Lesser Know History of the North Cascades Vol. III

Milepost 99

The area around Milepost 99 is also considered the Washington’s Eddy area. The west end of Conrad Road intersects the westbound lane of  Highway 20 here. Conrad Road, now a county road used to be the old east/west road up the valley. The old trail up Sauk Mountain takes off in this area. The trailhead was relocated several years back so people wishing to use it didn’t cross private land here against the land owner’s wishes.

Swift Creek, which drains Sauk Lake, flows under both Conrad Road and Highway 20 about half a mile east of Milepost 99. On maps this creek is called Barr Creek. Swift Creek is the local name for this creek. The Highway 20 road sign for this creek says Swift Creek as well. You can tell if someone isn’t familiar with this area when they refer to Swift Creek as Barr Creek.

I don’t know if the name Barr Creek predates Swift Creek or not. It is interesting that people, myself included, would stick so strongly with the name Swift Creek. It is not unique. Like Rocky Creek and Boulder Creek, there is a stream named Swift Creek in every major watershed in this area. Barr Creek would certainly be more unique but, nonetheless, if you ask me, the stream draining Sauk Lake is Swift Creek.

If you look in the right spot off the westbound lane of Highway 20 between Swift Creek and Sutter Creek, you will see a flat area cut between two low hills. This is the old railroad grade.

Milepost 100

Conrad Rd meets Highway 20 at Milepost 100. Immediately across Highway 20 from Conrad Road is a pull out and rest area called Roadside Park. This pull out is also a popular eagle watching spot during eagle season. The whole sweep of roadside park from its connection to Highway 20 on its west end to its connection with the highway on its east end is part of the old east/west road up the valley.

There is a Darius Kinsey photo that dates from about 1925, I think, that shows almost this exact spot on the road. Many features are still quite recognizable today. I believe the barn and farmhouse across the highway are original though the house is now hidden behind some poplars. The cement silo of today appears to have been built since the 1925 photo and is a different place than wooden structure in 1925. The mountainside behind the farm is quite different. In 1925, the ridgeline in the far background recognizable but most of this mountainside was logged and burned. There are a few patches of old growth trees but most of the timber on the mountainside is gone. It is heavily timbered today.

The Saint Martin/Saint Francis Episcopal Church off Conrad Road visible from the highway used to be Seattle City Light’s office/train station in Rockport. It was later moved to this location. I don’t know exactly when it was moved. The man who moved it is still alive.

When I was in grade school and high school there was a very big log jam in the Skagit River that roughly paralleled the Roadside Park pull out area. This jam had a lot of big red alders and maybe a cedar or two growing on it. It slowly washed away over the years, probably as key logs that held the it together slowly rotted away. There is a remnant of this jam, with alders growing on it, in the river near the east end of the Roadside Park, near the intersection with Highway 20.

A little further east are blueberry fields and Cascadian Farm’s roadside stand. When I was a kid this whole area, or at least most of it, was in strawberries. They used to hire the local kids on summer vacation to pick the berries during the short season. I never did end up picking berries there but a lot of my friends did.

I don’t remember who originally ran the strawberry operation here. It was someone local, who lived nearby I am sure. Towards the end, Sakuma Brothers, well known for berry farming at the lower end of the valley ran the operation for a year or two.

From this area you can see spot I have heard called “Meat Mountain” because there are lots of deer there. I have known many people over the years to get their deer on Meat Mountain.

Milepost 101

At time of this writing, a human made log jam is being installed in the area of this milepost and Cascadian Farm. The main force of the Skagit River is directed at road here and this area has a tendency to wash out. I saw river during several floods, one in 1996 and one other one, I don’t remember the exact year, where it appeared that the surface of the river was even with the tops of the concrete “jersey” barriers. This was an optical illusion of course. I don’t think those little barriers could have held back the river at flood stage.

Somewhere in this spot I think my dad almost cashed in his chips when he was a teenager. Dad and a friend were going to ride with three other friends to see a movie, either in Concrete or Down Below. When the car with the other three came to pick them, there was some kind of altercation and dad and the other guy decided they would just stay home. On the way back, the car crashed in the river in the dark. All three in the car got out but the driver ended up drowning.

The driver was well known to swim the river on a regular basis. They think he got disoriented in the dark and ended up on the other side of the river because they found some of his things on a gravel bar there the next day. They think he tried to swim back and drowned in the attempt.

The car was a coupe I believe. I know that it was really hard to get into and out of the back seat so they figured that if my dad and the other guy had gone on the trip they would have been in the back seat because they were the last to get in and they probably wouldn’t have made it out of the car. I was saved from being in a bad crash west of Concrete in a similar manner when I was a teenager.

On the gravel bar across the river here lots of buddleia or butterfly bush is beginning to take hold. As nearly as I can tell, this has occurred in just the past few years. There has been a heavy infestation of butterfly bush on Jordan Creek near Marblemount for years. I have just seen it in Diobsud Creek as well. This escaped ornamental plant is pretty but it isn’t native and it is very invasive. On Jordan Creek it formed a heavy thicket which appears to be partly shaded out now. I have seen heavy thickets on open sand bars in the Chilliwack River in British Columbia as well.

Some years back I heard a prominent lepidopterist, someone who studies butterflies and moths, promoting buddleia because it is beneficial for butterflies. Maybe we will have more butterflies. And maybe the heavy growth of the butterfly bush won’t affect anything else but I wonder if we will lose anything as well. Either way I think it is here to stay.

Just past where river is directed at the Highway, if one looks up above the west bound lane you can see a flat area that is the old railroad grade and a culvert underneath it.

Mount Chaval and the Illabot Cr drainage on other side of river are visible from the open area where the river flows toward the highway. The mouth of Illabot Creek is about a quarter mile downstream from this spot, roughly across the river from Cascadian Farm. From what I understand Illabot is anglicized Salish word that means “run them around” referring to the mountain goats the Indians hunted by running them around some cirques on Illabot Peaks until they were tired enough to get within shooting range. There was also a very big longhouse on Illabot Creek near the mouth that is well recorded by anthropologists/archaeologists.

I have also heard that the name “Chaval” refers to goats as well, though when I looked it up, the definition I found indicated that chaval is a French word for horse. Mount Chaval does have a vague resemblance to a horse’s head but the resemblance is not nearly as dramatic as Whitehorse Mountain in Darrington.

My Grandpa and Great-Uncle ran trap line in Illabot Creek area and witnessed a massive landslide that filled in almost all of Illabot Lake or at least witnessed the aftermath of this slide. There are more details about this and other interesting geological features in this watershed in my blog post “Birthday Trip” of  8/7/13.

Just past the open area along the river there are some fields. This is the Hooper Place. My uncle Ezra or Ez, as everyone called him lived here for many years. I have heard that he bought this place with retro-disability money for wounds received during WWII.

Before he owned this place, maybe when Hoopers  still owned it, supposedly 40 acres were lost from it overnight in a big flood. I am guessing what happened is that the main channel of the river was further south in one of the many old river channels on the south side of the river that are now sloughs and it shifted into the channel of a slough near its present location during the flood.

I understand that this is how our streams often migrate. They abandon channels during floods, often reoccupying old abandoned channels which have become sloughs. The most recently abandoned channels in turn become sloughs, which provide a lot of important habitat for fish and wildlife. At some point, during another flood, the stream will reoccupy the old abandoned channel/slough and abandon the new channel and the process repeats itself.

Streams also migrate slowly or rapidly by cutting away at their banks. One can see this process happening in the open area along near Milepost 101. Where the river is flowing roughly north/south and directly at the highway, it is slowly cutting into the bank on its west side. You can see the trees on this bank leaning at various stages of falling into the river. The bank on its east side here is slowly growing toward the west, accumulating sediment that falls out in the slower water.

Uncle Ez claimed to have seen wolverines on two separate occasions on his place, just across the river from Illabot Creek years ago. My dad claimed to have seen wolverines on two different occasions on Illabot Creek about 20 years ago as well and I heard of someone from Darrington also claiming to have seen a wolverine in this area. I myself have seen some suspiciously wolverine-ish tracks in the snow in the Illabot area.

I hear that wolverines have recently been “discovered” or “rediscovered” in the North Cascades. I have been hearing about wolverine sightings in the Illabot area for decades. Of course, the people making these sightings weren’t scientists (a criticism I have often heard) and some of the observations were possibly misidentifications, including my own, but when you have a lot of sightings by different people in a given area, I think that would lead most reasonable people to a least suspect there might be something worth investigating there.

It seems to me that some scientists make very good use of the observations of lay people when they can get them, while others ignore these types of observations. Of course, if the scientists were to take every sighting as absolutely true, they would be flooded with a lot of useless information and end up wasting a lot of time and effort. I also know a lot of people who see some pretty rare animals or what they think are rare animals and don’t report their observations out of fear of kneejerk reactions and further land use restrictions. I sometimes wonder how wise it is to let others know about some of the things that I come across.

Milepost 102

On the north side of the westbound lane in the vicinity of this milepost there is a large flat full of Himalaya blackberries (Rubus discolor) and smaller, skinny trees. The flat is maybe a quarter mile long and there are several houses on it.

When I was in grade school the area of this flat was a helicopter landing. I remember the flat being treeless with cold decks of logs and a helicopter occasionally parked there. I vaguely remember something being special about the helicopter logging here, maybe it was the first helicopter job in the state or the county. The story goes that a guy bought some timber land up on the side of the mountain here but when he went to build a road in to get the timber, he couldn’t get a right-of-way to do it. So he had to resort to helicopter logging to get his timber out. I was recently looking at some old Metzger maps of the area that show mining claims in the area that was logged. Timber rights often go with mining rights so maybe that had something to do with the whole thing.

I seem to remember the flat near Milepost 102 being used as a helicopter landing several times. From the other side of the valley one can see the helicopter logging units from where the logs were flown to the landing in the flat at MP 102. They are quite grown up now but you can still make them out if you know what you are looking for. One of the units has grown back mostly to hardwoods and makes a distinct patch on the mountainside. The other unit has grown back mostly to conifers but, if you look closely, you can still see the cutting lines where the younger trees are much shorter. These units are much more visible when there is snow on the ground.

The flat near Milepost 102 is not actually flat. It, and the road, lay on a long, fairly gradual hill. At the top of this hill, Highway 20 crosses Rocky Creek. More on Rocky Creek in the next Lesser Known History Post.

P.S. Over the last several weeks I have noticed a lot of needle cast in Douglas-fir over a wide area. I only noticed this because I have been keeping my eye on several patches of Douglas-fir with root rot which causes chlorotic (yellowing) needles and needle cast and increased susceptibility to wind throw. I noticed a lot of trees in these patches were dying, then I noticed the needle in trees all along Highway 20.

I don’t know if this is an ordinary seasonal thing that I have just noticed (healthy western red cedar looks very bad in the fall when the old foliage turns red and dies back) or if it is something new and different. If it is not an ordinary seasonal thing, there are any number of things that could be causing this, increased spread of fungal root disease, insect damage, (hopefully not some exotic pest) or stress reaction to the kind of strange fall and winter weather we have been having to name a few. I have heard that several studies recently have shown that tree death has recently increased.

Roadside Park area, Milepost 100, circa about 1925.  D. Kinsey Collection, Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham, WA. 

Roadside Park area circa about 2008. In black and white for easier comparison. The barn appears to be about the same. The house is the same but it is hidden by poplars in this photo. The silo in this photo is made from concrete while the one in the previous photos is wooden. The view point of this photo is a little closer than the previous photo. The ridge line in the background is easily recognizable. Note how much the timber on the hillside has grown back. The hillside in 1925 was almost bare. 

Same as previous photo in color. Color is blown out because this is a scan of a poor print. The car in the foreground is a Nissan. Did Nissan even exist as a company in 1925? They definitely weren't making cars that could be exported to the U.S. and compete on the American market. 

Skagit River just upstream of Milepost 101. The river is flowing north to south in this photo and cutting into its western bank. 

Skagit River just upstream of Milepost 101. This is a closer view of the east bank here where sediment is accumulating as the river cuts and migrates west. 

Skagit River just upstream of Milepost 101. This is a closer view of the west bank here where the river is cutting and migrating. Note the cottonwood trees leaning over the river as their roots are undercut. These are all new since last fall. The previous line of leaning trees fell into the river this winter. Also note the many trees with broken tops due to increased wind exposure as the trees in front of them fell into the river. 

Skagit River across from Milepost 101. Thick growth of buddleia. These have just reached this size and covered the bar within the last several years. Later in the year, these bushes will have many bunches of lilac like flowers that attract butterflies, hence the other name for this plant, butterfly bush. The copious purple flowers are why this plant is prized as an ornamental. It is pretty invasive and will take over open areas rapidly. 

Looking downstream on the Skagit River from Milepost 101 at the artificial logjam just built this year. 

Close up of artificial log jam. 

Wolverine tracks in the Illabot area? I don't know for sure. These tracks didn't appear to be melted out too much. Melting would increase their size. The notebook is about 7 inches long. These look way too big to me to be marmot tracks but who knows? Melting snow can change tracks dramatically and maybe they were melted out more than I thought.