

Welcome to the North Bonneville Trail. There’s a history of salmon collection down along the river in this area called Fort Raines and there’s a lot of stories coming from Fort Raines of being visited at night. Sasquatches coming down and to the scaffolds at night and then plucking the salmon out of the nets that are set out during the evening hours as the enrolled members, natives, had come down here to check their nets and reset them and they would come down to those scaffold areas and would see sasquatches on the bank and then one trying to pull the salmon out of the nets.

Up on the mountainous side there have been stories of them being seen in the Hamilton Cliff area down below the cliffs during the mid-afternoon and towards the evening hours and there’s no developments back, well there was no developments back when I used to maintain the Pacific Crest Trail which is part of this system as well and we used to clean the trail from the Columbia River all the way up into what was the Wind River Ranger Station and there were times where as we were working we would hear wood knocks that we associated to woodpeckers, we would hear low rumbling growls which we attributed to bears but while you’re out on this trail keep a close ear out for those noises because the wood knocks and those low rumble growls are usually associated to sasquatches.

Local Butterflies | Candace Fallon, Senior Conservation Biologist, The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation 

Butterflies may well be among the most loved of all insects. Often large and showy and, perhaps most importantly, never biting or stinging, butterflies have captured the human imagination for centuries. Researchers have found that butterflies evolved about 101 million years ago from the ancestors of nocturnal herbivorous moths.

This means the first butterflies were flitting around in the mid-Cretaceous period, making them contemporaries of the dinosaurs. Today, there are about 20,000 different species worldwide, with roughly 800 found in North America. Here in Washington state, that number is closer to 155 species.

Together with moths, butterflies are members of the Lepidoptera family. Lepidoptera comes from the Greek for scaly wing, in recognition of the thousands of tiny overlapping scales that cover each wing. Look closely at the next butterfly you see and you’ll find that these scales look very similar to the overlapping shingles on a roof.

When we think of butterflies, we often think of open sunny areas with lots of flowers. Like all insects, butterflies are cold-blooded, meaning that they need the sun to warm them up before they can become active. If you’ve lucked out with a nice day, look around and see what’s blooming.

Are there any butterflies visiting those blossoms? Butterflies visit flowers to sip nectar. They do this with a specialized hollow tongue or feeding tube known as a proboscis, which is usually coiled under their head and unfurls when they land. The length of a butterfly’s proboscis can vary depending on the types of flowers it likes to visit.

For those that visit long tubular flowers, the tongue can be quite long, up to or even greater than the length of its body. Imagine if your tongue fell all the way to your feet when you went to take a drink. Nectar isn’t the only thing butterflies will eat.

In some regions, they may also feed on rotting fruit or tree sap. In a behavior known as puddling, males of some species will also gather in large groups on damp soil, along puddles, or even on scat to gather additional minerals. Because butterflies visit so many flowers as they seek out nectar, they are helpful pollinators for a wide variety of plants.

Roughly 80% of flowering plants rely on animals for pollination, and butterflies can play an important role in this process. Despite the nearly universal appreciation for butterflies, they still face numerous threats, including habitat loss, climate change, and pesticide use, and populations of many species are in decline. Conservation efforts, such as providing host and nectar plant species, eliminating pesticide use, and restoring habitat, are crucial to ensuring the survival of these beautiful insects for generations to come.

As you wander the trail, keep an eye out for some of our local butterfly species, from the large yellow and black anis swallowtails, to woodland skippers so small that they often get overlooked. On a good spring or summer day, you can easily see a handful of species, including dusky wings, tortoise shells, orange tips, morning cloak, or a wide variety of shimmering iridescent blues. Thanks so much for listening, and happy butterflying! I’m Candace Fallon, a senior conservation biologist at the Xerces Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of invertebrates and their habitats.

For more information on how to protect and provide for butterflies, check out our website at www.xerces.org.

Birds of North Bonneville | Wilson Cady, Board Member, Vancouver Audubon Society 

On the north side of the Columbia River in the Gorge, all the land slopes southward from Mount Adams to the Columbia River, and the rivers flow from north to the south to the Columbia River. It allows birds from all elevation habitats to freely move east and west through the Gorge and populate any spot that’s suitable for them. From high spots like Larch Mountain in Clark County, you can look eastward and see the grasslands of Goldendale.

So a bird flying a thousand feet higher than you can see exactly where they’re going to go through with no problems at all, and they follow those routes. With this lack of barriers in the Columbia Gorge for passage for anything, birds from the east side and the west side intermingle in the Columbia Gorge because there’s nothing to stop them from moving up or downstream. So you end up with any little pockets of habitat will hold a species that’s from a different area.

At North Bonneville, the grasslands of Hamilton, Strawberry Island will attract western meadow larks and great catbird and other species that usually associate with the east of the mountains. And the canyon wrens that nest on Beacon Rock are far out of their normal habitat in the dry side of the mountains, nesting in an area that gets 100 inches of rain a year. I’m Wilson Cady.

I’m a third generation Skamania County resident, a retired forest products worker. I’m a founding member of the Vancouver Audubon Society.

I Want Mussels | Emilie Blevins, Senior Conservation Biologist, The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation 

One of the special animals you may encounter in creeks and rivers here in the Columbia River Gorge is the freshwater mussel. Have you heard of them before? They are similar to other animals you may be more familiar with, like razor clams or the mussels you eat. But freshwater mussels are also quite different.

They burrow into the bottom of the creek where they spend their life filtering freshwater to breathe, feed, and reproduce. Each species of freshwater mussel can live in the bottom of the creek or in the Columbia River for decades. In the case of the western pearl shell, one of three species you might encounter, they can live over 100 years.

Freshwater mussels are also special because they use a fish to reproduce. That is, a mother mussel releases her babies into the water where their two little valves snap hold onto a fish, like a salmon or a trout. The mussel baby spends two to three weeks on the fish before it transforms into a young juvenile mussel and drops into the bottom of the creek where it will live out the rest of its life filter feeding.

Because mussels need native fish, clean water, and good habitat, many of them are endangered or threatened. But they are incredibly important for the benefits they provide us and nature. By filtering water, they also improve water quality, their habitat for other species, especially their shells, and because they can help capture food from the flowing water, they also support all the bugs that become food for the fish.

When you’re walking along streams, keep your eyes open for the mother of pearl shine of a freshwater mussel shell. For more information on freshwater mussels, visit the website of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation at xerces.org.

Bridge of the Gods | Dr. Rick Chromey, Lewis and Clark Historian

Well, my name is Dr. Rick Cromey. I’m a Lewis and Clark historian. At the Cascade Locks, there’s a place called Bridge of the Gods.

That particular feature was something that, you know, geologists figured now we look at it and it’s dated to maybe around 1500 AD. A massive landslide happened, and you can see it up there on Table Mountain, how the mountain just peeled off, and it created this natural dam right there across the Columbia, and it supposedly backed it up. Nobody was there to tell you for sure, but it backed up the water for, they think, maybe 35-40 miles.

Well, it’s very possible that this sunken forest that they were seeing was actually the result of that particular collapse of the mountain. And Bridge of the Gods, of course, was the result of the water eventually eating its way through and creating a hole in the bottom of this dam, this land dam. And the natives all thought it was a gift from the gods.

They thought the gods have given us a way to walk from Oregon over to Washington. Of course, they didn’t call it Oregon or Washington. It was a way to walk across this Grand River, and they called it a bridge, a bridge from the gods.

And of course, we still do today, although we have a much more steel-reinforced bridge to go across.

Cataclysmic Floods | 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 coolies 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 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

How To Be A Birder | Emily Martin, slow hiking guide, and Wilson Cady, Board member, Vancouver Audubon Society 

I’m Emily Martin and I’m going to share three online birding resources with you that have been recommended to me by Wilson Cady, a local bird enthusiast. The first resource is called Birdcast and it’s the migration period radar images of the birds in flight. It will give you the number of birds passing over each county in the United States.

It will tell you the elevation, the speed, and the direction of the birds. It’s very handy to let you know when you’re having a good migration period. The second resource is the Merlin app, which is a bird identification app that’s based on both image and sound.

You can upload a photograph or an audio file into Merlin and it will try to identify the bird species. It’s pretty good at getting most of the birds, but be careful. I would use it more as a suggestion of what birds are out there, but not necessarily as an identification.

Identifying is what you have to do. The app can tell you that the bird is out there, but you need to look for it, find it, and confirm what it is. The final resource is called eBird.

eBird is a bird listing program where anyone can enter their checklists of the birds they’ve seen at any spot and those are compiled into a huge database. With that database, you can look at your county and you can see what has ever been seen there and reported, where it was, when it was, and you can also find out how many times they’ve been seen in a county. Some birders check this every day and check the recent reports to see what is out there at the moment.

This way you can actually track what is moving through the gorge. I hope you enjoy these three resources and enjoy your time on this hike.

One Of A Kind Wonder | Kevin Gorman, Executive Director, Friends of 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. It can be very challenging, but we believe protecting this place for generations to come is worth it.

We hope you agree.

Town Relocation Part 2 | Russel Fox, Retired Professor Evergreen State College

  The trails you are walking and biking on today were designed by residents, including children, from the town of North Bonneville in the early 1970s. When the town was required to move with the building of the second powerhouse, residents got intimately involved in the planning of their relocation. In 1971, the town of North Bonneville was a quiet, sleepy town of fewer than 500 residents and a budget of less than $50,000.

This was the year residents learned that the second powerhouse construction project would require their relocation to somewhere. Being patriotic citizens who appreciated the need for, and potential for, additional electrical power production, the town residents were not necessarily opposed to the project. But when informed that the core interpretation of the recently passed federal relocation law only required the government to compensate and assist individuals so that they could move elsewhere, most of the town’s residents were upset that they were not being identified and considered as a community with a history of relationships with each other and with the local environment.

The town council contacted a new public college, the Evergreen State College, I and my urban planning students came to North Bonneville to meet with the town council in the fall of 1972. The town council and students agreed to have the students live and work in the town side by side with residents. By the end of the school year, the students and participating residents had produced a 230-page three-ring binder relocation notebook that the town council and many residents had already understood and digested.

They were well prepared for negotiations with the Army Corps of Engineers, including having mobilized state and local agencies and elected officials’ support to insist that they be relocated as a town rather than as individual households. They even got congressional support in the form of federal authorization that required the Corps to relocate the community as a new town. The Corps responded by presenting a proposal to build a new town further down the river, out of the construction area, about 30 miles away.

The town respectfully listened to the Corps’ proposal but rejected it. They realized it was very important to them to stay close to their original town site. The town requested that the planning and engineering firm hired by the Corps work closely with them.

The town residents and even the children were asked to map their existing patterns of walking and bicycling as they engaged with friends in the regional environment. These conceptual maps became the design foundation for the trails in the new town of North Bonneville. The new town was inaugurated on July 4, 1978.

It was a great celebration. I’m Russell Fox, a former professor at the Evergreen State College. Thanks for listening.

Ape Cat | James Szubski, Margie’s Outdoor Store

The Columbia River Gorge is one of the most active paranormal hotspots in North America, and that includes the Klickitat Trail, where you are right now. My name is James Shupski. In less than three years, we have received more than 300 reports of strange things afoot here in the Columbia River Gorge.

Bigfoot encounters, UFO contacts, ghost experiences, and sightings of a mysterious creature unique to the gorge, the Klickitat Ape Cat. In fact, the second reported encounter with a Klickitat Ape Cat occurred not far from here, a short way up Klickitat Canyon. Since then, we have received more than 100 reports.

All of the reports describe a large, muscular cat with black or very dark brown fur and a long black tail. About half of the reports describe a creature of enormous size, some say up to four feet tall at the shoulder. That’s way larger than the largest cat living on Earth today, the tiger.

There is only one creature in the fossil record that matches the reported size and weight of the Klickitat Ape Cat. It is called the Panther Atrox, a North American lion that lived in Washington State during the Ice Age. It’s said to have gone extinct 10,000 years ago.

Oddly, a handful of reports say the creature has a face that looks similar to a monkey. Mainstream science does not recognize any large black cats living in Washington State, and they say that no cougars have black fur. The truth is, the Klickitat Ape Cat remains a mystery.

No one can say for certain what it is or where it came from. The only way to figure that out is for folks like yourself to file a paranormal report at Margie’s Outdoor Store when you have a strange encounter in the gorge.