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.