Tour Deshais: Descending through history

COLVILLE – After I crested one of the highest strips of pavement in Washington, I descended into history.

My speed reached 25 mph, 30, 35 mph, and I went back in time. First along the ancient footpath that transformed into a wagon train route and then today’s highway that I’m biking on. But I also went from the relatively recent destruction of a forest fire, to the recovery work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, to the days of the frontier when trees were first felled by industry.

The forest surrounding Sherman Pass at 5,575 feet was destroyed in a wildfire in 1988. The intervening 27 years have brought life back, but the spindly burned spires of the once grand evergreens stand twice as tall as the dense stand currently fighting for dominance.

The White Mountain Fire Complex, as it was called, engulfed Sherman Peak, Mount Washington, Edds Mountain, Bald Mountain and White Mountain. The intense heat shattered boulders and left a legacy of snags – burned lifeless trees that forest creatures still use for shelter. The landscape reminded me of my ride up to Loup Loup Pass two days ago, which is surrounded by an area destroyed by fire not even a year ago. A generation from now it still will be struggling to come back.

I had the road to myself coasting down the varying pitches, headed full bore to Lake Roosevelt, 23 miles away and at the bottom of the hill.

Camp Growden – also called Little America – was one of the many camps built to house the young men and women of the CCC. As one-third of the nation’s adults couldn’t find work in the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt created the CCC for the nation’s youth to do unskilled manual labor, generally in the forests of the West.

Trails were built, dams erected and roads put down to connect the country’s natural resources to its industrial centers.

Mainly, it was a way to get young people to work, and the program required them to send home the vast majority of their wages.

I could hear the coming growl of the logging trucks before they flew by me at an alarming rate. I gripped my handlebars against the trucks’ wind, which gusted around them as if they were their own planets with their own weather systems.

As I got closer to Lake Roosevelt, a dammed reservoir of the Columbia, I came upon the log flume of Sherman Creek.

The endless forest of the Inland Northwest supplied a timber-hungry world board-foot after board-foot in the early 20th century.

Trees were felled and transported out of the region either along the waters of the Columbia or by rail.

Hedlund Lumber Co. was the first to bring small, powerful locomotives to these woods, laying miles of track on the east side of the Columbia that delivered the logs to the Great Northern Railway transfer yard in Marcus. Human and machine worked in tandem to reap what nature sowed.

Henry Klopp, however, used nature against itself as the law of gravity and the buoyant property of wood supplied his 5-mile log flume the tools necessary to flush the logs out of the woods to a sawmill on the Columbia. The flume’s remnants are evident today.

At the bottom of the hill, I reached present day, and today’s work is far from over. I still had nearly 20 miles to ride before I reached Colville, and those trucks with all those logs have to go somewhere. Many of them likely will pull into the Boise Cascade plant on the east side of the bridge crossing the Columbia. Others continued south with me, to Colville and beyond.