AN OREGON RIVER

 I really do have to have sit down with that book on Cascade volcanoes. It'd there on the top of the stack just "looking" at me. If you look closely you can identify the layers of lava. Mt. Hood is only five hundred thousand years. old. I haven't dug deeply enough to know where the Mt. Hood flows end and the Columbia flood basalts begin. Those flood basalt flows were laid down between sixteen and fouteen million years ago. 

Shows how much I know about my home state. I'm really good when it comes to the Willamette Valley. Reasonably decent about the north coast. Eastern Oregon not so much. I'd never even heard of the White River until someone posted this shot on Forgotten Oregon. 

The White River falls are the upper set of falls with a ninety foot drop over a basalt shelf leading to the Celestiial Falls with drop of about fourty four feet. The headwaters are fed by the White River glacier on the south east flank of Mount Hood. 

I didn't realize there were so many glaciers on Mt. Hood. They're shrinking BTW. I'm not sure if the river is named for the glacier or the other way around. In seasons of high melt from the ice the headwaters of the river turn milky white. 

There are ruins of a power station next to the river. It supplied power to the area from about 1910 until 1960 when The Dalles Dam power station was completed. The lower river is popular for rafting and fishing inside the state park named for the river. The park is open from say May to late October, snow

season. The river is a little one by most standards. It's about fifty miles long and joins the Deschutes on its run to the Columbia. A more peaceful section of the river. Looks like it might be a section for kayaking or a drift boat. A McKenzie River drift boat to be exact. 

I'd never even heard of this little piece of  Oregon. The river originates from a glacier, there are no other tributaries. There is a so called ghost forest created when the volcano erupted in the late seventeen hundreds either burying or blowing over the trees when a new valley floor was created. 

What was a u shaped glacial valley became a steep V shaped canyon as the White River cut its way through the debris left by a pyroclastic flow and subsequent mud flows. 

Mt. Hood is classifed as an active volcano that last erupted between September of 1865 and January of 1866. Visitors to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood occaisionaly get a whiff of sulpher when the wind is right. A reminder that when it comes to the high Cascade mountain range peace can be a relative term.

Thankfully we get a fair amount of warning. After all Mt. Saint Helens didn't just blow off about a thousand feet of elevation one Sunday morning out of the blue. She gave plenty of warning. It isn't the mountain's fault that geology is a relatively young science. That the geology of Oregon is slowly becoming understood piece by piece. Or that humans, being an impatient species often choose to ignore warnings because the timing isn't an absolute. I felt that "thump" when she blew over a hundred miles south in Springfield. Just a little "thump." Got home from church and it was all over the news.