<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The late Tom Hartzell and I were having a discussion about the Pacific Northwest in the lunchroom one day.\u00a0 Tom mentioned he and his wife would be vacationing there in the near future, so I took the opportunity to ask him a little favor.\u00a0 I said, \u201cWell, if you happen to find an ashtray made from Mount St. Helens ash, buy it for me and I will pay you back.\u201d\u00a0 Tom raised an eyebrow:\u00a0 \u201cYou don\u2019t smoke.\u00a0 Why would you need an ashtray?\u201d\u00a0 I explained;\u00a0 one of the videos I showed in my Geography\/Earth Science classes showed how some enterprising craftsman turned the voluminous ash fall from Mt. St. Helens\u2019 1980 eruption into a cottage industry.\u00a0 For most, the choking layers of ash that blanketed much of the region were a nuisance, but this group of artisans figured out how to press souvenir ashtrays from glass created by melting the ash.\u00a0 When the molten glass was pressed in a custom made mold, it came out with a replica of the volcanic mountain in the center.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When Tom got back, he apologized for not scoring me an ashtray:\u00a0 \u201cBut I did find sculptures made out of pressed volcanic ash.\u00a0 I hope this will do.\u201d\u00a0 When I retired, this is the one special artifact from my case of geological curiosities that came home with me and it is now proudly displayed on our piano.\u00a0 It depicts an otter laying on its back cracking open a clam or oyster shell.\u00a0 Tom wouldn\u2019t let me pay him for this sculpture that was created by the Evergreen Trading Company in Seattle, Washington (\u201cHandcrafted from real volcanic ash\u201d it says on the logo).\u00a0 This Mt. St. Helens sculpture is a favorite memory piece from my teaching days.\u00a0 While I am still half heartedly looking for a Mt. St. Helens ash tray (I still don\u2019t smoke but they look kind of cool), but I am perfectly content with the ash otter sculpture.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Oddly enough, this isn\u2019t the first time I was gifted with stuff from the Mt. St. Helens eruption.\u00a0 My old friend Mitch has lived in the Portland, Oregon area since the early 1970s and for a while, his folks lived there as well.\u00a0 Mitch and I were quite the pair in high school and spent so much time at each other\u2019s homes, we referred to our parents as Ma and Pa I and II, depending on whose abode we were holding court.\u00a0 Ma and Pa II had a grand view of Mt. St. Helens from their living room window until the day of the eruption.\u00a0 Mitch said when they could not see the distant mountain as it was shrouded in gray that morning.\u00a0 The layer of ash covering their driveway was a good hint of what had just happened.\u00a0 They scooped up a couple of baggies of the fine gray dust and mailed it to me along with numerous newspaper clippings about the event.\u00a0 I never thought about trying to melt it down in the art room kiln, but there probably wasn\u2019t enough to make an ashtray anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When I graduated from NMU in 1975, I treated myself to a trip to Oregon to visit Mitch and his roomie Jack.\u00a0 At that time, they were sharing a townhouse in Lake Oswego just outside of Portland.\u00a0 On days when both Mitch and Jack were at work, I would hike up the hill to the community recreation center to shoot some hoops, take a steam bath (not a sauna, mind you, a true \u2018steam room steam bath\u2019 like in the mobster movies), or to take a dip in their Olympic sized swimming pool.\u00a0 Not being a horse person, I did not take the time to check out the indoor equestrian center they had next to the main complex.\u00a0 It was a kind of ritzy place – did I mention that Bruce Springsteen\u2019s first wife grew up in Lake Oswego?<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When Ma and Pa II sent me the Mt. St. Helens clippings, there was an entire section about volcanic activity in that part of Oregon and Washington state.\u00a0 I always lamented being a Geography teacher who taught students about volcanic activity but had never visited one myself.\u00a0 Scanning the newspaper supplements, I realized I had actually had trod the slopes of a volcano without being aware of it.\u00a0 The community of Lake Oswego is built on the flanks of an ancient cinder cone volcano so each day I walked up the hill to recreate, I was trodding upon a volcano.\u00a0 When I retraced my path on the map included, I further realized that some of the mounds I passed by, over, and through were small secondary cinder cones lining the much larger cone the subdivision was built on.\u00a0 I had to change my volcano lament to \u2018I have never visited an active volcano\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0More recent visits to the WOAS-FM West Coast Bureau in Eugene, Oregon has lengthened my list of volcanic site visits.\u00a0 On my first visit there, we drove to the top of Skinner Butte after\u00a0 seeing pillars of black columnar basalt exposed on one side.\u00a0 These resemble man-made columns but were actually formed deep within the Earth as molten basalt slowly cooled eons ago.\u00a0 Later on that same trip, we climbed Spencer\u2019s Butte just outside of town.\u00a0 With the peak reaching an elevation of 2,058 feet, it was quite a hike to the top and the view was spectacular.\u00a0 This peak is a volcanic feature formed when molten magma pushed through layers of existing sandstone.\u00a0 When the surrounding sandstone layers were eroded away, the harder lava intrusion was left to stand guard over the landscape.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One of the most fascinating volcanic landscapes we have visited required a drive uphill to the east to an area known as the McKenzie Pass.\u00a0 There is a large tourist pull out at the top of the pass as well as a paved path around and up to a stone observatory.\u00a0 The pass sits at an elevation of 5,325 feet from the viewing the area*. One\u2019s first thoughts turn to, \u201cHow on Earth did they manage to build a road through this landscape of broken blocks of volcanic rock?\u201d\u00a0 The road was built on a former wagon trail that follows an earlier footpath, but the scope of the project is still mind boggling.\u00a0 There are places where a wrong step off the walking trail would put one into the bottom of a thirty foot deep crack (of which there are many in this broken, blocky landscape). *The stone viewing observatory is named after Dee Wright, a Forest Service packer and foreman of the CCC construction crew that built the observatory.\u00a0 Made from lava stones, the Dee Wright Observatory sits near the center of the 65 square mile lava flow created by molten rock flowing from the nearby Belknap Crater.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In one direction, there are a couple of low peaks (Belknap Crater and Little Belknap) and farther to the north lies Mount Washington.\u00a0 In the other direction, the snow capped Three Sisters volcanic peaks dominate the southwestern horizon.\u00a0 I remember seeing the Three Sisters in the distance on my first visit to Portland back in 1975, but this was different.\u00a0 They now seemed close enough one could just reach out and touch them.\u00a0 It is a rugged landscape to say the least and no great wonder many pioneers found alternate routes to bypass this rubble field of lava rock.\u00a0 The road is evidence, however, that some intrepid souls decided to hack a route through the heart of the old lava flows thus blazing the way for the current Highway 272.\u00a0 I am not the only one to think the area looked like the surface of the Moon.\u00a0 NASA did indeed use lava flows at this site to train astronauts for future explorations of the lunar surface.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The grand-daddy of all the ancient volcanic features to visit in Oregon is Crater Lake.\u00a0 We took a day trip there from the WOAS-FM West Coast Bureau in Eugene.\u00a0 We made our final approach from Eugene on the Willamette Highway (Rte. 58), State Highway 97 and finally Rte. 138 (the North Umpqua Highway).\u00a0 We turned north on the North Entrance Road which crossed the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail as we neared Crater Lake.\u00a0 The N. Entrance Road crossed a barren area called the Pumice Desert and a grassy meadow where the tree line ended.\u00a0 The open areas had not returned to forest land in the wake of the Mount Mazama eruption.\u00a0 Before it became Crater Lake, there was a stratovolcano we now call Mount Mazama that stood some 12,000 feet tall.\u00a0 The souvenir keychain I purchased at the gift puts Crater Lake\u2019s current elevation at 7,076 feet.\u00a0 A major eruption of Mount Mazama 7,700 years ago didn\u2019t actually blow the top off the mountain like Mt. St. Helen\u2019 eruption.\u00a0 Mount Mazama collapsed to form the caldera in which Crater Lake sits, a lake deep enough to best Lake Superior by a couple of feet.\u00a0 As we crossed this treeless plain, we could see the ridge that forms the northern edge of the crater jutting upward like so many jagged teeth. \u00a0 Some of them reach over 8,000 feet.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We decided to take the most direct route to the Rim Village and followed the Rim Road that parallels the crater\u2019s western edge.\u00a0 Not being familiar with the layout of the Rim Village, we managed to drive past the entry road and halfway to Mazama Village on the southern side of the crater where the Rim Road meets the Crater Lake Highway (Rte. 62).\u00a0 When we finally found a place to turn around, we drove through a road construction site for the second time, eating the dust from a rather long line of cars.\u00a0 Living in a small town with no traffic lights, it was interesting to run into two on the road between Mazama Village and Rim Village.\u00a0 Okay, they were those temporary ones used when road construction closes one lane of a road, but it was still funny to tell people, \u201cI live in a town with no traffic lights but there were two on the road to Crater Lake.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Finding a parking spot was a bit tricky because it was a very busy place.\u00a0 It was worth it, however, as the view from any point on the rim of Crater Lake is a hundred times better than any photo I have ever seen of the park.\u00a0 There were about forty stairs leading down to a \u2018cave\u2019 excavated in the side of the crater where various displays were set up explaining the geology and history of the place.\u00a0 I was a little concerned when we made our way back up the stairs.\u00a0 Halfway to the top, it became apparent I was getting winded.\u00a0 After sitting on a rock wall for a few minutes, it dawned on me:\u00a0 the 7,000 foot elevation was 6,000 feet higher than my normal elevation back home and the thinner air was the culprit.\u00a0 Interestingly enough, both Eugene, OR and Ontonagon, MI have close to the same 600 foot elevation above sea level so hiking around in Eugene was no problem at all (that is my normal elevation).\u00a0 I had a similar experience the first time I visited Boulder, Colorado but it only took a few days to acclimate.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Like the rest of the tourists, we pulled off at several different places to take in the view.\u00a0 The Rim Road is closed part of the year due to the immense snowfall so we were not surprised to find patches of snow still hanging on in August.\u00a0 We refrained from getting into a snowball fight like the bus load of Boy Scouts did at Rim Village, but we could not resist a photo op standing on a pile of snow in our shorts and tennis shoes.\u00a0 There are boat tours one can take from the north rim, but after struggling with forty stairs, I had no desire to descend a mile long trail into the crater.\u00a0 It would have been interesting, but the climb up to the parking lot afterward would not have been fun.\u00a0 We likewise resisted the urge to hike to the top of Garfield Peak near the Rim Village as we watched the tiny people inching their way up toward the 8,060 foot summit.\u00a0 With my trusty <\/span>Oregon Atlas<\/span><\/i> in hand we set off back to Eugene after one last stop along the Rim not too far from\u00a0 the boat excursion parking lot was located.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Having an atlas along for the trip gave me ample time to look for other places I would like to visit in the future.\u00a0 I had done the same thing when we had visited the McKenzie Pass and ended up in the town of Sisters for lunch.\u00a0 Instead of retracing our route home via the Pass, we took a loop to the north along U.S. Highway 20 (a route known as the McKenzie Pass – Santiam Pass Scenic Byway).\u00a0 Not far from Sisters, Black Butte is hard to miss as it rises to some 6436 feet.\u00a0 Like Mount Mazama, Black Butte is an extinct stratovolcano that last erupted in the Pleistocene Era, some 1.4 million years ago.\u00a0 The atlas shows there is a road that connects to a trail closer to the top where a fire lookout ground house stood until it was burned by the Forest Service in 2016.\u00a0 This would be an interesting hike, but I also took note that there are two openings at the north base of Black Butte situated about 200 feet apart.\u00a0 The two springs issuing forth from these openings combine to form the headwaters of the Metolius River.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Driving along U.S. 20 we were treated to scenic views of a jagged peak known as Three Finger Jack as well as Mt. Washington and Mt. Jefferson.\u00a0 Turning south off of <\/span> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Crater Lake was a great destination but it was also a long trip that consumed an entire day.\u00a0 If I have a chance to revisit the McKenzie Pass again, I will jump on it.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t that far from Eugene and the lava fields and volcanic cones are truly fascinating.\u00a0 We have an ancient volcanic history in the Great Lakes Region, but the continental glaciers that scrubbed the land surface multiple times over the eons left us a different type of volcanic landscape.\u00a0 I also find it interesting to see signs marking the thousand foot elevation benchmarks along the highways.\u00a0 With our highest peak in Michigan (Mount Arvon) reaching only 1,979 feet above sea level, seeing an elevation sign for 5,000 feet was a unique experience for me.\u00a0 There are more trails to explore at the McKenzie Pass Summit – maybe I can get to the top of Little Belknap cone without getting too winded.\u00a0 The pass is, after all, only 5,325 feet above sea level.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Top Piece Video – I don’t know about songs about Geologic Rambling, but there are ‘rambling’ songs . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The late Tom Hartzell and I were having a discussion about the Pacific Northwest in the lunchroom one day.\u00a0 Tom mentioned he and his wife would be vacationing there in the near future, so I took the opportunity to ask him a little favor.\u00a0 I said, \u201cWell, if you happen to find an ashtray […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,12,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-humor","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2788"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2790,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788\/revisions\/2790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/span>U.S. 20 on to Rte. 126 just past Santiam Junction, our last leg stretching stop of the day was at Sahalie Falls.\u00a0 All volcanic activity does not necessarily produce mountains.\u00a0 In this case, rivers running across old lava flows encounter multiple steps that send their waters cascading downslope.\u00a0 I asked a Forest Service Ranger how she enjoyed working in a beautiful spot like this.\u00a0 She replied, \u201cOh, I don\u2019t usually work in this area.\u00a0 I am just here to advise people where they shouldn\u2019t go because there is a forest fire burning southwest of the falls.\u00a0 Luckily, we were able to continue southward on 126 toward the McKenzie Highway without having to reroute due to the active fire (although we did see quite a few Forest Fire vehicles parked at the entrance of the roads leading to the actual fire).<\/span><\/p>\n