Our little piece of heaven in the Columbia Highlands

The Columbia Highlands, which span a good part of Ferry County, are probably the most underappreciated and underutilized lands that I know of. Coming back from our most recent trip there, we told the guy at Smallwood Farms, a lovely fruit stand outside of Okanogan, where we had been hiking and he said, "You're probably the only ones to have done that hike all season." Which is sad because it was pleasant. Beautiful. The Sweat Creek Basin Trail probably isn't a 5-star vista trail through glaciated peaks. It's subtler. But an old growth forest of Ponderosa pines in rolling hills is also worthy of visiting.

A hoodoo in Hoodoo Canyon.

There are so many places in Washington state that are trampled and over-used. Admittedly, I've never been a fan of the over-use of national parks at the detriment of ignoring plenty of other public lands. Here in Washington state we have the North Cascades National Park through which we drive to get to the Columbia Highlands. The North Cascades National Park is an extraordinary place for mountaineers and hikers looking for five-star vistas, but there is little land hospitable for animals. For life.

The megafauna that make these places come alive need the grassy valleys and lowlands and intermediary zones. When we go to the Columbia Highlands, for example, the place feels alive. The clearest example was what happened when we came upon some deer near our camp by the Hoodoo Canyon: They ran away. When we spend time in the Olympic National Park, the deer are so docile they don't even move. They've never been hunted by humans and rarely by animals. There's also an overpopulation of them in the Olympic National Park. They've got mange. They're not really wild. They're not that impressive as creatures. They NEED predators!

The deer in the Columbia Highlands are part of a living ecosystem, where they might be hunted down by wolves or coyotes. Somehow the animals in some national parks have lost some of this life and wildness. Which is why visitors to Yellowstone sometimes confuse the place with a petting zoo and put their children on bison to take pictures.

Hoodoo Canyon.

Not long after we watched the deer run away from us, while watching sunset by our tent, we heard a chorus of coyotes howling. No, we're pretty sure they weren't the wolves the area is famous for, which we think would have a deeper howl. But the experience was wild. They started and it sounded like a dog whining but then they got inspired and sang in unison and it lasted maybe four minutes and stopped suddenly. They rendezvoused and the hunt must have begun and the singing stopped. They were clearly in the valley below us but we couldn't tell if they were a few hundred yards away, a quarter mile, or even a mile or two from us. It was a bit eery.

Our camp near Hoodoo Canyon. We heard the coyote chorus below. 

Emerald Lake, Hoodoo Canyon

This wildness is perhaps why we make the extra long drive through the 5-star vistas and glaciated peaks and staggeringly beautiful and daunting North Cascades to make it to this unique space, which we believe is possibly more important to protect. Because it actually supports life. Real life. It's also an intermediary zone between the Cascades and the Rockies, which is why the animals use it.

Sunday breakfast here, just outside of Republic, WA, was the best breakfast of my life.

The place is special. There's not a single traffic light or fast food chain operation or hotel in all of Ferry County. Not a mall or a subdivision of McMansions. What place can you say that about in this day and age?

I can't have a post on this special place without mentioning again the wolves. My mom gave me a wonderful book on identifying all kinds of animal scats and tracks, which is a very complicated endeavor and I can't say that I'm good at it, but we can make good guesses now on what we're seeing. The author David Moskowitz has an exhaustive book about the wolves in this region entitled Wolves in the Land of Salmon. On a very controversial topic that produces some of the most diametrically opposed views, he breaks the "wolf issue(s)" down with a lot of nuance. Certainly, he comes from the scientific perspective, though he's more a tracker than a formally trained scientist (he does do some work with the academic side of things, but it's clear he doesn't let that get in the way of thinking outside of the rigidly controlled academic thinking).

What's certain is that wolves kill elk and wolves kill livestock. In sometimes greater or lesser number than certain constituencies in the fight about wolves would like to admit. What's also certain is that when wolves kill elk, the vegetation of riparian areas improves, which is good for fish, stream flows, cutting down algae blooms, and the whole cycle of life in these places. What's also certain is that wolves cover vast territories (some packs cover hundreds of square miles, depending on prey density). These territories cover a patchwork of private and public lands--state, federal, etc. The livestock industry is allowed to use public lands if they do not damage, degrade or impoverish the lands. Given the damage done by cattle, which do an extraordinary amount of damage to riparian areas and cause lots of erosion, it's hard to say that the public lands are not damaged by the livestock industry. But of course it's for the "public good" to have beef to eat. Though Americans as a whole do probably eat way too much beef. What's also interesting is that the livestock industry romanticizes itself as ruggedly individualistic--ranchers are known for their anti-government tendencies, yet the land they rent from the government comes at rates that are essentially subsidized. What seems pretty clear is that ranchers put their livestock in wolves' territory and it would be ridiculous to think that an opportunistic hunter like a wolf would not kill this mostly docile livestock.

Barbed wire, Ponderosa pines, and pleasant views

Which brings us to a couple of fundamental contradictions that say a lot about how strange we are as a species and how complicated the wolves issue is or isn't: Wolves are a biological competitor for resources that we desire (elk), but their presence is invaluable for creating conditions favorable to many other resources we also desire: Fish, free-flowing streams, some would even say wolves' depredation of elk in the long term help the elk, but there are not enough studies to prove this with any certainty--documented elk numbers dwindling in wolves' territories frequently doesn't have as much to do with wolves as opponents of wolves say and has more to do with loss of habitat (to humans), overuse by livestock (raised by humans), and other animals, like bears and coyotes, but indeed, difficult to measure. So, wolves are a public resource that are killed for harming livestock, a private resource that grazes on public lands at rates subsidized by the federal government. An overwhelming proportion of the public in both Washington and Oregon (70 to 80%), whether for good or not, want to see wolves return to public lands. For the public good, I might add. Those who live closest to these public lands, though, in general do not want to see the wolves return, partially because they kill livestock and partially because of a mythology that's been propagated in the European-American for centuries before they even came to America. A mythology that has little basis in reality, but stories are what make us who we are, right?

Our little wolf Lupe on the Sweat Creek Basin trail.

What I know for certain is that wolves symbolize wildness and there's not enough wildness left on this planet. And wildness and open spaces are good for our health--both mental and physical, and for many of us, the wild is our spirituality. You cannot get any closer to a spirit--a goddess or god or whatever it is that gives meaning to our lives--than being out in the wild. And a wild place that is worth protecting and worth celebrating and visiting is the Columbia Highlands. See more about how to protect the Columbia Highlands here.