La Nina has left a snowy quilt, over our mountains and valleys. Prodigious white erases landscape’s details. Minutia give way to wider swaths of bright snow and light or dark forest, over the varying slopes. Skiers and snowshoe travelers look to the close trail or the distant vista. Either way, the pattern of Earth and its history gets clearer.

    Thinking of the intermediate scale: where might we find the “Goldilocks” ski or snowshoe outing? That would be distant enough for some solitude, neither too distant or too high, with sheltering woods and far vistas. Let’s go to Trout Creek and Coyote Creek.

    The Trout Creek Road (Forest Road 2000-020) turns north from Highway 20, slightly more than five miles west of the Columbia River bridge. Coyote Creek Road (2000-085) is 1.6 miles farther. Gradients are moderate. Managers and hunters have kept these roads and their branch roads clear. The Sherman Creek Wildlife Recreation Area and adjacent National Forest are managed for mule deer winter range. To seclude the deer habitat, both roads are gated to prevent winter motorized travel. The slopes, north of Lower Sherman Creek are gentle to moderate, and bear a mix of open area and forest. That sort of landscape opens views, reveals the glacial history and avoids avalanche worries.

    If you are to understand the landscape and its history, you need a topographic map. The contour lines simplify the geometry, much as does the snow. Maps are a simplifying and focusing discipline. There are no better topographic maps than the US Geological Survey 7.5 Minute Series Quadrangle maps – Bangs Mountain and South Huckleberry, in this case. Microsoft makes them available on Terraserver. Navigate from: http://terraserver-usa.com/cmap.aspx?Src=0&T=0&PPD=8&R=15&C=11.

    Start up the Trout Creek Road. As you climb close-spaced contours up to flats of wide space, you are going up the face to gain the surface of a terrace. These are not long stair steps, but small remnants of shorelines and floodplains. Short term flooding and landsliding have collapsed the material between the remnants. Each higher level is older than the one below. Since the terraces are built of sediment, rather than carved from bedrock, a temporarily high lake or glacier level destroys lower terraces. On the way to Trout Lake, you cross terraces, at elevations of 2,550; 2,810; 2,948 and 3,150 feet. Most of the levels correspond to lakes, which lasted for several decades beside the glacier occupying or blocking the valley of Sherman Creek. Lakes along the Columbia Glacial Lobe, should have outlets, to the south. The bottom of Donaldson Draw, southwest of Bangs Mountain, is very close to 3,150 feet. Northeast of Bangs, there are erosional notches, near 2,810 feet and 2,550 feet. One of the more prominent lake levels lies above Trout Lake at 3,315 feet elevation.

    Higher yet along the Hoodoo Canyon Trail, there are terraces of a different character. The soil is thin, and rock crops out on the faces. These may have been glacially gouged from layered structure in the gneiss. The answer may lie, across the canyon, in the Coyote Creek area. The only possible crossing is about one-third mile south of Trout Lake. It would be difficult crashing through riparian brush and up a moderately steep and thickly forested slope. (That suggests a route pioneering project for summer work.) Let’s just fly our imaginations over there.

    There is one match, at 3,580 feet. All of the other steps are disparate. We continue down the open slopes and 3,150 foot terrace, to the 110 road. Here is a long, bench, sloping to the east from 3,054 feet. If we stop and visually extend that slope, it projects to the 2,948 foot terrace along Trout Creek. We have found the valley bottom of an ancient stream. Below the old stream, we run out of steps. The drainage pattern splays steeply to the south and southwest. That geometry defines an alluvial fan. Fans are the product of intermittent, rapid flood events. After the terraces were formed, floods must have occasionally broken out of Hoodoo Canyon, carrying loads of gravel onto the fan. Later drainage settled down to smaller quantities, but more steady flow. That was the environment for Trout Creek to cut its gorge into the fan.

    Comparing elevations may feel like staring at wallpaper. Combine it with a winter outing. There you have the joy of finding things out.

The North Columbia Monthly provides news, views, humor and a calendar of events for an area that stretches from Nelson in British Columbia south to Spokane in Washington State and covers all points in between. A free (and free-thinking, progressive) magazine, The Monthly is available at several hundred spots throughout the region and now is also available on-line at www.ncmonthly.com. Published once a month since 1994, The Monthly is an independent magazine that often challenges contemporary wisdom by encouraging critical thinking about issues and attitudes in the region and beyond.

Featuring our one-of-a-kind "What's Happening" department, The Monthly provides the region's only all-inclusive, free listing of community events and is the first place many people check to find out about area arts, crafts, music, fairs, services and events of all kinds. Our open listing policy for the "What's Happening" department promotes diversity, cultural interaction, and the exchange of ideas and free expression. Also featured in the magazine are people, food, health, humor, and feature articles that keep readers coming back for more each month.

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