04-09-1987 Something a Little Different

Life has been a bit busy here at Sunset House, and I am having a bit of trouble setting into writing about our everyday life.  Nothing exciting, and hopefully I will catch up a bit with the fun of March and April.  But for now, here is the writing that is taking up much of my early morning writing hours.

 I’ve been spending some early mornings working on the book I am writing, and today I found myself back in 1987, mapping soils in Hells Canyon by helicopter…

Hells Canyon is steep and rugged.  This photo is from one of my soil pit sites

In 1987 I was detailed from my regular duty station in Coeur d’Alene to the soil survey for Nez Perce County. Because of that detail, I got to experience one of the highlights of my entire soil survey career, mapping Hells Canyon and the Seven Devils by helicopter.

We were assigned to map 100,000 acres in the wilderness areas of Hells Canyon, including the crests of the Seven Devils Mountains, a thousand feet above the Snake River. It was a roadless area with very little access. On the far northern edge, a few old dirt roads wound their way up to Wapshilla Ridge, where we would live for two weeks.

Six of us drove up in three trucks, loaded with everything we could carry, especially water. Once we went up, we weren’t coming back down. It took several hours to reach the ridge from Lewiston, and when we arrived, we set up camp.

Our base camp from the air

I was lucky. I had my own tent. That mattered. There were five guys and me, and while they were all good men to work with, that small space at the end of a twelve-hour day was mine.

Seem little blue tent a bit isolated on the left

That first night we sat around the campfire, all of us excited to finally be there. For weeks we had been working with aerial photographs, using stereoscopes and overlapping images to read the landscape in three dimensions. From those photos, we determined slope, aspect, and landform, drawing ink lines around what we saw as distinct units.

Pete Biggam, my party leader Tom Hahn and another guy I don't remember

Using grayscale patterns and the shapes of trees and shrubs, we made our best estimates of habitat types across each slope. The premapping had been both careful and imaginative work. Now we were here, ready to test those predictions on the ground.

The sun rose on that first morning with slanted golden light from the east. We had a quick breakfast at the campfire as we waited for the helicopter to arrive. The noise of the copter was striking in that wilderness silence when it dropped onto the ridge. The pilot threw out a large canvas bag and then jumped out of the bird.

The bag held flight suits in all sizes, required for the work, in spite of the heat and sweat that came with hiking and digging on steep, rocky slopes. After some digging through the pile, I found one that almost fit. I was a lot smaller than the guys.

Getting ready for our first flight

We spent the next hour in safety training. Most importantly, we learned how to enter and exit the helicopter without getting ourselves decapitated.

The work plan was for us to go out in pairs, with the copter dropping off the first pair, then leapfrogging to the next, and the next. Using our premaps, we had selected sites that we thought would represent the landscape. At each one we would dig a pit, determine the soil, and verify the vegetation habitat type.

From the air, those sites didn’t look anything like they had on the map. The mountains kept changing shape as we circled. What had seemed clear on paper became something else entirely in motion. It was fascinating.

Somewhere along the way, it was decided that I would ride in front with the pilot and help navigate, guiding him to our drop points. I never really questioned it at the time. I just did it.

I was partnered with Pete, a coworker who had only recently been assigned to the Coeur d’Alene office and wasn’t especially happy about being detailed away from his new home. Nez Perce County didn’t excite him much, but the helicopter mapping did.

Pete was a great storyteller. He told us about helicopter mapping in the lava fields of Craters of the Moon, including being dropped into what he swore was a rattlesnake den. Compared to that, we felt lucky.

We worked well together and respected each other, so I was glad to be paired with him.

When we were finally dropped off at that first site, loaded down with packs, shovel, and spade, it was a thrill. The thumping of the blades faded into silence, and we just stood there for a moment and laughed.

“Okay,” one of us said. “Who takes north and who takes south?”

We split up and started down opposite sides of the ridge. We had forty five minutes to hike down, dig a pit, describe the soil, verify the vegetation, measure slope and aspect, and get back to the top in time for pickup.

It was grueling work.

And it was exhilarating.

hiking down one of the more gentle slopes in Hells Canyon

Even in early June it was hot. It would have been hot in regular work clothes, but inside the flight suits we sweated profusely. Once down on the slope, after digging and writing, I would stop to rest and unzip the front of the suit to get some air, wondering how people in the military managed to get anything done in all that heavy clothing.

Some of the slopes were 80 percent, close enough to vertical to make you pay attention. Finding a way down around rock outcrops and across rugged ground took effort. Then there was the soil itself, rocky and full of cobbles and stones, and most of the time thankfully not deep enough to require a full six foot pit.

On the south slopes, Pete often only had to dig a couple of feet. On the north slopes, where soils naturally accumulate deeper, I sometimes had to go to four feet, but most of the time it was between two and three. Doable in the short time we had.

After a decade of mapping soils, I was fast. I could texture by feel, estimate rock fragments, read roots and pores, and record it all in a shorthand I understood, something I could later translate into something readable.

One day, in the middle of all that movement and noise, there was a moment of complete stillness.

In that silence, I stopped to rest before climbing back up to meet the helicopter. A coyote came around the corner and stopped cold when he saw me.

He sat down and looked straight at me. I wasn’t afraid, and he didn’t seem to be either. We just watched each other for a long time. He was trying to figure out what I was. I had the feeling he had never seen a human before.

I didn’t move. I just sat there and watched him.

Finally I said, “Hello, coyote.”

He stood up, turned, and sauntered off. Not running. Just leaving, like it was no big deal.

The rhythm of our work days began to blur together. Campfire suppers of beans, hot dogs, spaghetti from a can. Exhausted sleep in our tents. Waking at sunrise and waiting for the sound of the chopper. A day begins, a day ends. The views of Hells Canyon, the Seven Devils, and the Snake River far below were the only things that changed as we worked our way south through that wilderness.

We were dirty and exhausted, and some of the early exhilaration of helicopter mapping had given way to the hard physical labor and repetition of the work.

Late one afternoon, on a particularly hot day, the pilot took mercy on us.

“I have a surprise for you.”

cool clean water of the Snake River

All six of us were in the bird when he dropped down into the depths of Hells Canyon, landing on a wide sandy bar along the Snake River.

“Here you go,” he said. “A bath and a swimming hole. I’ll be back in two hours.”

I will never forget the chill of that slightly green river water. I unzipped my flight suit and knelt down to drink from the river, splashing my face, feeling the heat begin to leave my body.

Pete in the Snake River in Hells Canyon

Pete stripped down to his shorts, and I took a picture of him upside down with his feet sticking out of the water.

I walked a little ways downstream to a more private spot before undressing and easing into the river. The water felt like a gift. I washed away the dirt, the sweat, and the smell of long days in the field.

It was more than just cooling off. After three days on the ridge with almost no water to spare, being able to get clean felt like a kind of relief I don’t think any of the guys even considered. It was one of those quiet things you just managed and didn’t talk about.

As one of those particularly inconvenient moments in the life of a woman, my period chose that time to arrive, while I was camped with five men on a waterless ridge in the wilderness. It wasn’t something you talked about. You just dealt with it as best you could.

Only a woman who has worked in the field like that will understand how good that river felt.