Barb and Dave's Western Tour: The Columbia River-Mt Hood, the Bonneville dam

The Columbia River -- Bonneville Dam -- Mt Hood:

Note the sharp escarpments in the valley leading down to the river.

Mamaloose Island: It used to be a sacred burial site for the Indians; after the Columbia was dammed, the parts of the island with Indian burial sites are all under water. One foresighted American had himself buried high up on the island, so his gravesite is still visible.

This plant is called the Oregon Grape - leaves look like holly, fruit like a grape.

Mt Hood

The Hood River valley is a popular place, too.

A really serious fisherman

Bear-Grass

Two-l Llamas, on the Double-Dutch Llama farm.

You know:

The One-L lama, he's a priest;

The Two-L Llama, he's a beast.

But I will bet a silk pajama

There isn't any Three-L Lllama.

(Footnote: The author's attention has been drawn to a type of conflagration known as a three-alarmer. Pooh.)

Windsurfers

Spongecrete; this was installed on a parking lot. An interesting idea: I didn't know you could make concrete that would actually let water seep through. That would reduce the immediate runoff in a heavy rain, and thus the amount of soil erosion. It may only work where there are no hard freezes, which there aren't, here.

The Bonneville Dam Interpretive Center (i.e. Museum; they don't actually interpret any foreign languages or anything, except occasionally some Indian stuff).

Another creation myth. The Indians certainly see something in the coyote besides an admirably clever, sneaky guy who lives by his wits.

An old steam engine

Baron Fersen, a Russian nobleman, settled here in the late 1930's, hopeing to start a community. He died before he could do it.

The spillways: Since you can't store AC current, the dam only generates power to meet the demand at the moment; the rest still gets spilled over the spillways.

They recently replaced the rotors on the generators on the south side of the dam; this is one of the old ones. They are really big:

Flood control is an important reason for the dams on the Columbia - there are 14 of them on the Columbia itself, and, they say, 500 dams along all the various tributaries - but the power generated is a welcome extra.

There's a lot to the fish business; every species is different.

They worry a lot about letting the fish get up and down the dams. These screens are supposed to let most of the fish get strained out and not go thru the turbines.

One of the features of the new rotors is that they have a clearance of only a fraction of an inch between the end of the turbine fin and wall, so that almost no fish can get thru that way. It turns out that if instead they get swept out by the fish screens (above) and go thru a chute - which most of them do - they're fine. If they go thru the turbine between the blades, they're generally OK too. The one thing that can traumatize them is if they slip past the end of a turbine fin; then, the more sudden change of pressure from upstream to downstream can upset their metabolism that little extra too-much.

The salmon were a little hard to see, thru the murky water. But there were these lampreys: