Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. IV

Milepost 102 Continued

About a quarter mile east of Milepost 102, Highway 20 crosses Rocky Creek at the top of long, fairly gentle hill. The land on either side of Rocky Creek is U.S. Forest Service land.

On a hot spring or summer day, this spot in the road has the effect of a refrigerator. If you roll your window down as you near the bridge and cross the creek you can feel that the air is noticeably cooler and quite refreshing. This is a result of air, cooled by the creek, funneling down a narrow canyon about a quarter mile upstream of the road crossing.

This phenomenon has dramatic effects at other times of the year. Plants in the area bloom one to two weeks later than their counterparts just out of the effect of the cold air. And there have been a number of car crashes here over the years as the cold air lowers the temperature enough to form ice on the road, usually on the west side of the creek, when the rest of the road, out of the cold air effect, is ice free.

The constricted canyon above the road crossing has other effects as well. If you look out in the forest for several hundred yards on either side of the bridge crossing, you will see a number of dry stream channels cut into piles of gravel and boulders, covered with moss and grown up with trees.

These channels were formed over the years during floods when the stream exited the constricted canyon. Inside the canyon, there was less area for the increased volume of flood water. This increased the pressure of the water moving through the constricted area. The increase in pressure also increased the ability of the water to move sediment, kind of like holding your thumb over the end of a garden hose, which allows you to gouge holes in the dirt. When flood water exited the constricted canyon, the area increased, the pressure dropped, along with the water’s ability to move sediment and the boulder and gravel fell out of it in piles. Stream channels were cut in these sediment deposits by the lower flows of the flood that deposited them or by later floods.

The Rocky Creek bridge has washed out at least several times I am told. The last time was before I was born during the Columbus Day storm of October, 12th 1962. It has been channelized with riprap on either bank from the mouth of the canyon to below the Highway 20 bridge. This riprap has held up for many years but at some point it might fail under the right conditions.

Near the east end of the Rocky Creek, the Rocky Creek Trail into Cow Heaven takes off up the ridge. I have been told that this is the trail the Skagits, or the local bands of Skagits, used to access the part of Cow Heaven that they burned to enhance the blueberry crop. So this trail might actually be hundreds of years or even millennia old and predate European contact. We know the area today as Cow Heaven but it sounds like it was an important food gathering place for the local Skagits and I imagine they had their own name for it, though I don’t know what it was or is, maybe this knowledge still exists. There is more on Cow Heaven and the Rocky Creek Trail in my posts “Know Your Forest, Cow Heaven” of 7/2/13, and Know Your Forest, Cow Heaven Addendum” of 11/24/13.    

On the west end of the Rocky Creek bridge, off the west bound lane, there is a blocked off road. The road used to lead to a house that sat at the bottom of the hill near the creek. The people who lived here rented the property from the Forest Service. As far as I know, the U.S. Forest Service has discontinued this practice. The folks who lived there by Rocky Creek were grandfathered into the rental but when the last one of the original renters finally passed away, the Forest Service had the house removed and the road blocked off.

On the east side of Rocky Creek, Highway 20 goes back down a hill. Near the top of the hill east of Rocky Creek, outside the timbered U.S. Forest Service land there is a former restaurant and current motel called the Totem Trail off the west bound lane. Some folks named Ed and Dot Johnson were the original owners and operators of this establishment. I mostly remember going to the restaurant to eat as a kid. The restaurant quit operating sometime in the early 1990’s I believe. The motel is still operating.

About a quarter mile east of Rocky Creek there is a corner in the road. Off the east bound lane on this corner there is a house and farm buildings. When I was a kid, the poor guy who lived here had the worst luck with his hay. He regularly got it rained on and quite often put it up too wet. Two or three of his barns burned down because he put up his hay too wet and it caught fire from spontaneous combustion.

Across the corner on Highway 20 from this farm, there is a black walnut tree. This tree marks the spot of my family’s homestead. There was once a house by the walnut tree but it burned down before my dad was born. Unfortunately, many of my grandma’s journals were destroyed when the house burned. My grandma was an avid diarist, recording all sorts of things from births and deaths and activities to the first blooming of many plant species as well as fires, and storms and floods. So a lot of information about the early history of this area went up in smoke. We do have one journal with entries from about 1914 to the early 1920’s I believe.

Supposedly, this black walnut grew on my grandpa’s grandma’s grave in Pennsylvania. I assume that it came out as a seedling with the family in 1887 and sailed around Cape Horn with them. If this is true, this tree is probably the last living thing to have made that ship voyage around Cape Horn.

The large fields east of the black walnut tree were part of the family homestead. They have now been subdivided for development. These fields and the ones behind them and the ones further east are or were collectively known as Windy Flats.  

Probably because of its position in the valley, Windy Flats often gets fierce Northeasters in the wintertime. It is a straight shot from here to the valley of the Skagit above Marblemount, even though the river itself wanders and meanders a bit. The valley above Marblemount is quite constricted and this serves to funnel and direct north and east winds straight at windy flats. You can also see almost straight east up the Cascade River above Marblemount from Windy Flats. This also undoubtedly influences the winds.

In years gone by, Windy Flats was well know for snowdrifts. The Washington State DOT used to put drift fences in the fields on the north side of Highway 20 to keep the snow from piling up here. This was discontinued a number of years ago, I am told due to liability concerns. I nearly didn’t get to work one morning about 20 years ago because there was a snowdrift across the road at Windy Flats. The drift was probably 6 to 8 feet high in the west bound lane. It was only about 3 feet deep in the east bound lane but the car I was driving at the time sat very low to the ground and I was just barely able to punch through after getting a run at it. If I remember rightly, there was a logging truck in front of me that broke trail a bit.

The year one of my uncles was born there was a snowdrift 18 feet high against the house where the black walnut stands. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was my uncle Ez. He was named after a doctor from Concrete whose hospital is now the Lutheran Church. The doctor’s name was Ezra Franklin Mertz. He was, in turn, named after a general in the Union Army during the Civil War. If there was an 18 foot drift against the house at Windy Flats, it probably took quite some doing to get there all the way from Concrete to deliver a baby, which would probably merit naming the baby after the doctor, though I must admit, this is all pure speculation on my part.

It is also not uncommon for Windy Flats to flood. One winter when my dad was a teenager, the Flats flooded and then it snowed. A lot of ducks were drawn by all the standing water and dad and a friend decided to go duck hunting.

As the story goes, they were sneaking up on the ducks behind a rise in the ground when my dad’s friend slipped or tripped and did a face-plant in the snow. Right then the ducks took off. My dad’s friend lifted his shotgun, a double barreled 12 Gauge to shoot. Dad saw that both barrels were plugged with snow and tried to warn his friend but too late. The guy let fly with both barrels and the force blew him back off his feet and into a snow bank.

My dad and his friend survived, though I think my dad’s friend was a little sore for a few days. The shotgun barrels also survived. They often end up peeled back in ribbons like a banana when they are fired when plugged. Maybe it was luck or maybe it was the design of the barrels. The design is what is known as Damascus barrels which are strips of metal that are twisted and welded together to form a tube. Dad ended up buying that shotgun a few years later and we still have it.

Milepost 103

Milepost 103 is on the bridge over Corkindale Creek. Corkindale Creek is in Windy Flats and runs through my family’s old homestead. Many people now refer to this whole area as Corkindale. Years ago the area was also referred to as Rocky Creek. The Rocky Creek schoolhouse was about a quarter mile east of Corkindale Creek and thus farther from Rocky Creek than Corkindale Creek. My dad told me the name of the guy that Corkindale Creek is named after was actually McCorkindale. Evidently the name got shortened over the years.

There is a small tributary stream to Corkindale Creek that flows in from the west near the valley wall, or base of the mountain if you prefer. This stream is sometimes referred to as Little Corkindale Creek but the older, and I think more proper, name for it is Pro Creek. I spelled this name as it sounds. I don’t know its origin or if it should be spelled Peroux or Perot or some other way. I have been told that it is Pro not Peroux.  The water supply for my family’s sawmill came from this creek and there was an old trail in this area that a man named Fred Trudell built to take his cows from the flats into Cow Heaven. In fact, I believe it was Fred’s use of Cow Heaven under a U.S. Forest Service grazing allotment that gave the place its current name.  

Corkindale Creek proper drains the west side of a large rock that sticks prominently out into the valley. This rock is probably more competent or harder and erosion resistant that the rock that once surrounded it so it wasn’t eroded away by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. This rock is called Newby’s Knob after a family who arrived in the Marblemount area a year before my family and homesteaded at the base of the knob. I have seen Newby’s Knob recently referred to as Corkindale by folks probably not very familiar with the history of the area. I have also heard that local bands of Indians placed a good bit of spiritual significance on this rock.

Maybe a quarter mile up from the flats, Corkindale Creek used to flow over a large rock, maybe 15 or 20 feet high and about half as wide as it was high, creating a very nice waterfall for a stream that size. When I was back home on leave from the U.S. Navy in 1986, I went up to look at this waterfall only to find that the rock had broken in half and the stream was flowing through the middle of the bottom of it. This rock had been intact less than two years before. In the short span of my life, I witnessed, or pretty nearly so, a major fracture in this great rock that had been, to all appearances, impervious and unchanged for hundreds of years or even millennia. I was by myself so I didn’t do any talking out loud but my thoughts were pretty much a stunned “wow”.

When I was a kid, a man named Bernard Hambleton owned most of the fields in the Windy Flats/Corkindale Creek area. He raised registered bulls and most of the fields were in use most of the time, either for grazing or for hay. Around this time we also used to see herds of deer, easily numbering in the 30’s to 50’s which is pretty rare, even in those days, for blacktails (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus), which is what these deer were. There are still quite a few deer around but I haven’t seen that many in this area since I was in high school.

Highway 20 is a long straight stretch when it crosses Corkindale Creek. This straight stretch continues for about half a mile past Corkindale Creek. About a quarter mile before the east end of this straight stretch, on the north side of the highway, there is a barn with a small apartment in it. In the easternmost stock pen associated with a this barn is the site of the Rocky Creek School. There used to be a twin Douglas-fir here. It was cut years ago and only the stub of a stump remains. I don’t remember how many years the Rocky Creek School operated, it was long before my time. I don’t think it was around for too many years before they decided to send everyone to school in Marblemount.

The son of some people who owned a café and tavern in Rockport, the locally famous Fish Inn, hit a deer on the highway here years ago and was killed. I don’t know a lot about him but I do remember that he and a partner were working a talc mine up on Illabot Creek when I was a kid.

About 100 yards or a little more east of the old Rocky Creek School site are the ruins of the house my grandpa built when he was 80 years old. He bought the Rocky Creek Schoolhouse from the School District for salvage, tore it down for the lumber and built the house from it. He had to cut a few new boards and timbers but most of what he needed he got from the schoolhouse. We moved out of that house when I was about a month old. My Grandma planted an ash tree on the west fence line near the house. Her ashes and my grandpa’s ashes were scattered under this tree.

Across from the old Rocky Creek School site there are rental cabins. The main building here is built in the style of a chalet. A guy named Wolf Lancendorfer lived here when I was a kid. He built the place and started the cabin rental business. One of his sons was a few years ahead of me in school. My place is just east of here and across the highway from the ruins of my grandpa’s house.

Just a little farther east is a sharp, 35 mile-per-hour corner. There is a business that sells honey near this corner and it is often referred to as the honey corner. The older name for this corner is Curnutt’s Corner.

Because it is so sharp there have been many car crashes at Curnutt’s Corner over the years. My dad had a story that I only half remember about a friend of his went to Concrete for the first day of school there (everyone around Marblemount went to school there until about 8^th Grade, I don’t remember which, and then went to Concrete for the higher grades), quit school and hitchhiked back home. He caught a ride with a guy who was working on Ross Dam I think, who was headed back up to work. Evidently this guy had had a little too much to drink or maybe wasn’t very familiar with the road because he didn’t make Curnutt’s Corner and piled his car up. My dad’s friend wasn’t hurt but this was the second or third time he’d gotten a ride hitchhiking to have the driver crash. He made some comment like “I can’t catch a ride with anyone who knows how to drive.” He still didn’t go back to school.

Curnutt’s Corner is where the old road to the O’Brien ferry landing meets the current Highway 20. The O’Brien place was on the other side of the river here and a creek on that side of the river bears their name. Midge O’Brien was the postmistress for Marblemount for many years and, from what I hear, regularly operated the ferry by herself to get back and forth across the river.

My Uncle Bud lived in a house near Curnutt’s Corner. At one time it sat much closer to the road. Uncle Bud didn’t want to be so close to the road so he cut the house in two with a powersaw (chainsaw), moved the two parts back from the road and reconnected them. The house is still there today.

This whole area is now often referred to as Corkindale. As I have already noted the Rocky Creek Schoolhouse was further from Rocky Creek than it was from Corkindale Creek. I seem to remember old timers often referring to the area as Rocky Creek. This stream seems to be the significant one that everyone used as a marker years ago. When everyone still had a land line phone, the phone prefix here was (and still is) 873, the same as Marblemount. The mailing address here, however, is Rockport, zip code 98283. I don’t recall exactly how the voting districts were set up.

At Curnutt’s Corner, the road turns to the northeast and there is a short straight stretch before some short turns in the road. There is a resort here called Clark’s Cabins and the road serving it is called Clark Cabin Road.

At one time this area was known as Bullerville. I don’t think it was ever a serious attempt at establishing a town. There was a dance hall here with a regular dance floor and where they had dances on Saturday nights. My grandpa played fiddle and guitar and I assume he played here.

Most people I know who remember this place had very fond memories of it. It sounds like people had a lot of good times there. I have heard of epic drunkenness and partying here, not, I am sure, that this was all that was going on. I think this was the only place for public entertainment for miles around when transportation was very limited so Bullerville kind of had the entertainment market cornered. My dad and his friends and brothers used to entertain themselves when they were kids by observing all the drunks. Dad had lots of amusing stories about inebriated people at the dances.

This was back in the days of bottle refunds and dad said they could get a significant amount of money for a little kid in those days by collecting the bottles after a big dance.

I don’t know when the dance hall closed. I assume it was sometime in the 1940’s. I think that there a quite a few people around who remember this place so there are probably quite a few stories still around.

There is a slough on the river here that is known as Buller’s slough.

About a quarter mile east of Clark’s Cabins is Milepost 104 which will be covered in the next post.