June 26, 2003

• So yesterday, while I was driving through Idaho, east of Twin Falls, I stopped at a rest area to eat some lunch.
  
  I happened to park next to an interpretive plaque (when will state agencies learn to practice better point-of-interest hygiene?), at a trailhead for a tiny trail that led along a part of the Oregon Trail. I-84 and I-86 are built, in part, along the old Oregon Trail trade route.
  
  I decided not to follow the traill, because I felt like I was in a hurry to get back to home sweet home. But thoughts of the trail were in my mind when I got to the next exit, which featured a place called Massacre Rocks State Park. Massacre Rocks? Who was massacred? Was it folks on the Oregon Trail? Was it the natives? Were they massacred on the rock, or simply near it?
  
  I pulled off and drove on down that road.
  
  I should point out that I-86 runs next to the Snake River, through a vast desert valley. It’s the kind of thing you picture in your mind when you think, ‘Desert Of The American West.’ A gray and brown landscape with all the charm of wadded and re-smoothed sandpaper.
  
  But it’s an interesting place, geologically, and ecologically, and anthropologically, since it’s a major trade route of right around a hundred-plus years ago. And a few tens of thousands of years ago, it was under water, as part of the giant Lake Bonneville.
  
  I entered the state park and parked my car (what else do you do at a park?). Right there, staring me in the face as I sat behind the wheel, was a sign that said ‘Geological Exhibit,’ at the foot of a paved trail leading to a cliff edge. Good enough for me.
  
  Following the trail, I ended up at another set of plaques, these ones explaining about Lake Bonneville and the fact that this section of the Snake River valley used to be under a volcano, and that the buttes that make the far bank are the old volcanic core.
  
  There was also an explanation of the giant flood that drained Lake Bonneville out the Columbia gorge, and how a break in the buttes on the far bank was a huge waterfall while this was occurring.
  
  I like hearing the story of the Columbia deluge, since I can drive a few hours from home and look at the geology and see where it happened. It’s real hand-of-God type stuff.
  
  Anyway. From my vangage point on the cliff, I saw some birds gliding around about eye-level. It was a group of three, one of which was far, far larger than the other two. After a few moments I realized that the wingspan of the large one was wider than the SUV parked on the bank below.
  
  Too big to be a heron… I was looking at a whooping crane. There were more in the water, and I eventually saw another one gliding around far up in the air. Giant, mammoth birds they are.
  
  I stood there and watched the one up in the sky for a while. There was nothing hurried about it; the long, gliding, even wing-gait, the elegant white plumage with stark black contrast. Poise and grace, control and easy efficiency.
  
  I’ve been reading up on the whoopers since I got home. It turns out the Idaho whoopers are imported. They’re part of an experiment to get sandhill cranes to raise the endangered whoopers, but apparently sandhill parents don’t know how to teach their adoptee whoopers about the birds and the bees. Whoopers so raised end up not mating or producing offspring. The smaller birds I had seen with the whooping crane were sandhill cranes, smaller only in relation.
  
  It also turns out that whoopers raised in captivity don’t learn to migrate, which seems pretty obvious after you think about it. So some folks have set up an organization that teaches migratory routes to whoopers and other endangered species raised in captivity. They fly an ultralight, to lead the young whoopers along the route.
  
  Which leads me to another topic: A movie I really really really want to see, called Winged Migration. Which is lucky, since it’s showing here in town right now. But I digress.
  
  I never did find out the story of Massacre Rocks, and had to read about it on the internet.

  • 2:11 am
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