Bridging a Great Divide: The Battle for the Columbia River Gorge

Acknowledgments

xi Acknowledgments This book was born quietly and obscurely, on one of the many reporting trips I made through the Columbia River Gorge between 1999 and 2013. I didn’t jot down the specific date when I committed to writing the book. It happened at one of those moments when everything—the great impounded river itself, the majestic mists of its rapids, the hidden waterfalls at its west end, and the bold basalt cliffs to the east—shifted into sharp focus. For the umpteenth time, I realized how privileged I was to be working ground where history and prehistory had left such vivid markers. I was getting paid to chronicle the contemporary history of this far corner. The least I could do was write a book. The list of those who contributed to the slice of Pacific Northwest history I attempted to capture in these pages is long. It begins, I suppose, with Larry Peterson, my former editor at the Columbian, who casually added the Columbia River Gorge to my list of beat assignments when I arrived at the Vancouver, Wash., newspaper in the summer of 1999. History was being made that summer as the Washington courts debated the limits of authority of the 1986 Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act. Specifically, the courts were debating whether the Bea house, a house built in outright defiance of the act, could remain on its site, or whether it must be moved. The Washington Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the Bea house and Skamania County and against the power of the Columbia River Gorge Commission to order the structure relocated from a highly visible bluff in the heart of the gorge. The Bea house ruling was one in a string of momentous political and judicial tests to which the landmark Scenic Area Act was subjected in its first twenty-five years. Regardless of the specifics of these cases, in every one the law survived constitutional challenge. In the course of reporting Bridging a Great Divide, I had the opportunity to interview each of the six executive directors of the Gorge Commission xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and many of the commissioners named to the panel by the governors of the two states and the six gorge counties. These extensive interviews put in context the slow evolution of political attitudes toward protection of the 86-mile-long National Scenic Area, which spans the crest of the Cascade Mountains. I am particularly grateful to Chuck Williams, founder of the Columbia Gorge Coalition, a true visionary who called early for federal protection of irreplaceable gorge landscapes; Don Clark, who as chief executive of populous Multnomah County reached out to Oregon civic leaders, including U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield, to lay the groundwork for a regional gorge campaign; Jeff Breckel, who worked behind the scenes with gorge supporters on both sides of the river to craft a politically viable bill; and Jurgen Hess, a Forest Service landscape architect who grasped early the unique challenges the new Scenic Area Act would pose for an agency long accustomed to carrying water for the Northwest timber industry. In the new National Scenic Area, the Forest Service would have direction from Congress to place protection of scenic, natural, recreational, and cultural values above all others. I am grateful to Bowen Blair, the young attorney who served as the first executive director of Friends of the Columbia Gorge, for spending most of four years in Washington, D.C., recording the arduous legislative path the act followed in its improbable journey from draft legislation to passage by Congress. It was Senator Hatfield who ultimately persuaded President Ronald Reagan to sign the bill, even though it violated the president’s deep and fundamental support for private property rights. It was U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood, Oregon’s other powerful Republican senator, who rescued the bill from a disastrous plan by the two governors to water it down and render it meaningless. But it was Blair who gave us the colorful backstory, jotted down in caucus meetings and Capitol Hill hallways and midnight committee hearings that otherwise would have gone unreported. No book attempting the subject of the Columbia River Gorge would be worthy of the effort without a sampling of photographs that capture its diverse landscapes and the quality of its constantly shifting light. I shall be eternally grateful to the amazing nature photographer Darryl Lloyd of Hood River, who offered me the unrestricted use of twenty-five of his gorge photographs, each...