National park honors Lewis and Clark's historic journey

The newest national park strings together existing sites along the Columbia River and coast in Washington and Oregon

Oregon Live.com

Saturday, December 25, 2004

BRIDGET A. OTTO

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark reached the banks of the lower Columbia River nearly 200 years ago, they were wet, cranky and, at times, confused.

They'd been hiking a mighty long time.

Near what is now Skamokawa, Wash., they thought the "ocian" was in view.

It wasn't.

The captains pushed on.

They continued along the Columbia's north bank, battling the ravages of the river. They hiked to the headland now called Cape Disappointment and finally set eyes on their goal: the Pacific Ocean. Just west of today's Astoria-Megler Bridge, they camped and voted where to winter. They chose a site south of the Columbia, where they built Fort Clatsop.

They befriended the Clatsops, who lived where Fort Stevens now embraces the coastline. They clamored over Tillamook Head and extracted salt from sea water. They hunted, traded, and recorded flora and fauna. They left their mark all over the landscape that we now casually call the beach or the river.

They made history, a history that was recently pulled together in a unique partnership of two state agencies and the National Park Service.

Welcome to America's newest national park.

Lewis & Clark National Historical Park, just 6 weeks old, tethers a half-dozen coastal jewels in Washington and Oregon. They all connect to Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery's 1805 exploration of a region now divided by state lines but linked by a new park that offers a model for the future.

Lewis & Clark National Historical Park is the first to unite two state parks agencies and the National Park Service under one umbrella, said the service's director, Fran Mainella.

"Parks do not need to be 100 percent in ownership of the Park Service," says Mainella, who predicts more new parks will be run jointly with states, trust funds or associations. She credits the unique management model of the Lewis and Clark park with speeding its birth, even though parts of it are incomplete.

Not all the sites are equal -- one's a rest area -- or fully developed. But on the eve of the 200th anniversary of the Corps' arrival, the new park is bracing for a surge of tourists next year.

Among the changes and plans in its initial growth spurt:

At Fort Clatsop near Astoria, crews are clearing the six-mile Fort-to-Sea Trail. It should be ready to hike by November.

The place the explorers dubbed Station Camp, on the Washington side of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, will look more like a destination and less like a historical marker. The curving highway will be torn up next year and shifted north, opening up a 9-acre waterfront park with trails and viewpoints that include interpretive stations.

On Washington State Route 401, Megler Safety Rest Area remains separated from the road and the Columbia by chain-link fencing. The National Park Service hopes to eventually acquire adjacent land and transform the area to reflect its stormy history.

The Confluence Project, the first of seven art installations on the Lewis and Clark trail, begins at Washington's Cape Disappointment State Park. Architect Maya Lin's plans for the project, expected to cost $2.8 million, are about 70 percent complete. Also proposed for Cape Disappointment: a Thomas Jefferson memorial.

Mundane, but so important for first-time visitors, new signs and brochures should be placed at all the new park sites as soon as possible. Likewise, staff members at each of the sites in the new park must think beyond their sites' borders as they absorb the history of one very wet winter for 32 white men, one black slave, a teenage Shoshone woman and her newborn son.

That was the winter the corps hiked in what is now Ecola State Park and around Cape Disappointment, where Clark carved his name onto a tree.

The winter its members realized they had no idea how to construct a seaworthy canoe, unlike the Chinooks.

The winter they built Fort Clatsop and named it after the native people.

Inside the captains' quarters at the Fort Clatsop replica, Scott Stonum stokes the fire, his breath visible as he speaks. Rain drips into barrels outside. Stonum, chief of resource management at the fort, considers the future of the new national park.

"These Sitka spruce are 100 years old," he says, his face warmed by the orange glow of the fire and his vision of the forest 100 years from now. By then, the trunks will be 12 feet wide and tower as tall as the old-growth spruce and hemlock Lewis and Clark marveled at.

Those old-growth trees disappeared in the 1800s when the land was logged and cleared for farming. The canopy surrounding Fort Clatsop today began as saplings planted about 100 years ago by the Oregon Historical Society on 4 acres where they thought the original fort had stood.

"This," Stonum says, "will be here for my grandchildren."

Men and women in green slickers and yellow foul-weather gear work in a grassy field behind St. Mary's Catholic Church near Lewis and Clark's Station Camp. The archaeologists have carved neat squares into the earth. They sift the dirt for fire-cracked rocks, animal bones, glass beads and other artifacts.

The past they seek includes much more than the 10 rainy days Lewis and Clark stayed along the north bank of the Columbia River. The Chinook tribe fished here, fur traders passed through and, later, P.J. McGowan ran a salmon packing and canning business.

Before U.S. 101 can be straightened, opening space for waterfront access, a trail and interpretive panels, the National Historic Preservation Act requires that the land be researched and an archaeological survey taken.

The archaeology dig will probably wrap up in January. Then a new Station Camp will emerge. Site development came quickly in part because Washington state bought the property from the McGowan/Garvin family and transferred it to the National Park Service.

"The federal government was out of pocket very little, if at all, on the capital side," says David Nicandri, director of the Washington State Historical Society. "And the state gets a national park unit in the one county (Pacific County) that most needs tools and assets to remobilize and regenerate its economy."

It does come down to money.

For an economy brought to its knees by the loss of logging and fishing jobs, the cachet of a national park and the tourists it promises are irresistible.

"I think, my gosh, a national park in Pacific County," says Linda Rotmark, director of the county's economic development council. "That's amazing."

In addition to tourists, she predicts an influx of baby boomers as residents. Through today's technology and telecommuting, they can live and work where they want to retire, she says.

But there's work to be done before the tourists and new residents will come.

No part of the nascent park needs more polish than Megler Safety Rest Area. It's near the spot where, 200 years ago, a vicious storm pinned the corps to the shoreline for half a dozen days. Hence its name, Clark's Dismal Nitch.

Before the area can be developed into Clark's Dismal Nitch, much has to happen, starting with land acquisition. No one expects that until long after the bicentennial has passed.

Nicandri takes the long view. He likes to remind people that on the 150th anniversary of Lewis and Clark, all that existed at Fort Clatsop was the fort's replica. The trail, visitor center and parking came later.

"In 2016, 2026, no one's going to care that this wasn't in place for the bicentennial," he said.

Another Washington segment of the new national park, however, is very much in place.

The sweeping ocean views from 200-foot cliffs or along the 27 miles of beach at Cape Disappointment rival the natural beauty of any of the famously scenic national parks -- Grand Teton, Mount Rainier or Glacier. Two lighthouses guide ships past this notorious "graveyard of the Pacific."

The headland covers 1,882 acres of well-groomed hiking trails, beaches gleaming with tidepools, and campsites under a forest of cedar, fir, hemlock and pine. In 1805 Clark and crew pushed through what he described in his journal as "emencely bad thickets & hills" to what is now Long Beach.

Here, where the explorers ended their westward trek, Lin launches her Confluence Project.

Lin will "resculpt" a fish-cleaning station out of basalt. She also plans to plant native flora, nudge a parking lot out of the way and install a forest of totems -- each representing a tribe the explorers met -- around an amphitheater. The plans for the fish-cleaning station by Lin, best known for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., are nearly complete.

A memorial at Cape Disappointment -- this one to President Jefferson, who sent Lewis and Clark to explore "the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purpose of commerce" -- is another matter. There's no plan for its design, no artist working on it. Envisioned as the bookend to St. Louis' famed Gateway Arch by architect Eero Saarinen, the Jefferson memorial awaits momentum and money.

National parks aren't anointed every day. Along with years of pushing by politicians, historians, businesspeople and others, it took the collision of two forces to create Lewis & Clark National Historical Park.

One: Timing. The park will be far from finished when bicentennial events reach the coast in November, but the anniversary made its creation a priority.

"We won't have another centennial for 101 years," says U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash. "If we're going to do it, do it now."

Two: State and national sites already existed.

With much of the structure and staff in place, the startup was smooth. Often with a new park, "you literally have to find where you're going to get mail," says Chip Jenkins, superintendent of Fort Clatsop. "We have a huge leg up on that."

In addition, there's a movement to tweak the name of the park to Lewis & Clark National and State Historical Parks -- with the plural acknowledging the states' involvement, Jenkins said.

Still, just as it is at national sites from Crater Lake to the Statue of Liberty, money will be tight as workers balance maintenance, staffing and security. No brochures with the park's new name will be printed until staff members have used up the old brochures, Jenkins says.

In addition to a boost in the operating budgets of all 388 national parks for fiscal year 2005, the Lewis and Clark park will get still-unspecified financing as it gets up and running next year, Mainella says.

Budget crises come and go, but the bottom line for the Northwest: There's a new national park in our back yard. With it comes a deeper understanding of Lewis and Clark's journey to the Pacific Ocean, the people the explorers met and the impact they left. And it should be even better for the tricentennial.

"Our parks," says Mainella, "are the soul of America."