Within
One Watershed:
Essays from Hackleman Creek
The Hackleman Creek watershed, a tiny drainage in
Oregon’s Old Cascades, holds tumbling streams, stately old-growth trees, bright
wildflower meadows and a lake that vanishes each year. Blessed with a biological
diversity seldom seen elsewhere in the state, the watershed gives life to an
astonishing variety of plants, animals and other organisms within its
boundaries.
In this collection of personal essays, I lead readers
through the wild habitats that make up this remarkable place and explain how
water unifies everything in a beautifully complex web of life.
First up: an
introduction to the watershed.
The
Place
A watershed is a trough
in the earth’s surface in which all waters flow to a common stream. Mountain
watersheds fit together like puzzle pieces of topography, each one edged by
peaks and ridges that divide it from its neighboring basins. Gravity pulls
water down the steep gradient of a watershed’s uplands in a headlong rush. The
flow begins as raindrops or melting snow; it gushes down tiny runnels into
small rills, which join to become coursing rivulets. Rivulets fill creeks that
bounce over rocks and tumble into the watershed’s principal stream. As water
rushes downhill, it is immediately replaced by the water behind it in a
never-ending continuum of liquid movement.
But a watershed is more
than just flowing water. Everything living in a watershed is part of its
identity. When a mountain stream first trickles out from melting snow washed by
warm spring rain, it begins a journey that connects everything in its path. It
may dampen meadowed slopes where elk graze and coyotes hunt. The swelling
waterway may tumble through a narrow gorge where mist-moistened ferns cling to
vertical rock walls; it may glide under overhanging fir branches that sweep
down from immense tree trunks in an ancient forest. Somewhere along the journey
through its basin, the stream may moisten the chocolate-colored back of a
rough-skinned newt or bead the oily feathers of a Harlequin Duck. As the stream
grows, its water may pass through the gills of native trout and catch the
shadow of a chattering Kingfisher in flight. A stream and the land that it
drains form a living community where all the inhabitants are linked by the
common watercourse. Stream and watershed are one and the same.
The Hackleman Creek
watershed nestles below Tombstone Pass in Oregon’s Old Cascades. Few people
realize that the Cascade Range is actually two distinct mountain ranges lying
side by side: the western or Old Cascades and the High Cascades. Diminished to
rugged ridges by the erosive power of water and long-vanished ice, the Old
Cascades predate the High Cascades by about ten million years. These archaic
mountains now form the western edge of the modern Cascade Range.
As watersheds go,
Hackleman Creek’s basin is tiny: the creek flows only six miles from 4,236-foot
Tombstone Pass east to Fish Lake. The watershed occupies a mere twelve square
miles of sloped terrain. It’s landscape on an intimate scale, but troves of
rich biological diversity and geological complexity lie within its perimeter. A
cluster of five eroded volcanoes (Iron Mountain, Cone Peak, South Peak, Echo
Mountain and North Peak) rises to nearly 6,000 feet along the northern edge of
the watershed. Seventeen kinds of conifers grow on their steep slopes, a
greater diversity of trees than anywhere else in Oregon. Botanists have
identified 300 species of wildflowers here, including 60 species rare to the
Old Cascades. The curved Echo Mountain ridge embraces an amphitheater-shaped
valley carved by glaciers in the last ice age. Cold mountain air gathers in
this cirque, allowing species normally found farther north to flourish. Four
centuries have passed since the last fire swept through this small tributary
valley. Safely sequestered, Pacific silver firs and noble firs have grown to
tower above the forest floor. The largest Alaska yellow cedars in the state
stand as silent witnesses to Echo Creek as it flows below these arboreal giants
to join Hackleman Creek in the lower reaches of the watershed’s main valley.
An intricate network of steep ridges, known
collectively as Browder Ridge, composes the watershed’s southern divide. Water
that flows north from the ridgetop drains to Hackleman Creek. Water flowing
down the ridge’s southern slope drains into the neighboring Browder Creek
watershed. Rock outcrops and pocket meadows dot the ridgecrest itself. An arm
of Browder Ridge cups hidden Heart Lake in a hanging valley, one of the few
lakes in the Old Cascades not reached by road or official trail.
Hackleman Creek bubbles
out of the hillside above Tombstone Prairie and descends between steeply
incised slopes robed in deep green trees. It receives the waters of Indian
Creek and Heart Creek from the south; Slide Creek and Echo Creek enter from the
north. Gaining in volume, the creek slows temporarily as it reaches a flatter
gradient near Lost Prairie, where meanders carry it alongside a spongy wetland.
Finally, it reaches the end of the watershed and spills into Fish Lake, which
exists for only a few months each year.
Impounded 3,000 years ago
by lava flowing from volcanic vents near the Cascade crest to the east, Fish Lake
brims with water each spring and early summer. The seasonal abundance of
precipitation keeps the lake at full pool until the dry season starts in mid-summer,
when the water vanishes into porous basalt to travel through subterranean
passages down-valley to Clear Lake. Grasses and forbs accustomed to the annual
shift from wet to dry transform the lakebed into a lush meadow, where Hackleman
Creek makes a few lazy curves before it disappears.
As the lake level recedes
each year, the resident Hackleman cutthroat trout feel the water temperature
rise and swim upstream into Hackleman Creek to take refuge and wait for the
lake to refill with spring runoff. Since
these fish have been physically isolated for millennia, they may have become a
genetically unique population.
History drapes Hackleman
Creek in a rich tapestry of human presence. Indigenous peoples used the area as
a travel route for thousands of years. Molalla, Kalapuya, Klamath, Wasco,
Paiute and Cayuse families crossed Tombstone Pass, ascended Browder Ridge and
visited Fish Lake every year in their seasonal rounds to gather plants, hunt
deer and elk, harvest berries and strip cedar bark for baskets.
In the 1860s, European American
settlers built a wagon road from the Willamette Valley through the Cascades to
access sheep ranches and gold mines in eastern Oregon. Sections of the route
are still visible along Hackleman Creek. A pioneer grave marks each end of the
watershed: one at Tombstone Pass and the other at Fish Lake. Both are reminders
of the perils of nineteenth century travel.
The 1920s and 30s brought
Forest Service personnel to Fish Lake, where they operated a remount station
for pack strings and rangers on horseback. Century-old log cabins still stand
near the lake that becomes a meadow each year.
The Hackleman Creek
drainage, like all watersheds, provides the careful observer an opportunity to
view nature as an entity with deeply interconnected components that form a
living whole. Viewing the natural world through watershed eyes gives us
the capacity to trace the flow of water as it connects everything from the
tiniest lichen to the tallest trees; it allows us to truly understand that
impacts felt upstream always bring repercussions downstream. Nothing in nature
lives in isolation.
The term watershed is
more than a word; it’s a perspective that fosters a profound connection to
place. By adopting a watershed outlook, we open ourselves to greater awareness
and deeper insight, not only for a single watershed but for our singularly
beautiful planet, as well.
Next time: I begin my explorations of the Hackleman watershed in its uplands, high on Browder Ridge.