Eye of Idaho.com  

South across the grassy fields of Camas Prairie, up fir and pine timbered slopes to the red-bouldered slot at highway pass, you suddenly break over the top. Before you lies a very different world from Camas Prairie, and the unexpected panorama takes your breath away. You are looking out over the vast rugged canyons carved by Chapman and White Bird Creeks and the Salmon River. From here it's a steep, crooked, gorgeous descent, down the highway grade to White Bird junction. Only the truckers hate the 2,700' drop in eight miles.

The two main towns in Salmon River Canyon are White Bird and Riggins. The 27-miles between them comprises the only "populated" area along the lower 200-miles of the river. The Lower Salmon, the 55 miles downstream from White Bird to its confluence with the Snake, is wild river all the way. And from Riggins, 250 miles upstream to its source, the Salmon is called The River Of No Return. It is one of the few remaining undammed rivers anywhere.

Geologists think in such time frames. A few million years here, a few there, and pretty soon you’re talking real time. It makes some of the things I worry about seem pretty insignificant.

Awhile back Jane and I dropped off two of our grandchildren at the Spokane airport. We had a great time with them but did high-fives as the plane took off. Now our kids could undo any damage we had perpetrated on their kids. On the way back we stopped in Moscow to visit with John Bond, the geologist who gave us some ideas about where we might find water. Nice man, John, and thoroughly familiar with Salmon River geology. Forty years ago he helped map the White Bird area with the USGS.

I listened for over an hour while John compressed the events that had formed the landscape we now see around White Bird. It is a fascinating story that he told in terms even I could understand…

About 250 million years ago a very large continent started to break up. One split separated our eastern seaboard from the western edge of Europe, eventually creating the Atlantic Ocean between them. Before that you could have walked from New York to London. So there became a North American continental plate, afloat on the Earth’s molten mantle and speeding west at an inch or two per year. Its western edge, including that beach of ours, overrode and submerged the Pacific plate, pushing and grinding over it. Massive forces metamorphosed the rock and rearranged the countryside around White Bird. During the next 235 million years, at least two mountain building episodes continued the transformation. The landscape now had a relief of 1,000-5,000 feet. Rivers flowed through it to the retreating sea.

By about 30 million years ago our beach had become dry land, far from the sea. Untold geologic events had moved the Pacific Coast to near its present location.

Wind and water did their thing and Earth forces modified the topography some, but local geology remained fairly stable until about 15 million years ago. That’s when fissures appeared between Spokane and Pullman, Washington. They ran about a hundred miles south, toward Enterprise, Oregon. Molten mantle material extruded up and out over the surface from as deep as 50,000 feet. Flow after flow of lava moved over the land, each layer filling a little more of the river valleys and creek bottoms. Finally basalt overtopped most of the ancient peaks. A cross-section of one of the old basalt-covered mountains is visible across the river from our place. Only a few of the higher early mountains protruded above the uppermost new lava layers. Cottonwood Butte is one.

These periodic flows of lava covered the entire Columbia River basin, including most of central and eastern Washington. Some of the flows pushed west as far as the mouth of the Columbia at Astoria. To the east the new plateau stretched all the way to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Rivers meandered over the now flat land in wildly winding patterns, cutting their way through the rock and depositing sediment in eddies and at their banks. Tearing down and building at the same time. Water soaked into basalt and ran between layers, perhaps eventually making its way up our well and into our coffee cups on its next swing through the water cycle.

Evidence of geologic activity is everywhere around here. Remnants of the lava flows still display their edges in the layers you see on canyon walls above the Salmon River. Local faults shifted the basaltic strata, lifting them at one side and dropping them at the other. You see the tilted patterns from this process at road cuts and on canyon walls. Standing on a layer of basalt at Free Use Road, just east of White Bird Creek, you can see the same stratum across the battlefield to the west, topping the hill above White Bird grade; then still higher west of the Salmon and some 2,000 feet above it.

Wind and water worked the land. They wore it away and patiently carved it into new shapes. Sometimes large blocks of earth became unstable and slid off into valleys, like the big landslide in White Bird Canyon, visible from the highway halfway up the grade.

White Bird itself once lay at the bottom of a 150-foot deep lake, formed when the river was dammed by a fault which ran through the slot where Hoots Cafe is now.

At a cut along old highway 95, about two miles north of White Bird, you can break off tiles of soft white “rock.” Between the tiles leaf fossils separate the old lake bed sediment layers, maybe one tile per season, like tree rings. I imagine roiling spring torrents carrying whitish silt from somewhere upstream and depositing it in eddies as the current slows. Summer wanes and the water clears and recedes, preparing to accept autumn gifts from the trees.

The Earth hasn’t moved much around here in the last 5,000 years. But hang around another few million...you can bet it will. When I begin to believe in the importance of my own time, I should think like a geologist. Humility has to come easier in the presence of great historic rocks that reduce the three-million-year Age of Man to an eye blink.

When I walk our land now I still see it as rocky range land tipped up on end, but John Bond’s story has drugged my sense of our place in Idaho. On clear evenings up here on the canyon wall, when my mind wanders I can believe that I hear waves sloshing, feel beach rocks beneath my feet, smell kelp whips rotting. I can believe I see ocean sunsets from our back yard. Good drugs, John.