>National Wildlife Refuge Centennial

Awakening Wonder

In the watery reaches of the Klamath Basin, a father and son explore the splendors of nature—and discover that finding the "right" answer can be as complicated as the refuge system itself.

 

After a long flight west to Eugene from my home in Brooklyn, New York, I was driving east up the rumpled rise of Oregon's Cascades with my 17-year-old son, Nathaniel (Nate to you, to his friends, and to himself). With each banked, looping curve, the roadbed narrowed and dropped away into steepening gorges with dense stands of firs. Fresh coats of snow sharpened the midday glare. Nate and I agreed that the big rented 4x4—Big Red—was just what we should be driving in these mountains. Even better, it had a CD player, and Nate had brought along his music collection.

Beginning some hundred miles inland from the Pacific, the Western Cascades are glacier-gouged volcanic mountains some 40 million years old, reduced in the intervening ages to talus foothills of crumbling andesite. They now lie in the shadow of the High Cascades' monumental profile of 10,000-foot peaks, the very model of a million-year-old volcanic range in its still-volatile youth.

I was here to explore the Klamath National Wildlife Refuges nearly a hundred years after the federal government set them aside for posterity. And by the end of the spring, Nate, representing posterity for this assignment, would be leaving high school and home. I thought it would be good to spend some time seeing new things together.

I didn't actually say any of this, though. Nate was bobbing his head to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, chewing gum, and taking in the scenery with green eyes he long ago learned to master. He was pretty happy just then with his innate Nateness—long and lanky, with feet that already filled size-11 shoes and hands that could palm a basketball. Seventeen-year-olds have their own Tao. If a parent is lucky, there'll be a few fleeting moments when your attention and theirs will focus on the same thing. But you will break the spell quickly if you deign to offer an opinion or a lesson about it.

As we crossed the mountains, forested slopes gave way to barer ground, lush fir to sparse-limbed Ponderosa pine, deep soft forest duff to crumbling hard-rock outcrop. The rains that soak the western slopes, some 65 inches a year, only rarely make it over the mountains. This leaves the sprawling Klamath Basin—4,000 feet above sea level but 6,000 feet below the mountain peaks—high and dry and dependent upon runoff from mountain snows to resupply its oasis of lakes, wetlands, and marshes.

The waters were plenty for the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin Indians. Amid the rough sagebrush of the high desert lay 350,000 acres of wetlands visited by pelicans, cormorants, great and snowy egrets, herons, ospreys, and waterfowl by the millions. Estimates are that at the start of the 20th century, some 6 million birds came through annually on migrations. The Klamath was the largest winter nesting grounds for bald eagles in the continental United States (as many as 1,000 of the birds still nest there).

The basin's chinook and coho salmon once made up the third largest salmon migration in the West. In its 90,000 acres, Upper Klamath Lake (the largest lake in Oregon) held bull trout and suckers; tall stands of tule grasses, a native bulrush that could be woven into baskets or canoes; and the plentiful yellow water lily called wocus, the seeds of which could be ground into flour. Lower Klamath and Tule lakes had 186,000 acres of wetlands. Here gravitated golden eagles; ibises; snow, Ross', white-fronted, and Canada geese; pintails; grebes; mallards; gadwalls; canvasbacks; and terns.

As they did everywhere they went, amazed pioneers wrote rapturous accounts of the basin's abundances: Come one, come all. Don't worry about the endless cold winters and the hot high-desert summers. The Indians were another story. The tribes protected their fertile homeland, holding off settlers and soldiers with an implacable ferocity. Although a treaty officially ended hostile encounters in 1864, its terms voided the tribes' claims to all land but an 800,000-acre reservation and access to the Klamath waters and resources. The Modocs, who didn't care for this arrangement, fought on until their final capture 10 years later. The victors, however, ignored the spoils. In one of the West's least successful land rushes, the next 35 years brought in only some 500 settlers.

Nate removed his headphones.

"How long till we're there?"

"Take a look at the map."

We pulled off the road and figured it would be at least another hour to our destination, a little town on the northwest shore of Upper Klamath Lake called Rocky Point. The main road was a circuitous one, but a small Forest Service road seemed to lead there directly. The question was whether the road was completely snowed under.

"We've got four-wheel-drive," said Nate.

"We'll give it a try."

We found our turnoff—no music now, Nate was into this little adventure—and followed a set of frozen tire tracks. As we came through a stand of trees aglow in the late light, Nate said, "Dad, look." I stopped. A distant bulging snow-covered peak seemed to be afloat on the snowfields surrounding it. It was huge. That's all there was to say. We looked at the map and identified it as Mount McLaughlin—at 9,500 feet, the highest peak in southern Oregon, a young volcano just 25 or so miles from us.

Nate climbed down out of the 4x4 and, either from being cooped up so long or from the excitement of the scene—out alone in cold, snowbound woods; a volcanic peak with a supernal bearing hogging the whole horizon—he began to run. "I'll see what's up ahead!" he shouted. And he was off on his long legs, fairly hurdling snowbanks.

When he returned, still running, he was out of breath. "Wow. Amazing. The snow just gets, like, deeper and deeper up ahead. I think we have to turn around."

We reached Rocky Point long after dark. Jerry Feliciello, who owns Rocky Point Resort, had left keys to the cabin where we'd be spending the week. It sits on the west shore of the lake, where Crystal Creek wanders in and out of the tule-grass beds. There'd be time for exploring later: We unpacked Big Red, ate some peanut butter crackers, and got to sleep.

The settlers who finally arrived in the Klamath dreamed blissfully of, as one newcomer put it, "a great country full of fruitful small farms." The problem was that—agriculturally speaking—the Klamath was a nightmare: barely 12 inches of rain a year, frosts that lingered into the summer, a short growing season, and too-dry-for-prime-time soils. But with good homesteading land in the West running out, western politicians and manufacturers looking for new markets persuaded the U.S. government in 1905 to step in to fulfill these landholders' dreams. The Project, as it became known, would pump, channel, drain, dike, dam, and divert enough water from the Klamath system to flood-irrigate more than 200,000 acres. The promised land and the promised water produced crops.

The Project also wreaked havoc with the wetlands. Within 10 years the Lower Klamath had been reduced by two-thirds, to 30,000 acres. The chinook and coho were nearly gone. Market and feather hunters were murdering birds at a tremendous rate. At the same time, the government looked to preserve what it could. In 1908 it established the first of the Klamath national wildlife refuges. Over the next 50 years it would create an archipelago of refuges surrounding the farmland and pastureland, which had replaced nearly 80 percent of Lower Klamath and Tule lakes' 186,000 acres of wetlands and halved the migrating bird population.

The Klamath Basin is about the size of the state of Massachusetts, so Nate and I spent much of the next week in Big Red. Musical interludes became fewer as Nate, born and raised 3,000 miles away on the streets of New York, became engrossed in the alien scenery.

Upper Klamath National Wildlife Refuge hugs the northwest shore of Upper Klamath Lake, providing its last best nesting habitat and the major source of water for the wetlands below. Despite its size, the lake is shallow, and a few inches' difference in its level can affect its trout and endangered Q'apdo and C'waam mullet species. These, along with vanishing salmon, are all that remain for the Klamath tribes. Fighting to preserve this last bit of their legacy, they take only two mullets each year, for ceremonial purposes.

Along the edges of Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge we watched white pelicans hop along with wings spread, pairing up amid young marsh greenery, while pintails, canvasbacks, and eared grebes scuttled about, discomforted by the cold. When a distant farm field began to simmer, we hopped out and quickly recognized hundreds of browsing snow geese. Nate took the binoculars and stepped slowly forward until the massive gaggle, after a shuddering succession of wings, arose in a white blizzard. Nate took chase. To understand a stream you have to wade into it; to understand the grand flight of spring, you have to run with it.

Yet even as the high flat country began to share its secret joys with a young man, its shame also became apparent. There is no greater shame than that of Tule Lake, a slatternly body of water from which the life has been drained. Tule Lake, which during peak runoff once covered 100,000 acres, now covers barely 13,000. Surrounded by hobgoblin lava-bed formations, ditched by irrigation canals, even the grazing mule deer seem to take pause and pity over the devastation of what was once one of the most vital wetlands in the West.

When we stopped for breakfast in the Western-movie-set town of Merrill, Oregon, animated conversations in the diner revealed a rebellion brewing. Due to the current drought, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had decided not to allow any water releases, neither for irrigation nor for diversion to the wetlands. This, to preserve streamwater for the endangered mullet and salmon. The farmers knew full well that without irrigation, their farms would not produce, their fields would turn to dust. Protests formed. The local radio station handed out black ribbons. On the air, between country music songs, correspondents reported from the county courthouse and the fairgrounds, where thousands had gathered. Their message was simple: The basin's way of life was threatened by those who put the interests of fish ahead of humans. After we left, the tempest burst its teapot. A couple of vigilantes uncapped the locked valves and released water.

photo by Andy Anderson

Ignorance of the problems facing the Klamath Basin would be bliss. Natural resource agencies attempt to allocate water for farms and tribes and fish from a supply that has never been sufficient for all, even under the best of circumstances. In 2002 the farmers were given their full allocation, but it proved to be yet another drought year. Water flows hit a record low and, by the end of the summer, salmon were jammed together in rivers, with not even enough water to navigate gravel sandbars. The warm, shallow water allowed parasites and bacteria to thrive, and disease struck: 34,000 salmon and other fish died as they attempted to migrate upstream (see "Salmon Stakes," Incite, March 2003).

As Nate put it, "It's like the movie The Matrix. You see the beauty of the place, the nature of the place. But what you see doesn't give you a clue as to what's really going on. The more you learn, the more involved you get. I know you've got to save the fish," he said, "but I feel sorry for the farmers who live here. They work their asses off, and then they lose their crops. Like, what do they do?"

On our last day of the trip, Nate asked if we could go over to Greg Trouslot's. Trouslot had appeared at Rocky Point our first day there. He climbed out of his pickup as if he were stepping down from a big rig. With the leathery look of a weathered waterman and a cowpoke's lean and hungry demeanor all concentrated in his thick gold mustache, Greg Trouslot loomed large. He was introduced to us as a fellow who knew the lakes and forests in the Klamath as well as, probably better than, anyone. When we told him the wind had been too fierce for canoeing, he offered to tow us to more protected waters.

On the lake, Trouslot's voice resonated above the noise of the outboard. When a passing snow squall enveloped us in its haze, the lack of visibility never put him off his course or his conversation. In a patch of tule grass that Trouslot said would be seven feet high by summer, Nate and I got into the canoe to face up to the gusting winds and jagged chop. Nate was no novice with a paddle and we made decent headway, but his bare hands began to feel the freeze. After an hour of wind-tossed paddling, we tied up and headed back.

At Trouslot's house among the aspens overlooking the lake, birds and ducks filled the broad lawn. Trouslot was in the midst of building a lookout, a watchtower shaped to his own specifications, with ironwork shaped by his own large hands. Those hands impressed Nate even more once he realized Trouslot had used them to build the life he wanted to live, which, Trouslot said pointedly and to Nate's silent approval, "is just trying to lose track of time."

At the newspaper-covered kitchen table, his huge mastiff leaning against his leg, Trouslot talked of the possibilities of maintaining the Klamath's (and his own) refuge from the world at large. Rumors had it that if agriculture vanished from lack of water, a ski resort on the forested hillsides north of the lake may score the slopes with lodges and lifts. "And once change starts, it snowballs," he warned.

"A lot of people don't begin to understand the responsibility they have to a place, even if they don't live there," Trouslot said. He began guiding on the lake some five years ago. While he has done some catch-and-release fishing with visitors, he mostly takes birders around. He said, "I just want people to understand what it's really like."

A guide through the matrix, I imagine Nate thinking. He suddenly broke in. "It's like everyone dreams of what they see on postcards, but that's not what it's all about."

"People see it differently when they come out here," said Trouslot.

"When you consider what’'s been lost, what we're trying to save is just a small part," said Nate.

"What we need to eliminate is our intervention."

"So what's left can play a larger part."

I stayed out of this. These two were on the same page.

If spring had been delayed in the basin, high in the Cascades the coming season was not even in sight. Climbing 8,000 feet toward Crater Lake, 12 feet of snow covered the ground. But even this would not be enough. More was needed for the snowmelt to supply the basin's needs. But here was the picture-postcard nature, the scenery that visitors wanted in the background of "Here we are at Crater Lake." As Nate looked, I knew he now knew better, that the real life of the natural world went mostly, too often, unseen.

Bruce Stutz is the author of Natural Lives, Modern Times: People and Places of the Delaware River, and a former editor at both Natural History and Audubon.