Hell’s Canyon and Clearwater River
Overnight, Captain David Kay and his officers made great speed to the confluence of the Columbia with the Snake River, then over 130 miles up the Snake, through four locks and dams, to the Lewiston and Clarkston area.
We tied up to a dock in Clarkston, Washington, where two fantastic options awaited us. Some of us chose to board jet boats, and adventured further upriver. As we sped along in these powerful vessels, the local driver told us about the unusual and eccentric homesteaders that settled in the area over the years. We drove past an old stern-wheeler, and learnt how similar ones were used to transport cargo and passengers up and down the very river we were now exploring. As we whizzed up the rapids, it was hard to imagine those clumsy vessels accomplishing such a feat: many times the crew had to haul the boats through rapids using cables and iron rings in the rocks, some of which can still be seen. These would travel over 70 miles past Clarkston, to an old mining town named Eureka! Nothing of great value was ever mined here, and it could be that the Imnaha, last stern-wheeler to travel these waters, was actually sunk on purpose to disguise this fact from disgruntled investors! Signs of the mines and the old town can still be seen, as this is the furthest point of our trip up Hell’s Canyon. This spectacular Snake River canyon is famous for being the deepest in North America, and the one Evil Knievel attempted to leap across on a motorbike.
What most of us really enjoyed about the trip upriver, however, was how we entered a completely different geological realm. From the layers of relatively young basalt that carpet much of Washington and Oregon we entered a much older world. Here ancient limestones uplifted from the seabed and volcanic arcs from far-away, rafted in over huge distances by tectonic plate movement, were scraped off on to the edge of continental North America as one plate subducted under another. At one point on our trip our jet boat turned to a side, and we could observe a type of geology on one side of us, and a completely different one on the other, as reflected in the pictures above. The canyon walls served as a backdrop to great wildlife, as we saw a varied bird life, big horn sheep and mule deer.
The other option was equally as exciting, and a must for those who really wanted not only a deep and comprehensive account of the time the Corps of Discovery spent in this area, but to really tread in the footsteps of the great explorers, and re-live their experiences among the Nez-Perce tribe. On making their way out of the Bitterroots, the Corps traveled down the Clearwater River before reaching the Snake then the Columbia. They were half-dead after a starvation trail through the Rockies, and the expedition was literally saved by the good will of these people, who could very well have killed them and have become the strongest Indian tribe anywhere in the region on taking their weapons. The trail we followed contains the greatest concentration of Lewis and Clark sites anywhere in the nation, and many remain practically unchanged from those days.
