Making some research available

People who know me know that I tinker away on several areas of interest, tend to accumulate a lot of background material, and rarely finish a project by publishing it here, elsewhere, or creating a book or article for distribution. I won’t apologize for that since I truly enjoy the journey.

I appreciate the broad range of educational videos that Nick Zentner, geology professor at Central Washington University (Ellensburg, WA), has accumulated on his YouTube channel. His “Two Minute Geology” series is a great introduction to the Zentner approach to teaching geology.

One of Nick’s programs was recorded live above the giant ripple dunes at Crescent Bar, Washington. I watched the program along with dozens of others around the world. Nick, at one point, discussed a tree that is vertically lodged in a basalt cliff and several hundred feet above the current water level. He discussed how Lieut. Thomas W. Symons described the tree during his important journey down the Columbia River in his 1881 report. I thought it would be cool to go look for the tree and, perhaps, imagine being there, on the river, before the area was inundated by the Wanapum dam. I followed Nick’s directions to the site and found nothing. I asked Nick for clarification and he provided more relevant directions. My friend, Bill Layman, listened to my account of this unproductive search and volunteered to take me to see the tree using his small boat. We headed to the site on July 15, 2020 and I was able to see and photograph the tree.

As I discussed the excursion with Nick and on social media another man stepped into the discussion. Jim Mattila is an avid historian and advocate for historic preservation emphasizing Native American. Jim provided several links to article and, most interestingly, historic maps that document the Lodgestic Bluffs and the tree. I went down the rabbit hole and ended up archiving over 40 historic maps on my computer for future research. Thank, Jim.

I wrote up a short article that focuses on the tree and also documents journal entries by Symons and Samual Parker. I included a map showing the tree location but did not provide GPS coordinates of the tree location. I include several of my photos in the paper.

Nick recently contacted me about my images and asked permission to use them in an up-coming video (now released) about the tree. I granted him permission (duh!) and got a verbal recognition in his program.

Follow-on email exchanges with Jim Mattila encouraged me to make my little article available. I have put it online for download. You can access the publication on this blog site by clicking here. Please send me any comments or suggestions you have about the writeup. Thanks.