The Disappointing Cape: Land's End and Rock Pillows

Just over 200 years ago, the first expedition of Americans reached the Pacific Ocean after following the Missouri River over the Rocky Mountains and down the Columbia River. Lewis and Clark and their crew arrived in November of 1805, and they knew they could not make the return trip until the winter snows abated.

They explored the area around the mouth of the Columbia for an decent campsite to stay in several months. They ultimately settled on the south side of the river at Fort Clatsop, but for a time they spent a week at "that dismal little nitch" on the north side of the river. They explored around the rocky peninsula that had already been given the name Cape Disappointment by fur trader John Meares who, because of a storm, turned his ship around in 1788, just missing the mouth of the Columbia. The credited discovery was four years later, although we know that history has a serious bias; the river was discovered more than 10,000 years ago by humans.

The peninsula is today a state park, and it has a well-developed campground complex that fronts a wide sandy beach, with a more modest sandy cove on the east side called Waikiki Beach (it memorializes a Hawaiian seaman who perished during a shipwreck).

The winter encampment of the Lewis and Clark expedition at Fort Clatsop was largely a miserable affair with constant hunger and lack of supplies. They had hoped to flag down a sailing ship coming down the coast to trade for supplies, but their fort was a couple of miles from the beach and they missed ships for lack of a good lookout point. One might wonder why they didn't set up camp on the wide sandy beaches of Cape Disappointment. The answer is pretty straightforward: the beach didn't exist when they were there. It was a rocky peninsula as can be seen on their sketched map (below)

The mouth of the Columbia River is a nightmare for shipping. The discharge is more than enough to support even large freighters as far upstream as Portland, but the river carries vast amounts of sand and silt, and the shifting bars have caused vast numbers of shipwrecks. In an effort to stabilize the shifting sand bars, jetties were constructed in 1886. One extends for several miles from Cape Disappointment. Although the rock wall helps to keep the river channel clear, it also serves as a barrier to the southward movement of sand along the coast north of the Cape. The sand started backing up immediately forming the wide flat beaches that can be explored today (see the map below...sand is the yellow unit marked "Qb").

Source: US Geological Survey and https://nwgeology.wordpress.com/the-fieldtrips/pillow-lava-sites-in-washington/pillows-in-the-crescent-formation-cape-disappointment-state-park/

One of the coolest things about exploring Cape Disappointment is the privilege to actually see the rocks. The wave-carved cliffs are not totally covered by vegetation as is so often the case in western Washington. And the rocks are weird. They are not layered, and instead are marked by strange globular masses of what turns out to be weathered and oxidized orange basalt (we would normally expect basalt to be black like the lava flows in Hawaii). How did they get this way?

Note the cormorant for scale (upper left)

When basalt erupts underwater, it forms these globs that are about the size of thick down pillows. It looks like toothpaste being squeezed out and then getting pinched off. Although these rocks are on land today, they were once on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. They formed in eruptions at the mid-ocean ridge on the seafloor. They traveled like a conveyor belt for hundreds of miles (at the stunning rate of several inches a year) and were scraped off and added to the edge of the continent in the subduction zone that forms the western boundary of the North American Plate in Washington and Oregon. These rocks, the Crescent Formation, are Eocene in age (around 40 million years ago).

Cape Disappointment is a fascinating place to explore (it's neither dismal or disappointing). Watch the weather, though. Not only for the incessant rain, but for fog. It's said to be the foggiest place in the country which helps explain why the peninsula has not one, but two lighthouses.

Cormorant and Pillow Basalt Above Waikiki Beach (but not the one you think)

I'm still on the road so posts are few, but I occasionally get to a computer. Today's picture is a Cormorant flying in front of a wave-cut cliff exposing pillow basalt at Waikiki Beach. I've been writing a lot about Hawai'i of late, so you are forgiven for thinking that this is one the islands, but it's not. It's at Cape Disappointment on the Columbia River in Washington state. It got the name from an event in 1811 when a shipwreck led to the death of a Hawaiian crewmember whose body washed up on the beach here (I don't know why they didn't just use his name).

The pillow basalt is part of the Crescent Formation, a unit that preserves sea-floor sediments and basalt of the ocean crust that was swept into the subduction zone along the west coast of North America. Pillows are globular masses of basalt that form when the lava flows into water. The lava dates from the middle Eocene epoch, about 40 million years ago.

Cape Disappointment is steeped in history, being the last point of solid bedrock along the Columbia River where it flows into the Pacific Ocean. The name came from the failure of early explorers to recognize this spot as the mouth of the Columbia River (hazardous and constantly shifting sand bars made navigation upstream extraordinarily difficult). It was also the place where the Lewis and Clark Expedition finally reached the Pacific Ocean.

The construction of a huge jetty to make navigation on the Columbia River a bit safer caused sand to back up against the rock barrier, forming an extensive beach where none existed before. The site is now a state park and national historical park. There is a nice campground where we enjoyed some rare sun the other day (Cape Disappointment is said to be the foggiest place in the United States).

There are two lighthouses on the peninsula, due to the aforementioned hazards. Around 200 ships were wrecked in the immediate vicinity over the years.

The Hawai'i That Was: A New Blog Series

Source: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2644b.htm

There's a rock in the sea about 500 miles northwest of Honolulu. It's about as far removed from the beaches and high-rises of Waikiki as any place on Earth can be. It's called Pūhāhonu (Gardner Pinnacles to Europeans), a part of the Papahānaumokuākea (Northwestern Hawaiian Islands) Marine National Monument, established by presidential proclamation in 2006. The land amounts to an entire six acres, and reaches a height of 170 feet. The island was discovered by a whaling ship, the Maro, in 1820, but I suspect that it was known to the ancient Hawaiians. They had enough navigating skill to realize that other islands lay beyond Kaua'i and Niihau.

The rocks were erupted about 12.3 million years ago. The island covered more than 900 square miles, based on the present size of the remaining shallow coral reefs, but it may have rivaled the Big Island in size before underwater landslides ate away at the flanks. The height of the volcano can't be easily estimated, but it would have been at least thousands of feet high, maybe much more.

Why is an obscure rock in the middle of the ocean showing up on a blog about Hawai'i? It's just this: it was Hawai'i. Twelve million years ago, the Gardner Pinnacles sat astride the hot spot that is forming the Hawaiian Islands, and it was the "Big Island". But no longer; today it is the last island in the Hawaiian chain that exposes any volcanic rock. An island that once rivaled the Big Island is now a bit of rock that will be gone in a few thousand years. An island that once provided home to thousands of plant species has just one, a Portulaca species. An island that once provided home to thousands of arthropod and other invertebrate species now has a few dozen. The rest of the species are extinct. Dozens of unique species of birds once lived here, only to go extinct as their territory shrunk and disappeared beneath the waves. A dozen or so seabird species live on the island today. It's a Hawai'i that once was.

There are many ways to describe a Hawai'i that "once was". I just spent three weeks on two of the islands, Hawai'i itself and Kaua'i, touring the geology and archaeology of this unique landscape. If we seemed to be avoiding Oahu and Honolulu, it was true. There is so little of any of the original Hawai'i to be found on the coastal strip of Waikiki. None of the native plants, or animals, or for that matter, precious little rock (Diamond Head being a prominent exception). But exploring the corners where far fewer tourists go, we had a chance to see something of the Hawai'i that existed before the arrival of the European explorers and missionaries, and even before the arrival of the Polynesian people (and the Menehune). That's the Hawai'i I'm hoping to introduce you to over the next few weeks. I hope you enjoy it!

Ten Overrated Places to See Before You Die...Part One

I am about to kick a hornet's nest, more or less just for the fun of it. There are so many places to see in the world, and lots of lists and books that describe them, and I am doing all I can to see as many as I can. But some places, to be perfectly honest, felt a bit like a waste of valuable time, especially when some incredible geology was nearby, being missed. These are the 10 OVERRATED PLACES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE!!!!

In one sense I REALLY hesitate doing something like this because some perfectly innocent and good people are eking out a living selling trinkets and souvenirs at these places, so, do consider this in poorer regions (I'm thinking of the Navajo Nation, for instance). I got the idea from a book on 101 places NOT to see, but I'm trying to be a bit more nuanced! There are some great alternatives near by!

I would love to see what anyone else's list looks like. Be gentle, and remember who suffers if all the sudden NO ONE visits. Let's get busy kicking sacred cows...

1. Loch Ness, Scotland:
People visit Loch Ness for one reason, and one reason only...to see the Great Glen fault and the wonderful Paleozoic metamorphic rocks! Oh, and there's something about a plesiosaur or something that waited out a million years of ice ages...
The thing is, this is what we did at Loch Ness (above). On the other hand, just a few miles down the road at Loch Lochy the cliffs were higher, more spectacular, and Ben Nevis, the highest point on the British Isles loomed. I say loomed, because 4,000 feet might not sound like a lot, but when it rises from sea level the way it does, it is big. I took a lot of lousy pictures through the bus windows because we couldn't stop at all these incredible sights.


2. Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park:
This is not to disparage Yellowstone National Park, it's just that Old Faithful is, well, overrated, because it follows a schedule so well. People can time their carefully calibrated vacation visits by hanging out in the souvenir store or cafeteria, and then run out and see the eruption as scheduled, and then head back to the store or boutique or whatever. On the other hand, try and take a bunch of students to Yellowstone, and convince them NOT to see Old Faithful.You will not be alone when you watch Old Faithful erupt...
And it is photogenic and all...

The thing is, if your vacation has to be timed this way, you miss out on a heck of a lot of really interesting things. Get out and walk through the Upper Geyser Basin, be patient, and you might see some really extraordinary things that don't involve Old Faithful and giant crowds. On my last visit I got to see two major geysers, Castle and Beehive, going off at the same moment. And no crowds.
And on another trip I got to see an unscheduled eruption of Grand Geyser that was taller than Old Faithful. With about six other people in attendance...


3. Four Corners, NM, CO, UT, AZ (Navajo Nation):
This is one I hesitate to put on the list, for the reasons stated above. It's a line in the sand, an arbitrary survey placed here for no reason other than these lines follow some other arbitrary lines on the globe. If you are in the area, there are other, far more spectacular things to see than a concrete survey marker. How about Monument Valley?Or Canyon De Chelly? (that's a moonlight shot, by the way)Or Navajo National Monument?Or Mesa Verde?The thing is, if you are in this region of the country, take the time to learn something of the people who live there today, or who lived there in ancient times. Why worry about a set of crossing survey lines? OK, I guess it would be kinda cool to put the GPS on the spot...

4. Waikiki Beach, Hawaii:
Yeah, I'll probably get dinged for this one, too, but really. I personally find Oahu to be the least interesting of the four Hawaiian Islands that I've visited, and Waikiki is the 'leastest' interesting of all. Mind you, all things are relative, and if you told me I could go to Waikiki and go nowhere else, I, eh, would take you up on the offer without hesitation. In spades. But consider that as the epicenter of tourism in Hawaii, this is the most crowded spot you can imagine, and just about everyone you see is willing to help part you from your hard-earned money. If you go to Hawaii, rent a car (or borrow one from your in-laws. I have connections!), and get on the road around the island. Quiet beautiful beaches and interesting geology can be found all over the place. Even better, get to one of the other islands. Hawaii is one of the closest places to paradise that I have ever been. But Waikiki...not my cup of tea.
5. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy:
Let's put it this way. Would anyone visit if it weren't leaning? Now there are geological issues here, having to do with why it is leaning, but the tourist trappings here are beyond belief. What I really wanted to do was to take our bus 20 miles farther down the road and take a tour of the Carrara Marble quarries. Yes, the marble that Michelangelo carved "David" out of. It's that close. But we only had time to do one or the other, and the students voted...
The Baptistry leans almost as much as the tower does...and in all fairness, the interior of the Cathedral at Pisa was beautiful.
That's it for today...I welcome your tirades and ideas for part 2!