Climbing Wendover Ridge

Down Lochsa Canyon

On the morning of 15 September 1805, Toby, the Corps’ Lemhi Shoshone guide, led the party down the canyon “over Steep points rockey & buschey as usial,” according to Clark. Private Whitehouse added that they “crossed Several Springs and Swampy places covred with white ceeder and tall handsom Spruce pine, which would be excelent for boards or Shingles.”

Those “Steep points” where the river has shouldered its way between rocky mountainsides, are marked today by road cuts, which were necessary in order to make room for the highway that was completed through this stretch during the 1950s. Late in the 19th century the creek and the small pond were named Papoose and Whitehouse, respectively.

The “white ceeder” was the western redcedar; which is the more suitable for shingles and boards. The “tall handsom Spruce pine” was the tall (50 to 100 feet), fragrant, dark-green Engelmann spruce–”slender as a church spire.”^[1]Donald Ross Peattie, A Natural History of Western Trees (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), 135, 217-18. Peattie believed (p. 218) that at their Clearwater Canoe Camp the Corps of Discovery … Continue reading This tree’s straight stems have often been used as telephone poles, though its most sublime destiny, owing to its singularly resonant quality that derives from the consistently fine, soft, straight grain, has long been used for violin bodies and piano sounding boards. In the 1990s many Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii Parry ex Engelm)^[2]Picea [pie-SEE-a] is a Latin word for spruce; engelmannii [eng-gull-MAH-nee-eye] commemorates the German physician and botanist George Engelmann (1809-1884), of Saint Louis, Missouri, who was an … Continue reading stands throughout the Bitterroots were decimated by an infestation of spruce bark beetles.

From 1200 feet in the air the river that Lewis and Clark later named “Koos koos kee”–which they understood meant “clear water”–looks placid, but at water level it is a continuous staircase of rapids that justifies the old Indian name, Lochsa, meaning “rough water.” Along the thin line of U.S. 12 the way is level and smooth. The narrow canyon floor, most of it no wider than the river, binds the highway to the riverbank so tightly that the sharply interlocked curves warrant a posted speed limit of 55 mph.

The “springs & swampey places” that haven’t been covered over by the roadbed are mostly indistinguishable to the motorist’s eye, although one of those swampy places has been preserved as the Memorial Cedar Grove in honor of the conservationist and historian Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955), who camped there during his writing of the well known one-volume edition of the Journals of Lewis and Clark. That grove is on Crooked Fork Creek almost 2½ miles upstream from the point where it joins the Brushy Fork to make the Lochsa River. That means that the Corps of Discovery never caught sight of those particular ancient giants of Thuja plicata that thrill today’s travelers through the Lochsa Canyon.

The roads that wind through the mountains at center right and lower left are gravel-surfaced forest access routes to timber extraction sites. The light green areas are sites that have been “clearcut”–all trees have been removed, and seedlings have been planted that will in time replace the harvested timber. Forest access roads are also used by hunters and other recreationists.

Under the circumstances, one imagines that Clark kept only brief daily notes during the crossing of the Bitterroots, and hastily expanded them into permanent journal entries sometime later. Regarding the road they followed on the fifteenth, he wrote that it:

leaves the river to the left and assends a mountain winding in every direction to get up the Steep assents & to pass the emence quantity of falling timber which had falling from dift. causes i e. fire & wind and has deprived the Greater part of the Southerley Sides of this mountain of its gren timber, 4 miles up the mountain I found< a Spring and halted for the rear to come up. . . . Several horses Sliped and roled down Steep hills which hurt them verry much The one which Carried my desk & Small trunk Turned over & roled down a mountain for 40 yards & lodged against a tree, broke the Desk.

The horse “appeared but little hurt,” although there were “Some others verry much hurt.” In fact, his courses and distances for that day concluded, “Two of our horses gave out to day and left. the road as bad as it can possibly be to pass.” Today the Forest Service trail up Wendover Ridge is somewhat easier to follow, but its grade is still relentless, and it can take as much as six hours to accomplish the 3,000-foot gain in elevation between the river and the vicinity of the expedition’s “Snowbank Camp.”

John Ordway tells us that when they reached the top they estimated they had covered about ten miles since leaving the river. They “travvelled untill after dark in hopes to find water, but could not find any.” He remembered that they finally stopped, melted some of the old snow nearby to brew more soup, and “lay down without any thing else to Satisfy our hunger.” Clark, however, recalled that they also boiled some “Coalt meat” and made “Supe.”

Melting Snow for Water

It is a tedious and time-consuming task to melt snow into water and then bring it to a boil in order to cook food. It also requires much more fuel than ordinary cooking, making extra work for the woodchoppers. The process is all the more irksome for those who have been burning up calories in strenuous travel since dawn, all the while perspiring and exhaling water from their bodies, who now have little to do but stand idle in the cold and wait for the results. The ratio of snow to water content varies widely depending on the character of the snow. It can be as low as 100-to-one, but it may be three-to-one or higher. That is, a kettle full of snow might melt down to one-third to one-half of a kettle of water, at most.^[3]Today the water content of snowfall in the Bitterroot Mountains is measured telemetrically on a regular basis. By this means it is possible to predict the extent of local valley flooding that may … Continue reading

The horses were no doubt suffering more from the lack of water than the people. In mild weather an idle adult horse needs ten to twelve gallons of water a day. Given that, the animal can survive for three weeks or so without feed. Without water, it will die of dehydration in five days. Even Seaman needed more water than usual.

By “old snow,” Ordway meant that it had apparently been on the ground there since the previous winter. In modern terms it would be called firn, or névé, which consists of granular, partially consolidated crystals, and is in an intermediate stage between snow and glacial ice. It is possible that the snowbank which the Corps relied on for water had been around for more than one summer. The year 1805 was in the declining phase of the “Little Ice Age,” which had begun about 1500 A.D. and was to end around 1850. Except for the rare occurrence of temporary climatological anomalies, old snow has not been seen anywhere near the supposed site of “Snowbank Camp” in recent memory.

The company’s ration of water that day probably was no less disappointing than their entreés for lunch and supper. Portable soup was a decoction of meat—possibly meat “byproducts” such as heart, kidney and liver—and perhaps some vegetables boiled into a paste that was cooled, dried, and cut into cakes that could be reconstituted with water to make a clear soup resembling modern bouillon or consommé. If the men did not particularly relish portable soup, that undoubtedly was because it failed to satisfy their need for nourishment. For comparison, an eight-ounce can of “beef broth” today, when diluted with water, will make two servings, each containing a mere 15 calories—one-third of a day’s need for sodium, and no carbohydrates or fats, far from those men’s daily requirement of some 5,000 calories each. The horse meat helped a little, of course, but at its best it is not very fatty. No wonder they were “much reduced” in weight by the time they reached Weippe Prairie. (Even a 2,500-calorie supersized burger-and-fries from a 21st-century fast-food emporium would have fed one of those 33 hard-working adults for only half a day!)^[4]http://southseas.nla.gov.au/biogs/P000055b.htm, accessed 27 November 2004.