Lewis and Clark, Long Beach, whale bones, bears

Sun 20 June 2010
The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center is on top of an old WWII battery at Fort Canby, Washington. It is just a few hundred feet from the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse at the mouth of the Columbia River. We arrived half an hour before opening so we explored the battery first. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were co-leaders of the Corp of Discovery, but one had his Captain's commission not go through. They always pretended it did so their men would think they were equals. Their commission was to explore and map the drainage of the Missouri River and then go west to the Pacific Ocean. On the way they were to greet Indian tribes in friendship and catalog the flora and fauna they discovered. They journeyed by keel boat to the Hidatsa Village on the Missouri, by canoe to the source of the Missouri, by foot and horse over the Bitterroot Mountains and down to the Clearwater River, and by dugout canoe to the Pacific. When they got back all their clothes had worn out and they were wearing buckskins and the people greeted them with much fanfare and surprise since they thought they were dead. There were also two or three other groups commissioned to do the same trip, but they apparently never made it. Lewis tried to keep track of the men after their mission was over and sometimes thought people were dead who lived and published their journals many years later. One of the artifacts at the visitor center was a wooden tobacco box given to one of the men by Sacagawea. Sacagawea was the sister of the Indian chief who traded with the expedition for horses to carry their gear over the Bitterroot Mountains. If they had not made this trade they could not have continued the journey. Jean Baptiste Carbonneau was Sacagawea's baby son. He was raised and educated by Lewis, spent time in Africa, and died in the 1860s in Oregon on the way from California to Montana during a stagecoach ride to become part of the Montana gold rush. The long list of Indian tribes met, named, and vocabularies made, the list of animals and plants cataloged and excellent maps made by the Corp of Discovery is amazing. They even had a condor head they sent to Jefferson. In the northwest Indian villages sometimes raised condors from chicks and treated them like pets. They were curious and would peck at and play with almost anything.

Then we drove to Long Beach, Washington, which claims to be the longest beach in the world. There was a nice half mile long boardwalk and accompanying gray whale skeleton we enjoyed in the town of Long Beach. As usual the wind was strong off the ocean and it was so cold you saw everyone in jackets rather than bikinis. BJ and I drove to the end of the road on the peninsula and on the way north to Leadbetter State Park I saw a wild bear on the side of the road. It was in someone's yard in the middle of a dense spruce-hemlock forest. BJ wanted photos so I returned to near where I saw it and let her out of the car. I didn't want to overwhelm or scare the bear so I stayed in the car and let BJ do her photographer thing. Pretty soon what I thought was a lone black bear came onto the road followed by three cubs! The whole group was between me and BJ who was with another lady. Mama bear decided to lead her brood away from BJ and the bears came straight toward me. Mama bear moved over to the far side of the road when she got about twenty feet from me, and then moved behind me in the ditch on the far side of the road followed by two of the three cubs. I was careful not to stare at any of them right in the eye and turned my head away. One of the cubs came up to the front of the Vue, put his paws on the front bumper and hauled himself up to peek over the front hood at me two or three times before scampering off to follow his Mama into the dense woods on the side of the road. BJ got lots of bear pictures. She had been pretty grumpy about the rainy weather until the bear pictures--now she is happier. Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Canadian_Rockies_-_the_bear_at_Lake_Louise.jpg