THE SPRING SNOWMAN MIGRATION @ HAMILTON MT.

Sagging rainclouds took a sideways glance at me and pointed wet threatening fingers in my direction but ended up not touching me as I headed up the Hamilton Mt. Trail. In the distance I could see the Bonneville Dam stretched out across the Columbia, and as I gained elevation, this particular fruit of my species’ technology began to take on the semblance of building blocks - a child’s toys cluttering the living room (but never-the-less generating relatively cheap energy).

At about a mile and a quarter in, the trail meanders near a couple of waterfalls. Evidently, ultra eco-sensitivity has resulted in the construction of a nature trail that effectively keeps hikers from touching the water. Either that or trail manufacturers have been forced to build safety barriers geared to the public’s lowest common intelligence denominator. The end result is an ambiance that harkens to comparisons with standing in line at Disneyland.
At Pool of the Winds, the cascading water pours into a carved rock chamber of indeterminate shape, indeterminate because…well there’s a rail in front of it blocking access…

…but also, the volume of water pouring into the enclosed rock chamber (at least on this trip bracketed by rainfall) appears to create a pressure differential that pushes air out with considerable velocity (hence the descriptive name) making it unpleasant to stick your head around the corner (especially if you’re fond of the baseball cap you’re wearing).

Rodney Falls

Rodney Falls again

Walking through the woods on a nice trail, it suddenly struck me just how nice trails are. I noticed the densely packed trees functioning as warp threads for tightly woven ‘filling’ threads of under and over brush.

Without a trail, it would probably take someone capable of bench-pressing 400 pounds to have a chance at breaking a path through the forest.

However tall Hamilton Mt. is turns out to be just about where the viable snow-level was.

On nearby Table Mountain, snow gives the impression that it is retreating upward.

When snow melts and retreats to higher altitudes, there is always a danger that animated snowmen who are not paying attention may be trapped on small mountaintops unable to reach the permanent snowfields of the guardian peaks. Such a fate may have befallen the two snowmen marooned on the basalt outcropping pictured above. I admired how the two snow-people stoically accepted their fate. They seemed to stand in awe before the return of the color green. They stood side by side until the very end, seemingly confident in their belief that all snowmen will one day be resurrected when the temperature drops below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

Click on image for slightly larger version

On rare occasions, it is even now still possible to witness the massive snowman migration that heralds the end of winter in these parts. Note the powder kicked up by thousands of stampeding snowmen.

Pictures on the Verge of Spring

Lower Lacamas Creek – Below the Lower Falls – 03-08-08

Pothole Falls – Lower Lacamas Creek – 03-08-08

A Rivulet of Lower Lacamas Creek – Under the Bridge – 03-08-08

Same Rivulet 03-08-08

Pluralism – Lower Lacamas Creek Trail – 03-08-08

Delivering Leaflets – Lower Lacamas Creek Trail – 03-08-08

The Point – Kelley Point Park – 03-01-08

A Single Cloud – Kelley Point Park – 03-01-08

Detail of a Tree – Smith and Bybee Lakes – 03-02-08

Awakening Iris – Smith and Bybee Lakes – 03-02-08

Puffy Thing with Bug – Smith & Bybee Lakes – 03-02-08

Ravaged Time – Lost Creek – Oregon Coast – 02-24-08

Time Capsule – Lost Creek – Oregon Coast – 02-24-08

Time Traveler – Lost Creek – Oregon Coast – 02-24-08

Three Tenors – Newport Bay – 02-24-08

PARANOIA on the TRIPLE FALLS TRAIL

Ever since I trespassed into a mysterious hidden clearing on the Wilson River Trail, I’ve experienced the eerie feeling of being watched, or perhaps even of being followed. It’s the same kind of feeling I had when I crossed the renegade cows on the Bird Creek Meadow Trail near Mt. Adams.

I shared my uneasiness with Monkey-cam and hinted that I could really use some company on the Triple Falls Trail in the Columbia River gorge, but he was still miffed about being treated like an imaginary friend.

“Why don’t you hang out with your corporeal friends?” he pantomimed, knowing full well that I don’t really have any.

I guess he must have seen some transient expression of pain flicker across my inexpert poker face and he relented a little bit. He indicated that he wouldn’t be hiking with me this week, but he reassured me that he would begin negotiations with the cows to see if he could work out some kind of truce for the upcoming spring hiking season. I interpreted his goodwill gesture as a sign that, while tested, our friendship had not yet been damaged beyond repair.

Fortunately, a colleague at work expressed an interest in learning how better to use her camera and it worked out that she and her husband met me at the Triple Falls Trailhead early Saturday morning.

Upper Horsetail Falls

f/3.5 1/100th ISO 1600 -------- f/3.5 1/13th ISO 200 -------f/22 2.5 sec. ISO 200

It was kind of an awkward situation for me since Monkey-cam takes most of the pictures for the Blog, but I tried to remember all the things he had taught me and pass them on as if I were the photography expert.

“See this end with the round circular tube on it?” I asked, pointing toward what I supposed was my camera’s lens, “That’s the side you want to point at the thing you want to take a picture of.”

My colleague and her husband had never seen Triple Falls before, and didn’t know quite what to expect. They were fixated on the ‘Triple’ part of Triple Falls’ name. Since we had passed Horsetail Falls at the Trailhead, and Upper Horsetail Falls shortly afterwards, they assumed that we would soon come across a third waterfall to consummate their expectations for a triple.

“Is this the third falls?” They would speculate.

View from the bridge overlooking Oneonta Creek

Eventually, we reached this viewpoint where it became evident that Triple Falls was a single waterfall split (or segmented) into three. The graphic depiction of a single entity splitting into three immediately reminded me of the puzzle of the threefold nature of God which some faith traditions address in doctrines of ‘The Trinity’.






In my Lutheran tradition, The Trinity (The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit) is often symbolically represented by a triangle, its three points all equal in importance yet all part of one object.






Variations of the symbolic triangle attempt to emphasize the distinctness of each component of the trinity while at the same time showing their unity.






Long before the First Council of Nicaea (long before the status of the divinity of Christ was hammered out by early Christians) other more arcane symbols predominated in the religious landscape…but I digress.





We split up and explored the area above Triple Falls. I stood alone high atop the falls trying to unlock the key to capturing a sense of vertigo in a two dimensional image (a goal that continues to elude me). Peering through my viewfinder on that precarious perch, my legs involuntarily trembling, I suddenly felt an icy chill in the air and the hairs on the back of my neck snapped to attention. I whirled around to see if perhaps my colleague or her husband were sneaking up on me…but nobody was there. I would have chalked it up to my paranoid imagination except for one fact. The birds had stopped chirping and all was quiet save for the dull roar of the falling water.
Not frightened exactly, I determined to rejoin my hiking party.



I rejoined my colleague and her husband further up the trail. They stood perplexed before a curious sign. “What’s an endotherm?” I asked after reading the sign.

“Essentially,” my colleague began, “we are.” She had considerable biological expertise.

I stood with my blank expression and waited for more.

“Endotherms are warm-blooded animals able to maintain a constant body temperature regardless of the temperature of the environment.” She added.

The sign didn’t make any sense, so we ignored it and continued walking along the trail





Here and there in the shade were still considerable accumulations of snow.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon that occurred where-ever snow-clods (or perhaps pine-cones) fell out of trees onto snow slopes of a particular steepness. In snow of just the right consistency, the clods would roll down-slope gathering more mass and speed, becoming ever larger, ultimately spontaneously generating into large snow-wheels.






I wondered what other forms might be capable of spontaneous generation.






And then suddenly in a garden of rocks, I experienced another confrontation with mystery.

“It’s a non-indigenous carrot.” My colleague noted.

Like I said, she had considerable biological expertise.




Of course none of us were scared by a misplaced carrot. Even so, the touch of the shade of the surrounding, towering trees began to feel like a brush with claustrophobia. Maybe we should not have disregarded the cautionary sign. While not retreating exactly, I have to admit we felt much relieved to break out into the open again on our way out of the wilderness.



As we passed the mouth of Oneonta gorge, I noticed this graphic warning sign adapted from a photo of me that Monkey-cam took that time last year when I tried to wade up Oneonta Creek in the neoprene bib overalls that I borrowed from Bob.




I wondered what lost world lay hidden behind the formidable log jam at the mouth of the gorge.







The old Oneonta tunnel makes a convenient place to deposit excess snow form snow plow operations. Evidently, state workers with a sense of humor decorated this pile of melting snow to resemble a snowman in prison.

“That’s curious,” said my colleague, “This gate locks from the inside.”