Horace Sykes loved orchids especially and there are nearly as many slides of flowers in his collection as there are landscapes.

In searching for this site I skimmed  the surface of the Snake River from the mouth at the Columbia through the roughly 130 miles upstream to it’s Clearwater contributions at Lewiston/Clarkston on the Idaho-Washington border.   About 20 miles down stream from Clarkston I found the site, or believed I had.

In the slack Lower Granite Lake, behind the dam of the same name, the orchard seen here far right has been submerged, and many others that once thrived along the banks of the Snake.  (Horace Sykes took his photo ca. 1950 when the river was still running free, and the fish were not confused.) Ladders that were included with the four dams built in this stretch of the Snake between 1948, when the site was chosen for the first one, Ice Harbor ten miles above the Columbia, and 1975 when the last three – Lower Monumental, Little Goose, Lower Granite  – were dedicated.

With the opening of the locks, Lewiston and Clarkston became  ocean seaports. In the first full three-year period after this “Inland Passage” was completed, barge traffic increased through Lower Granite from 559,000 to 1,422,000 tons – by now a nearly ancient statistic, and one for which I have no recent update.  Most of this was wheat that the railroads had formerly hauled, some of it to Puget Sound ports, although the commerce of southeast Washington was almost always more tied to Portland than to Seattle/Tacoma.

The Canyon drop here is on an average about 2000 feet from the wheat fields of the Palouse above to the lake/river.  Garfield Country is south of the river and Whitman County to the north.

When I returned to Google Earth to hunt a name for the contributing gully on the right I became confused and could not find my way.   Perhaps some reader would like to try and find this place again, starting with my suggestion (only)  that it is about 20 miles down stream from Clarkston, and about 12 miles south of Pullman.

The road along the north bank of the river is called the Wawawai River  Road. Wawhy we can imagine.  (Click to Enlarge.)

[Click to Enlarge]  When first I looked upon this Sykes slide I thought that it was most likely somewhere above Lake Chelan, and now after using – again – Googlecopter, it is confirmed.

That Horace Sykes also drove his Chevrolet up the Shady Pass Road from the Entiat River valley means that he reached the lake from behind.  Or did he?  It is also possible to reach these heights from the other end of Shady Pass Road at the 25 Mile Creek on Lake Chelan, this means that it is roughly 2/5th of the way up the lake from Chelan to Stehekin.   I doubt that it standard to ferry anybody’s Chevy up the lake to 25 Miles Creek, so I conclude – as introduced – that it is more likely that Horace got to this prospect from the south – from the Entiat side.   I name the prospect Grouse Mountain  because there’s a blue dot photo there that is captioned so.  The highest point on Shady Pass Road is a few miles northwest of this prospect and it is considerably higher.  This elevation is about 4,500 feet.  The Pass and its campground around 6,600 feet.  Lake Chelan is 1,102 feet above Puget Sound.

If I have figured correctly the mountain seen far up the lake is Goods Mountain, the highest point  in the North Cascades National Park, “the fourth highest non-volcanic peak in Washington, and the twelfth highest summit overall.” Quoting there from Wikipedia.

Mt. Goods has this added mystery.  In spite of it height, Goods cannot be seen from any highway.  It rests in a sublime boudoir surrounded by attendant (or at least watchful)  peaks that reach heights nearly its own.  Together they are not a massif – like the Wallowas in northeast Oregon – because this range continues on to all sides far beyond park boundaries .

A scene taken in the same direction and from nearly the same prospect as Sykes appears as a volunteered “blue-dot” photograph in Google Earth.   It includes what I imagine is an ironic caption.  “The east moraine before the houses go in.”  I doubt that this slope has since been dappled with houses, although the uses of Lake Wallowa have been sometimes exploitive.   This is Nez Perce land and by treaty it remained theirs until gold was discovered nearby and the lake and land around it was taken back by the feds for settlement – and the rest – in 1877.

The Nez Perce war with U.S. Regulars that followed was one of the last battles between “manifest destiny” and Native Americans, and led to the 1000 mile near escape of Chief Joseph and the tribe for Canada – but not quite to it.  It was the occasion of the Chief’s famous “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever” speech.  Now, in a mix of admiration and white guilt, Mt. Chief Joseph rises to the west of the lake as part of the massif known as the Wallowa Mountains, and the town of Joseph sits near the north end of the lake, in the direction Horace points his 35mm slide camera here.

To his left but out of frame, the south end of the lake is well stocked for tourists with lodges, cabins, marinas, and prepared food.  Both Hells and Imnaha canyons (and several more) are off to the east, and not so far away.   The several canyons that drain the Wallowas to the north are to the west and northwest of Wallowa Lake where one will also find the town of Minam.

Since Horace Sykes did not caption his subject, I needed some help.   With good effect I asked coastwise historian Gene Woodwick, and she helped track these jetties down.

Since Sykes lived in Washington I thought first of the Washington coast, but what ports are there along our coast with jetties that resemble these?  None.  Gene suggested I move to Oregon, which is where Sykes came from when he moved to Seattle in the late 1920s to take up a new job as an adjuster with Northern Life Insurance.  With Gene’s advice I started near the south end of the Oregon coast at Gold Beach, where the jetties are about 900 feet apart.   But they did not match.  Next I backtracked south to Chetco River – about 250 ft. wide at the mouth – but without success.  Then I Googlecoptered up the entire Oregon coast and found six more pairs of jetties – and so eight in all.  They appear in this order, south to north: Chetco, Gold Beach, Coos Bay (1700 feet), Glenada/Florence  (750 feet), Yaquina Bay / Agate Beach / Newport (1100 feet), Tillamook Bay (1200 feet), Nedonna Beach (650 feet), and Rockaway Beach (600 feet).  All those widths are approximate measures using Google’s yardstick.

It was not difficult to match the Yaquina Bay jetties, as looking west from the  north end of the Newport Bay Bridge’s great arch, as the correct choice.   We cannot tell, however, if Horace Sykes shot from a moving car or stopped for a moment on the bridge.  You may note the lone boat heading into port.

Considering only the similar sky and the convenience of being nearby, Horace Sykes might well have taken this canyon-scape on the same trip that deadended for him at Hat Point where he recorded the scene shown yesterday as Sykes #72.  Not typical for him, Sykes captioned both.  That one yesterday “Hat” and this one “Minam.”  We, however, are going to willfully suspend judgment on his “Minam” identification. We feel an intuition.

For those unfamiliar with Minam, it is a small town spectacularly sited at the north border of a braiding of canyons that resemble the curly regularities in the beards of Abyssinian war lords and/or dandies. We are familiar with those from ancient bas-relief sculpture and now here south of Minam we imagine them as seen from space, as on Google Earth, which is our authority in hirsute and other hairdressing matters as in much else, including topography.  These canyons drain the north side of the Wallowa Mountains, which are Oregon’s more than match in size and elevation for Idaho’s Devils, noted yesterday.  (And from the summit of Idaho’s He Devil to that of the Wallowa’s Matterhorn is a mere 40 miles.  Both are a few stories under 10,000 feet tall.)

Now we will once more ride that devil crow, this time from Minam to Hat Point, which is about 50 miles to the east and a little to the south too of Minam.  By highways and forest roads it took Horace 75 miles or more to reach Hat Point from Minam, but what a trip it was and still is – we imagine!   Along the way – if you are driving – you, Horace and anyone will have to cross through the Imnaha Canyon, which to greatly simplify it is one canyon west of Hells Canyon, and for many in its scenery a more sublime spectacle than Hell’s.  (Of course, we have not made any poll in this, but check it out and decide for yourself.)

Returning now to my intuition.  I was stirred or agitated that the Sykes subject printed here might be a look into the Imnaha Canyon, rather than one of the several Minams, but, again, I know very little and speculate much.  Still going back and forth between them, the melody to “Let’s Put the Whole Thing Off” sustained me.  “You like Imnahas and I like Minams . . .”  I did study via Google “helicopter” the Minam canyons “flooding” north from the Wallowas and twice came close to rising with a rousing Eureka from my adjustable desk chair!  But with both canyons an irregular feature upset my discovery and I did recant.  Still I was faithful to Horace’s lead – his caption – until I wasn’t.

So I returned to the Imnaha with a mildly guilty hope and to my surprise soon found a Google blue square (that is, a donated “click me” path to photographs) of the same subject and taken from nearly the same prospect as Syke’s own.   However, to place it on the back of that now feverish crow, the blue dot is located 25 miles southwest of Hat Point and 7.5 miles southeast of the south end of Lake Wallowa, and that seemed to me to be way out of place.  (Still there are not many other blue dots in its neighborhood and with those directions you should be able to find it.)   Add to its seeming askew that the errant blue dot also has its own errant title – alas.   It is named “Hells Canyon Oregon, 1986.”

Certainly, Sykes canyon and the blue dot’s own are NOT Hell’s Canyon.  Perhaps the Google Earth blue dot photo was donated by a tourist from California or the Netherlands: generous but confused although generally in the correct corner of Oregon State.  And for a while at least that is where we will leave Horace Sykes’ “Minam Canyon” as well, somewhere in that fanciful topographical mare’s nest* that is the northeast corner of Oregon State.

* Seen in toto (altogether) from space the northwest corner of Oregon IS a mare’s nest – except for those several canyons the run north from the Wallowa Mountains to Minam.  Those are an Abyssinian’s groomed beard.

Pleas Continue with AN IMPORTANT IMNAHADENDUM

Now I have returned to my desk about three hours later and found it!  My “intuition” or hunch about it being a look into Imnaha Canyon and not one of the Minams was right.  Below, I have grabbed Sykes view with Google Earths – for a pair.  The foreground will need some adjusting (Horace was a little lower than Google) but the more distance side of the valley – its west side as it is – lines up well between Google and Sykes.  It is also a good witness to the “gloss” of the landscape that we get with Google, which with all its polishing and burnishing is a wonderfully revelatory tool.

The trick to finding this was turning the map upside down – looking south – and giving Imnaha a chance while abandoning Horace’s caption.   Here he has recorded both a stream and road at the floor of his canyon  – good clues of course.  I soon determined that the road is the Upper Imnaha Road and the river, of course, the Imnaha too.  It joins the Snake about 20 miles downstream from the turns in the river we see on the right.  That confluence is about three miles above another where the Salmon River joins the Snake.

To get to his prospect Horace drove the sometimes precipitous one-lane gravel road up the east wall of the Imnaha Canyon – up from the Imnaha Store and Tavern and Motel and Roadhouse.  Google includes an undated blue-dot photo of the clapboard establishment and it is blazoned with a banner celebrating its centennial.  Horace took his photo looking south from an elevation of about 4200 feet.  The river is 2000 feet below him.

Horace was standing on the exhilirating Monument Ridge, it is called, that carries what Google names the “Hat Point Road” for several miles above yet another valley – one between the Imnaha and Hells canyons.  (Hidden here behind Horace.)  Where this unnamed (we don’t know it) valley reaches grade with Monument Ridge is where Horace turned east towards Hat Point for  the Hat Point Road’s last run up to its nearly 7000 feet high namesake.  The distance between the sweet spot where Horace took this look south into the Imnaha is – as our crow flies – about ten miles from Hat Point across the “Interstitial Canyon,” we are now calling it.

“What is the deepest canyon in North America?” was one of the cherished questions from the geography quiz my brother Dave and I would plead for when traveling long distances with our parents.  The answer is (and still is, I hope) Hells Canyon, the about sixty miles of it that cuts the border between Oregon and Idaho.

What mysteries we Spokane Lutherans imagined lurked in Hells Canyon.  My dad promised to take us there too.  Although only a day’s drive – a rugged one – from our home it was still “out of the way.”  We understand that such a promise is really the most heartfelt expression of a hope that one can make.  We all wondered at Hells Canyon and wanted to see it, dad included, but could never find the time to go just that way.   Not so its principal competitor the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

The Grand Canyon was but one National Park we visited on our summer trip of 1950.  We headed first for Yellowstone, and then onward to Jackson Hole, Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon, Big Bend, those caves in New Mexico, Sequoia, King Canyon, Yosemite, and Crater Lake.   Although Grand Canyon is surely grand  it is – again –  still not as deep as Hell.  But it is more often precipitous and also strapped or banded in many variations of red, a better color for Hell and Hell’s own.   And, again, it was “on the way.”  While barging through eleven national parks heading to and returning from Texas we did it in a brand new torpedo-nosed Studebaker.  I can still recall the prestigious smell of it.

Dad was a delegate to a church convention in Houston.  He also had a sister in Arizona we visited.  She fed us squab.  Our parents assured us it was a delicacy but we suspected that it was an economy.  Another of dad’s ten sisters lived in Wichita Falls, Texas, and we found her in a tideflat shack with a TV set stuck on wrestling.  Her son repaired TVs in a small shop downtown.  In that house a clear line ran from the front door to the back, and those were the only doors in the place.  The rest was hanging sheets.  I concluded that my dad had come from a family of struggling Wisconsin farmers whose biggest crop, their own children, had scattered to the winds.

There are only a few prospects above Hells Canyon from which you can see the Snake River.  This is one of them.  The river can be seen reflecting the bright but still confounded sky.   If I have figured it right, the drop here between Horace Sykes camera and the river is over 5000 feet.  If Sykes had turned his camera to the horizon on the right he would have included the summits of the Seven Devils, the most precipitous mountains in Idaho.  The fall from the 9300 foot summit of He Devil to the Snake is nearly 8000 feet – a fall of biblical dimensions, perhaps,  a continuous descent into Hell.   Some of the landmarks on that Idaho-side horizon continue the demonic motif.  There’s the She Devil (second in height to the He Devil), the Gobblin, the Ogre, Purgatory Lake, Mt Belial, the Twin Imps, and the Tower of Babel – a very spiritual ridge.  All of these mountains are strangely gnawed near their summits and the rock itself, because of it, looks like anti-matter might look.

On the other (east) side of the Devils is Highway 95 running north-south along the Little Salmon River.  I rode it in a post-war art-deco bus north out of Boise in 1964, a most enchanting ride.  Over the rolling hills part of the trip the two-lane but paved highway with grass shoulders (not gravel!) dipped with the topography like a roller-coaster.  There was hardly any deep grading through the hillocks.   And I took this trip early enough to experience the splendid collection of hairpin curves on White Bird Pass.  It was subsequently straightened in the 1970s.   Just north of the pass is the in the high-plateau of Nez Perce farmland is the Idaho agri-town of Grangeville. I first visited Grangeville when I was 13, a guest of my brother Dave when he drove down from Spokane on a summer weekend.  For me it was a revelation of teen lust.  The youths of Grangeville spent their weekend evenings slowing cruising up and down Main Street, a libidinous promenade of souped machines, hidden beer, pop music and carefully chosen clothes.

If you look to the far left horizon of Horace Sykes view from the nearly 7000 foot high Hat Point you see clouds.  Beyond them on a clear day you would see instead some of the farms around Grangeville.   Dave and I were then on Grangeville’s Main Street only 43 miles northeast of Hat Point (and perhaps even Horace Sykes for the timing was within range) as the devil crow flies over the deepest canyon in North America.  But at that time I gave it no mind attending as Dave was to other matters, and following after him.

There is something “purple” about the phrase “purple mountain’s majesty” and purple hegemony from sea to shining sea runs through the poem “America” by Katharine Lee Bates, a Wellesley College English teacher who found the poem’s landscape on a summer train trip to Colorado Springs in 1895.  The first lines came to her at the top of Pikes Peak.  She was not looking west then into the endless ridges of the Rockies but east from whence she and Manifest Destiny had come.  She looked to the fruited plains that were taking shape like a checkerboard with farms keeping to section lines set down by federal surveyors years earlier.   The poem’s clean-and-gleam urban visions came from recollections of the teacher’s visit to the “white city” of the Columbia Exposition in Chicago two years earlier.   “Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears! / America! America!”  (Obese on hogs and steers.) A century ago, this year, after many composing contenders her poem met the by now accepted music for it, and it is still preferred  by many to the official national anthem about bombs exploding and rockets flaring.  Samuel A. Ward, a choirmaster-organist did the composing, and with sheet music soon published – and 78 rpm recordings available too – America the Beautiful became a patriotic hit, concluding with lines that had forgotten the then still fresh slaughter of the “Americans” who had lived here for a few thousand years before it was possible to take a train to Pikes Peak and more easily shoot at them, the buffalo and later the Burma Shave signs.  “America! America! God shed his grace on three / And crown they good with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea!”  I loved singing about “purple mountains majesty” as a child, and always thought that it was much the better song – over the “Oh Say Can You See” anthem.  We also played lots of Cowboys and Indians, admired the Lone Ranger’s Tonto and the special skill required to ride bare-back, and knew nothing about the Native American genocide at the hands of both uniformed regulars and settlers.

One summer in the 1940s Horace Sykes paused for this parade in the town of Okanogan.  It is, we know, customary for military groups – active, reserves, veterans – to take their parts in community parades.  Here a local in overalls joins a parade with his dog (we assume it is his) and a sign tied to the dog, which is a pleasing pun on “post,” as in army post or veterans of foreign wars post, and any post for his dog to pee on.  It is a rugged example of country irreverence.    The next dog parading is going north on Seattle’s 4th Avenue and just passed over the center slot of the Madison Street Cable Railway.   The building beyond the happy parade witnesses is the old Carnegie Library – it’s southwest corner.  May we take a cue from the New Yorker Magazine’s cartoon editors.  (Continued below the two photographs.  Remember to Click to Enlarge.)

That publication posts cartoons without captions and offers prizes for what it considers the best ones sent in by readers.  Not big prizes – but still prizes.  Consider this, then, a challenge: a contest.  What an honor to win.  Prizes will be announced – if we get any captions.

When I received the Horace Sykes slides from the Gowey family in the mid-1980s I did not know its complexity, which these two slides will illustrate.  The top is one of those rare instances when Horace stamped his slide “Horace Sykes Seattle, Wash.”  This time he also identified the subject, although for that we needed little help.  He named it “From Magnolia Bluff, Seattle.”  The second slide was also labeled, and similarily.  It reads “From Magnolia Blvd. Nov. 17, 1958 – 1:p.m.”  It is not, however, signed.  The mounting for this second slide is also more sturdy.  We subsequently discovered that it is not by Sykes, but rather by Robert Bradley, a professional photographer with a competing interest in rare stones.  Horace and Robert were probably friends, and may have met through the local camera club, or church, or insurance (Sykes profession), or through Lawton Gowey.   When I learned that Horace had died in 1954, I needed to find another photographer for all those sturdy sides that were dated after the year of Sykes’ passing.  The slides themselves included many scenes taken from the Lamplighter Apartments on Capitol Hill, and with a little investigating I found a photographer living there – Robert Bradley.  Subsequently, I also found a slide among them with his name included in the caption.  The Bradley collection is not as large as the Sykes and his sensitivities are more urban and not so picturesque as Sykes.  But here they are standing in nearly the same place and looking in the same direction.

Horace Sykes visited Grand Coulee Dam a few times, both during and following its construction.  Here we have both.  The top view looks from the west (or southwest side of the pool) to the back of the dam when the top of its spillway was still not complete including the long and thrilling bridge that would cross it.  In the sunset view below Sykes looks to the northwest from the east (or northeast) side.   There the dam is complete.  Its principal structure was ready ahead of schedule in the spring of 1941, conveniently or strategically ready to supply power for the munitions factories during the Second World War.  Irrigation, one of the principal reasons Grand Coulee was built, was not a factor until well after the war when the big pumps, pipes, and canals were installed for irrigating large parts of the Columbia Basin.  (Click to Enlarge)

Sheep may safely graze
where a good shepherd watches.
Where rulers govern well
we may feel peace and rest
and what makes countries happy.