Geological Spots in Salem, Oregon

Some local residents and travelers, who ride through the Willamette Valley, like to know the context of the earth that they are passing over.  This blog entry is my offering of "spots" that I enjoy revisiting and reconsidering in my home area of Salem, Oregon.  My place is in the middle of the north-to-south Willamette Valley in western Oregon.  In this area, people look to the south and west at basalt hills.  These hills were hot lava flows at a time well before The Ice Age.  The flows cooled and become "rock hard" and then were tilted up, by long-distance earth forces. These jostling forces came from the Pacific oceanic plate rubbing counter-clockwise against North America (Sort of a great "upper cut", but as punches go,....very slow).  To the east is the distant skyline of the Cascade Mountain Range. That horizon includes stratovolcanoes that tower another 6000 feet above the mountain forests.

This map shows my geological spots around Salem. The spots include:

• Rock faces that show distinct layering (I explain these on the interactive map)
• Overlooks where you can pull over on secondary paved roads and get a long view
• Places to get maps and sketchbooks
• Local sites like Parks and the State Capitol, where there is a climb up to the dome
• An outdoor store 
• My watering hole (for Oregon microbrew)

You can get coffee to go or to stay in, if you want to size up our citizenry. Local or national brew houses are within a few city blocks of the Map store.

At the viewpoints, you can drop the Google Maps little person icon on the roadway and look off into the Cascades, over the Willamette Valley of across the road at some rock faces.  I recommend looking at the roadside near Stayton, Oregon.

Here is the link: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=z8BCD0wMZe7k.kY5JZvCPNx4s

Richard W. Faas; A Good Guy, Now Gone

Richard W. Faas:  A Tribute

Dick Faas passed away, sort of by surprise, on September 19, 2014.  When I talked to my mentor and friend, he was dealing with a new health wrinkle that he planned to endure while finishing another paper about sedimentology.

Faas, didn't teach as much as "INFECT" young people with the wonder of his field trips and his stories. Geology is storytelling about outdoor explorations with stock embellishments of data tables, maps and cross-sections.  I remember him showing our group outcroppings of limestone, shale and very hard sandstone ("This is the Oriskany Sandstone!") and he stood down in the bottom of a glacial outwash basin, looking up at us, as if to beg for our comprehension. The ice sheet was gone, but the melt water moving under it had dug that basin out. We were cold, shivering, but this was the "stuff of real living" to me.  Right then and there, I wanted to be a geologist.

Roll the film of time a little further, and Faas is taking me on a field trip to witness plastic silt.  The two of us have on diving masks, snorkels, swimming gear and sneakers. We are in a gravel quarry pond out in front of a gravel washing flume. Dick has already shared the cautionary tale of dead fishermen wrapped up against the side of the gravel pit, lifeless, underwater in their fishing line."Watch out for monofilament!" ..Shudder.  Now, watch how we can make this blanket of mud undulate!  I learned something that day, 'If you can't build a flume, get a mask and snorkel and visit a river. I spent a lot of time in small rivers gliding on the surface and looking down. Later, to study sand dune structures that were buried 10,000 feet down in a Montana oil field, I drove 200 miles to a dune buggy recreation area in Oklahoma and borrowed a ride on a sand rail. The dune cut-away pictures looked just like the Montana core and I had made my own discovery.

Throughout his days, Dick was always interested, always encouraging.  I am glad that I knew him. Thanks, Dr. Faas!

Of Shield Volcanoes and The Curse of the Elevens

Geology is an important factor in Golf Course design.  Golfers cannot be bored and a large part of enjoying a round is the scenery.  Within a few hours of the Portland metropolitan area are two good golf courses, tucked up against the Cascade Mountain Range.

I choose Elkhorn Golf Course in Gates, Oregon that is reached by a steep paved climb over a mountain ridge from State Highway 22 and Mallard Creek Golf Course near Lebanon.  Each course owes its challenge to the steep sides of volcanic rock that is part of the Western Cascades.  These "Cascades" were the first north -to- south band of volcanoes that was fed by subduction of the Pacific Plate under North America.  The volcano line shifted a little more than 2 million years ago to the present line of stratovolcanoes that accent the present Cascade skyline. The renewed uplift steepened the river courses of the Western Cascades, again, meaning that golfers ought to forget following lost golf balls into river channels.  The banks are too steep.

Still, the Western Cascades are causing problems for golfers.  There are many holes with water hazards at Elkhorn, that golfers would hope to forget, because fairways are cut be water, and occupied by ponds and swamps.  A posted question at the rustic pro shoppe asks, "Do you have enough balls to play Elkhorn"? The rolling steepness of "The Back Nine" at Mallard Creek offers some interesting and sometimes frustrating challenges.

Two daunting challenges are the 11th holes of each of these two courses.

You have to loft the ball to "bomb" the green on the 11th hole at Mallard Creek, otherwise the ball trickles off the green and ends up in a pot bunker.  Just lift the ball and add a stroke if that happens.  At Elkhorn, No. 11 has 180 yards of water, and you need a long drive.  The wait to clear the hazard is very suspenseful. More often that not, you have lost one of your better golf balls, in the water, just off the edge of the green. Almost,....NOT quite!

Each hole has its rewards at this time of year.  You can look off across the valley at Mallard Creek, drop another ball and try, again.  Pretend that you are "Tin Cup".  "Take the shot!".  At No. Eleven, you can hang your head in frustration, and walk 80 yards to the drop area, just across a short arm of the water hazard and club an eight iron onto the narrow green. Take a moment to admire the turning alder, the fortress-like Elkhorn Mountain with the white bleached trunks from an old forest fire above you, or look listlessly over your left shoulder at House Mountain.  Welcome to the Western Cascades.

Locates? LOCATES?!.."I don't care about no stinking' LOCATES!

A Norman, Oklahoma caterer wanted to fix up his new house and to entertain University of Oklahoma clients.  Roger planned to hold back the Great Plains wind and screen his place from the noise and bustle of Interstate Route 35 traffic. He asked his geologist neighbor, John, to help him build him build a nice wood fence.  John said, "Sure Thing!" and they fell to the task with enthusiasm.

The fence line went on the opposite side of a new sidewalk from another, as yet undeveloped, paved and curbed road in the subdivision. They had a power auger and popped out about forty post holes. Every so-often, they hit what felt like a root. John said, "I think its a hard silt layer", and they dug ahead without much any more concern.

That afternoon, the local phone company was looking in the line of holes. With an uneasy feeling, John went over to see what was happening.  The foreman said, "Someone just cut our fiber-optic cable in 30 places". John knew how expensive these cables could be and apologized profusely, saying, "It's all my fault, I thought it was hard pan". The foreman knew that he had his guy, but let John off.  Roger and he didn't have to pay for the broken cable.

This happened many years ago, before other drilling experiences drove home the same lesson. Know where to dig.  Call 811, first and use Locates Services if you can. You will save embarrassment, your money and  possibly, your life.

A Public Service Link
http://www.call811.com/how-811-works/safe-digging.aspx

   

A Vacant Lot

An overgrown lilac bush, an out-of-place hemlock, an outline of a cinder block foundation, a weathered wood picket fence; these are the signs of past life.  Fossils of human existence in the country or in a lot among new curbed streets and businesses. A vacant lot can be a place for information about underground layer, because there may have been a water well on the place.

I am showing to you another geologist's trick-of-the-trade.  Where other scientists and planners drive by a lot, I stop and look around for an old water well.  My tip-off, today was a picket fence.  It spanned the front part of a vacant lot in West Salem, between several businesses.  Two large trees overshadowed the site, and a pole stood in the back of the lot where an electric power meter could have been placed. I was riding the bus, but in passing there looked like a three or foot foot square concrete pad for the old water well.  The signs were worth checking, so I pulled out a Salem West 7 1/2 minute topographic map, and there was a little black rectangle on the spot for a house.

A Well House in rural Benton County, Oregon

This discovery encouraged me to look up water wells in the Oregon Water Resources Department water well directory (Google- "OWRD" - wells in Township 7 South , Range 3 West, Section 22.  I had to pencil the outline of the section on the topographic map, because the area is shot through with odd-shaped parcels, called Donation Land Claims.

The "long and short" of the search is that I did not find the well, but looking for wells is like looking for sea gulls.  When you look for one, you will find others. Three other water wells popped up within a quarter mile and two of them have driller's logs. This is how to get an idea of the underground setting of a place.

KNOW YOUR OUTCROP!

This quick note is about keeping records. Tricks of the Trade.  As people and as scientists, we grow.  You have heard that "The unexamined life is not a life at all!", well that is why some people keep diaries.  Geologists are so busy and so wide-ranging that they should have some form of a diary. I find that keeping a notebook of my cross-sections, in a loose-leaf school notebook and arranged by nearby town is good for me.  I also learned from my years as a  geologist with Gulf Oil (now ChevronTexaco) that I needed to organize and recall my work.

Here are forms of record keeping that I learned at Gulf Oil:   1.Collection of well logs in a few loose leaf binders,  2.  "Scout Tickets" (glorified index cards with important well information, for me they are 3x5 cards), 3.  a rack of roll maps (there is NOTHING LIKE paper), and,  4.  pictures and notes on 5 x 7 cards.

Let's put it this way, "Where were you and what did you do?"  At how many spots have you worked in your career?  I mean the memorable places.  Several hundred?  That number can be fitted in one small box of 5 x 7 cards, .... you can draw a sketch or a map on the back of each card.  I have two sections in the box, to cross-reference where I was. I have an alphabetical section, of town and well field names, then by location; Township Range and Section.  I keep my project spots and  outcrops on these cards.

Summer in the Salem Hills, Salem, Oregon

Geological work around Salem, Oregon, at this time each year, involves some consulting work in the Salem Hills.  This work area is near my home, so my company has been building experience in the local rock layers.
At one time in the 1960s, the rocks were only thought to be a monotonous set of dipping layers.  The US Geological Survey visited the area and studied the old Salem Heights Water District water wells.  This work, done jointly with the State Engineers Office (later spun off as the Oregon Water Resources Department), showed an interesting area where the lava flows dipped into a small lake and exploded into shards of black glass (obsidian) and yellow sand.

Soon after that study, water well drillers started using faster drilling methods and drove deep wells into and through the basaltic lava.  The geology became better known to geologists and planners. The City of Salem took an interest in taking over the old water district as another source of drinking water.  This groundwater resource area became the first or second ASR, (Artificial Storage and Recovery) project in the state.

Continued drilling of the entire Salem Hills area was spurred  by rural residential development (Say it, "Rural Residential Development") which meant that more people could live out in and enjoy the Salem Hills. County planning requirements for this growth meant that my company and other geologists started to learn more about the Hills.

Here are a few of the lessons. Let me use the following figure, a cross-section, as an idea aid.

A.  The blue part, represents ocean layers.  This marine shale is located 50 miles inland, over a mountain range (the Oregon Coast Range) from the Pacific Ocean, but it is 450 feet higher than the present sea level. The rock has been lifted up that far.

B.  The green parts are the four lower flows of an extensive lava flow sequence, the Columbia River Basalt Group.  The pink piece is a remnant of a flow from the middle of the group. The names for these flows were decided in 1979 by geologists working on a nuclear waste tunnel storage system that was closed in favor of another nuclear waste depository site in the country.  The geologists' study of lava flows went across the entire 2000  square mile area of the Columbia River Basalt Group from near the proposed depository at near the Wallowa Mountains in the northeast part of the state to the Pacific coast.  The layers were recognized and mapped in the Salem area in 1979 and in 1995.  There are six layers where the basalt group is more complete in the Salem Hills. The seventh layer, in this case, does not deliver water because it is weathered to clay. In this cross-section, the dark green zone represents three lava flows. The light green zone represents the weathered flow and a fresh flow below it.

C. The lava flow layers can be recognized and named by observing flow thicknesses, a marker bed and just be counting flows in some places.  In this particular area, the marker bed is missing, except in a very few wells. The nearest location where the marker bed, the Vantage Member, is located is about 3 miles to the east along Sunnyside Road. The Vantage and the middle part of the Columbia River basalt was eroded away in the area of this shown cross-section.  A small piece of the middle basalt is the pink piece, up the hill, but I haven't been up there to look at the rocks and, perhaps, to find the Vantage.

C. Hard lava flows contain water that can be pumped to private water wells.  These particular flows deliver water to wells, more readily, because the water is not tied up in clay.  The water issues from porous lava flow tops and through thin rock fractures. The lava flows start as small rivers of molten rock, that give off hot sulfurous fumes and steam.  The gas and steam come out of the bottom of the lava flows and hang around in the top five or ten feet.  Some of the gas and air bubbles are imprisoned in the cooling lava and form round molds or vesicles. The gas bleeds away leaving the round shapes. The "vesicular" top of the lava flow is weaker than the more solid lower part of the flow and is easily fractured by moving earth forces and, incidentally, by water well drilling. Groundwater is found in these zones to provide the water well supplies that make building a house possible in many parts of the Salem Hills.

100 Years of Gratitude - NYTimes.com

100 Years of Gratitude - NYTimes.com

SOMETIMES, YOU DON'T GET PAID!

When you work for yourself, part of the time you don't get paid.  Reluctance to part with money is a primal reality and some people don't pay.  

I sat in a meeting with a square-featured geologist who had done a great deal as a consulting oil and gas geologist.  We were in a hotel conference room in downtown Houston, Texas.  The man had spent years as a petroleum consultant and had sold prospects to oil companies that turned into oil fields that produced a lot of oil and gas.

There were some people, he worked for who didn't pay him when the time came.  Try as he might, he could not get his money and in several instances he gave up.  Those decisions not to press further for his pay, had diminished him.  He was discouraged for large parts of years.  From that moment, onward, I resolved to press on fairly for my money when my clients didn't pay me.

I recommend two steps to be paid when your client wants to keep his money.  The first step is to ask in writing with honest records that document your work and hours.  It is wise to have had a contract signed, that spells out the work, the pay advances and the final amount.  The second step occurs when the client will still not pay you.  Then, you bring that person into the light of the Law and file a small claim.  This will shake the client up and you will receive angry, often intimidating phone calls, emails and letters.  Ignore the harassment, don't get mad and stick to the simple nature of the pay issue: 

1.  Demonstrate that you did the work

2.  Indicate the value of the work and report any payments that your client made.

3.  Press on quietly and deliberately for your money.

Your future clients will search the court records and will vindicate you in their own minds and you will see business where you did not expect any.

What a fine perch, a Satellite Makes!

While other people admire landscapes and measure snow depth and river flow, geologists appreciate other features.  I see a satellite as a handy "perch".  In his novel, "Rising from the Plains", author John McPhee profiled David Love who grew up in Montana.  Love became a geologist after traveling around his father's ranch with a visiting geologist.  His report work (a graduate thesis from Princeton) was about the Teton Mountains.  In order to set the geologic picture of the mountain range into perspective; to draw cross-sections and maps; Love chose "perches", high points from where to view and to sketch the rock layers.  To a tourist, these perches are kin to roadside pullovers or viewpoints along the highways. Love's perches were from mountainside ledges or high trails.

With the aid of afternoon sunlight, satellite photographs provide the same kind of information.  In the photographs below, mountain shadows extend from the twin summits of Mount Shasta.  The treeless summit is grayish brown, the color of the volcano lava.  Tear-drop lobes of slightly different viscous lava stopped halfway down the mountainside and froze into place.

Mt. Shasta, in Northern California, with scant snow cover around March 22, 2014

Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory Satellite, 2014

Heavier snows of the previous winter, accentuate the flow structure of the tear-drop lava masses.  

Original Link:  http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=82859

While my post is an appreciation of perspective, there are other references at NASA.gov about Mount Shasta and other Cascade Range volcanoes.

Windy Weather Whopper

I was in the Northern Part of the Willamette Valley, this 

morning when that windy storm system came through.  

Oh, Man, was it “Squally”!
  

How Squally, you ask? 

It was so squally that my water level line wouldn’t spool onto my

water level meter.   Every time I walked into the wind I had to 

get upwind of the snaking line to block the tempest with my body. 

That was my Mistake!  

That wind got up under my jacket and picked me up, so I started 

to fly off to Aurora.  Even the clouds were out of control!  The 

wind was grabbing them by the heads and dragging them up into 

the Stratosphere!  It was pulling the water out of the wells, too.  

The water levels were jumping. I would have joined them all, 

but my loose measuring  line dragged and snagged on a passing 

sprinkler head.  I was able to haul myself hand-over-hand back 

to the ground, where I grabbed onto a telephone pole and tied 

myself to it with my belt.  Yes ,that was really squally weather 

in the Willamette Valley, yesterday!

Trust Your Driller!

Oil/Gas and water well drillers are brought up in their trade/profession with a lot of apprenticing experience.  In addition to operating and maintaining their great or small drilling machines, they use tested and handed-down means of describing formations that they drill.

Today, I want to call attention to water well drillers' descriptions of how fast and in what way their drill bits progress through parts of formations.  My example is from the Willamette Valley of Oregon, USA.

When the driller of the Fairview School Well, a few miles southeast of the State Capitol, drilled soil and rock formations in this well, he used three speed terms; Soft, Moderate and Hard.  Soft means that the drill bit was not resisted greatly and he had fast drilling.  This drilling rate, in Oklahoma Oil/Gas drilling charts would be about 1-2 minutes per foot, or a penetration rate of greater than fifty feet an hour.  Moderate or "Medium" means that drilling is going at an average and the drill bit is meeting some resistance in drilling.  This would be common of a lightly cemented sand and gravel or a rock.  The drilling rate would be 3 to 5 minutes per foot or a penetration rate of 10 to 20 feet per hour.   Hard drilling means that the drill bit is meeting a lot of resistance.  Simply put, the rock is very hard.  The drilling rate is 8 to 12 minutes or more per foot, or less than 10 feet per hour as a penetration rate.  Directional drillers in oil and gas work would consider "tripping the bit" (pulling out of the hole, thousands of feet and changing the drill bit), but water wells are more shallower enterprises and water well drillers wait.

In the oil boom of the 1980s, I learned with Gulf Oil in Oklahoma that plotted drilling rate could mimic the Gamma Ray (GR) Correlation Curve that oil and gas geologists used from downhole geophysical logs.  We combined our sample logs with the GR curve to find how deep the drill was and to evaluate reservoir quality of formations.  Drill Time and the driller's rock descriptions (left column) reveal good qualities below the Shale (Depth 173', Elevation +37 ') that enabled the well to produce 380 gallons per minute with 72 feet of drawdown.  That is a good well.  The "drilling breaks", where the drilling gets "soft" or faster are where the lava flow tops are vesicular. There is "porosity" in the breaks.  With a little tectonically-imparted fracturing the vesicles become interconnected and provide good pathways to the open borehole.

The Importance of the Practice of Geology in Oregon, A Visit to Radio Station KMUZ FM 88.5

I visited this local radio station in Salem, Oregon at Noon, Today, to speak about Geology in Oregon.  My purpose was to connect listeners to the geological structures that they have been walking over unawares. All of us go about our day, seeing strangers going by in their cars, cashiers at the grocery store, produce grocers, their co-workers at the office and family members.

During our 40 minute radio question-answer talk, I explained that that the western landscape was composed of sloping rocks of hard lava flows that had been jostled around by great earth forces that shoved parts of the Pacific Ocean bottom past and under North America.  Two local results were the Willamette Valley (home of Salem, Oregon) and the Cascade Mountain Range (where we see Volcanoes on the eastern skyline).

The hills around the valley downtown of Salem were tilted by these regional forces.  The Salem Hills, south of the city, tilt toward it from Chinook Estates and Prospect Peak.  The Amity Hills of West Salem, tilt northeast to the Willamette River.

This talk was the beginning effort to make geology familiar to the people of Salem, so that on foot and in their cars, they may be connected to their physical environment. The KMUZ host, Ken Adams, and I hope that the public gets "outside" to understand local geology.

A President's Day Radio Show with John Rehm about Geology at KMUZ 88.5FM

On Monday, February 17th, I will visit KMUZ Talk Radio Host, Ken Adams at his studio in Salem.  Our talk is at Noon until 12:30PM.   

Listen in by going to KMUZ 88.5FM on Facebook or tweet me @StoutHammer.  You can call in by a local Salem phone number to our talk at 503-990-6101.

We will talk about why geology is important to any town or city.  The talk will range across some of the topics in my following biographical sketch for the talk show host:

"I have been in business in Geology in Salem since 1992.  I have been here since 1985 when I went to work for the Oregon Water Resources Department.  I am from a small town in New Jersey where I used to fish for trout in the creeks, sled in the woods and walk the open fields with my dog and shotgun.  I had married and gone to Oklahoma by the time my town got built up and all of that changed. 

I got very interested in geology while at college at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.  The geology department was small like the earth science department, now at Western Oregon University.  I know the geologists there and taught Physical Science labs at Western in 2001 and 2002.

When I was a student, I was thrilled by the giant earth processes of volcanoes, earthquakes, floods and continental ice sheets. I was shocked by the overwhelming speed and power of these events. Few can outpace a volcanic ashflow. No one can stand its 1000 degree temperature. 

What I like about Geology is being outside.  You have an office, but you have to get outside to get your information. Geologists are needed for building new office parks and highway bridges.  A few are needed for watching our Cascade Volcanoes.  Others are needed for building or adding onto water well fields.  I work with farmers who have irrigation wells.  In Salem, geologists work for the Oregon Department of Transportation, near the Highway.  There are geologists at the Oregon Water Resources Department and a few work at the downtown DEQ office, not far from your radio station studio.

Geology is a science, but because it deals with ever changing natural processes it is also storytelling.  At their best, our reports are clear storytelling with concise information, lodged in tables of information and scaled drawings.  Geologists go on field trips, where a group of them travels around a wide region to look at rocks and to figure them out.  You see, valley and mountain shapes are determined by troughs, folds and faults of rock layers, whether these rocks were molten or sedimentary.  On some evenings, geologists may gather around campfires and describe their findings, but also share stories about how they climbed a mountain to get a great view.

Geologists may describe a fossil or a mineral specimen. Some of the fossils in a rock, here in the valley, look like the clams and snails that live in the sand of the bays and beaches of the Oregon Coast.  Some are a little different, such as the partly uncoiled snails. Geologists can show with their hands how rock layers angle down the west wide of the Cascades into the Willamette Valley and are pushed up around Salem. They can show the side to side jostling of faults coming in from the Pacific Ocean and the up-to-down movement of faults." 

The Geologist's Way

Geologists "geologize".  They do specific geological things.  Geologists find and describe rock and soil outcroppings.  They draw outcropping descriptions, well logs or stratigraphic columns.  They collect and catalog samples and index them by location

Working in the Woods, A One-Year Assignment in the Cascades, Oregon

In July, 1997 I joined the U.S. Forest Service under a one-year contract to examine forest road washout sites in the Detroit Ranger District.  This meant investing in a set of studded snow tires for my little passenger car and sharing driving driving to and from Detroit Lake.  What a great job!

The forest road system provides access for "multiple use" of the National Forest land.  Logging companies pay for timber harvest leases in selected areas of the District.  The lease fees and some Federal money pays for public recreation uses such as hiking, backpacking and camping out of your car, boating and fishing from several campgrounds around the lake.

The following pictures will tell you about my work and then about some of the history and interesting places in the area.




The first step of the present history of my turn at the Ranger District was the creation of Detroit Lake in the 1950s, with building of the dam.  The construction site parking lot (still there, near the highway) is in the right foreground.  Highway 22 now ascends the left slope to about the height of the upper embankment.



Today, looking over the lake toward the east, is Mount Jefferson.  This picture is in the fall.

Cascades geology is like the Elkhorn River valley in the Northwest area of the District.  A forest road map can be bought at the ranger district on Highway 22, just west of the town.  The rocks of the district are like the layers in the upper diagram and the higher rocks of the lower diagram.  Mount Jefferson is composed of younger rocks (strato-volcano lava and cinders) and sits on top of these layers.

Public use of the National Forest requires project work.  The weather station at the Detroit Ranger Station symbolizes completed and planned projects such as campgrounds, office buildings, forest roads and bridges that put the area to many uses.






This more recent landslide, shows that mountains are not permanent things.  They erode and, because of their greater height and interception of more snow and rain, their sides come down as landslides.





This sketch shows places on one of the forest road system where the heavy February 1996 storm, saturated the ground and washed heavy masses of rock and dirt into the streams.  The size of the storm damage sites on the map was smaller than the long landslide in the preceding picture.  Big landslides were a half-dozen in number during the '96, but each moved a small train-load of rocks, dirt and very large tree trunks.






Hiking and Backpacking in the National Forest, means construction of publicly funded structures, such as footbridges.  This bridge is not in the ranger district, but it is typical of the kind of bridges to cross rushing water.







And people to do the work. This was me, John Rehm, in 1999, after National Forest paperwork was completed to allow building of a log bridge at the Ranger Station.  Notice standard attire,  a vest, and equipment.






A student intern, Robert Hawkins, of Salem, Oregon is with me. Hard hats are standard equipment in the forest.






The log bridge going up.  This structure was built and designed by Jonathan Rehm for a Boy Scout project.  He wrote the paperwork and had it approved at the District and Supervisor's Office levels.  The work was assisted by Mr. Grace (standing in the creek) and by another member of the Forest Service, who drove the district fire engine to drag the log into position.  The bridge had one hand-rail and a middle support.  It lasted for 11 years, before the hand-rail became loose.  The bridge was abandoned between 2010 and 2013.

This picture was taken of the Coffin Butte Lookout Station in October 1997.  The lookout is in the tower from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, each year. The station has a 360 view of the district.  The elevation on the helicopter platform (foreground) is 5771 feet above mean sea level. 

Wintertime means snow.  This is Highway 22 in Idhana, Oregon, just three miles east of Detroit.  This particular scene is from a snowy December, one week before a terrific snowstorm buried the towns, and started to cave some of them in.

From the foregoing pictures and descriptions, you can see that visiting a ranger district in the Cascades can be a lot of fun.  Working for the US Forest Servicei is worth the experience.  Summer internships have been available for college students and graduate students from around the world.  Forest work teaches you how to manage your time, to be responsible for equipment and driving a Federal vehicle, how to find where you are in "The Woods" and how to solve planning and construction problems.