WHEN THE EARLY MORNING SUN struck the roost trees at Farewell Bend, I walked along the drawn-down Snake’s muddy shore. Nothing showed on the locusts or on the nectar below. I showered in the park, then gnawed a carrot for breakfast as a tawny satyr anglewing floated about the camp on mandolin music. The couple with the mandolin, at the next site, offered me coffee, but I was eager to be away. Since the time zone ran right past the park, it seemed as if I had an extra hour for exploration.
Huntington is a railroad town full of disused cabooses. On the end wall of an old block of brick buildings, a big painted ad, faded now, read: “Clark’s Cafe / ALL WHITE HELP / A good place to eat.” At the nearby truck stop the night before, my black server told me about being evicted from her white fiancé’s apartment. Some things change slowly. There was still a café in this block and a bar. Farther along, a pair of cowboy boots stood in the locust leaves drifting in the gutter. They looked pretty well worn. I went in for coffee and a doughnut to back up the carrot. At the counter a skinny, pocked, and mustached railroad cowboy looked askance at my colorful T-shirt from the Tucson “Invertebrates in Captivity” conference. “Howdy,” I said. “Howdy?” he replied.
I asked the waitress about the boots. “Oh, are they still out there?” she asked. “I bet those’re Pete’s.”
In order to investigate the Snake in Hell’s Canyon, I was obliged to approach from the south. The only way to follow the river out of the north would have been by water, either in a jet-boat (no way to watch butterflies) or a whitewater raft, and time and logistics did not allow for that. The Snake River roadside was painted with the vivid purple of asters and yellow of rabbitbrush and sunflower, flickering with the familiar white of cabbage butterflies. Boise Public Radio offered ZZ Top, Stevie Ray, and Janis, all of whom tended to make me drive too fast over the rippled surface. I slowed to jot a couple of captions for the trip so far: “Washboard roads of the West,” and “Of cabbages & kings, mostly cabbages.” Golden-mantled ground squirrels, fattening for fall, climbed sunflower stalks for their seeds. Milkweed on the bank was chewed, by no one in evidence. The drawdown of Brownlee Reservoir left bright turquoise bands along the shore like chlorine rings in an old swimming pool.
An official-looking green-and-white sign read “Welcome to Jack Gordon Oregon/Unincorporated/Population 2 or more/elevation 2096′.” Jack Gordon was shady and inviting, unlike some of the barrens of fishing-boat trailers strung out in wide spots of dust and sun, where languorous, hot, windblown wives lay about in the open backs of fishermen’s rigs, feet out. Fish humped up in the tepid shallows, boats glinted out on the reservoir. Hunters were just as numerous. Two guys rumbled by with a big buck trussed up in a truck. My game would have struck them as laughable.
Above a patch of blue willow and below a blue sage hill, I came suddenly into a huge flight of Nevada buck moths. They fluttered slowly, and I nearly caught two with my left hand before Marsha did the job. I was more familiar with the related elegant day moth, an orange-and-orchid wonder that shoots through your field of vision like a bright bat. Hemileuca nevadensis has soot-black and linen-white wings, each with an eye-spot, and a silky white thorax; its six furry legs and rear end are banded with bright orange. When I held one in the forceps for a close look, it twisted that bright butt around and around, emphasizing its wasplike, toxic-looking qualities. Dozens were on the wing at once; clearly, there must have been hundreds in the colony. When I described this dramatic irruption at the annual Northwest lepidopterists’ gathering in Corvallis later that fall, I learned that there were just a couple of prior records for buck moths in the entire Pacific Northwest. My moth collector friends freaked out when I confessed that I had taken no specimens. Not in a collecting mood, I let the handsome moths flutter past.
At the mouth of a small canyon tributary, an old orchard bore a weathered sign: “Denzel Ferguson Desert Riparian Research Station / Fox Creek Experimental Farm / & More.” It appeared that more was less. The place looked kaput, a double-wide trailer open to the weather and the land gone to mega-thistles and desiccated burdock. Denzel and Nancy Ferguson are well-known Northwest environmentalists who wrote a hardball book about cattle on the land, Sacred Cows at the Public Trough. What dreams of theirs had come and gone at weedy little Fox Creek?
In other side draws, wooden boxcars, trailers, and temporary hunters’ camps hunched against the hot rock. I stopped by a burned-out trailer in the shade of two little black walnut trees for cold water and an apple. The meats of the small nuts were very flavorful, but far too hard to extract for the time I had and the miles I meant to cover. A mourning cloak drifted among the falling yellow leaves.
I thought I heard a low jet, but it was a bird ripping past my ear. It dove into the sandbar willows and I never saw what it was. There were bright yellow sulphurs all over the purple asters, big coronis fritillaries and bay-brown zephyr anglewings on the rabbitbrush. A Milbert’s tortoiseshell flew downriver, a mourning cloak up. And then — Yes! A monarch! — rose from the rabbitbrush brink and flapped out over the lake. Fighting a downstream breeze, it vanished to the south. This happened at noon, almost opposite the Mountain Man Lodge & Marina at Dennet Creek. What a relief — they hadn’t all gone south already. I felt released from a week’s hard penance.
Climbing up and out of the canyons, the road ran across slablike walls fractured into purple scree. The slopes looked cat-scratched with maroon stripes of sumac and poison ivy’s scarlet, like venous and arterial blood. A prairie falcon skinned the ridge. The Wallowas reared up above, and the Snake ran turgid way down below, as the road left the canyon and veered toward the west. The Daly Creek Pastoral Company had posted the next 7.1 miles of road, meandering up the side of a grassy valley. Sunflower heads poked through a cattle guard. Pastoral green hillsides were inscribed with the hoofways of generations of grazing cattle. These parallel ruts, known to ecologists as terracettes, mirrored the drawndown lake levels of the stilled Snake: mighty strange these new curves and hems of the land would appear to the likes of Lewis and Clark.
In spite of heavy grazing, a creeklet in the crease below the road was daubed with low yellow sneezeweed, watercress, and big blue forget-me-nots. This floral host was crowded with ringlets, sulphurs, whites, coppers, skippers, a zephyr, five mourning cloaks, and even two California tortoiseshells. This orange-and-black butterfly erupts in vast numbers in certain years, engaging in mass movements around the Cascadean region before it defoliates its buckbrush host plants, its parasites increase, and its numbers crash. In its big years, these tortoiseshells swarm through the high country of the Cascades by the millions, closing roads and leading to spurious reports of monarch flights. Many people, hearing that I was following monarchs, told me about the time they had seen scads of monarchs on Mt. Hood or one of the other Cascades volcanoes. This was a crash year, so it was unusual to see any California tortoiseshells at all. These two flew up and away to the south.
I paused near the mouth of the Powder River, which used to end in a final plunge to the Snake River; now its last meander drowns in a slackwater bay of Brownlee Reservoir. The name Powder River brought back painful memories. In July 1970, my brother Bud lost two close friends and nearly his own life in a horrid head-on collision between an old Chevy and a cattle truck, upstream near the town of North Powder. For weeks I trailed butterflies with a camera and a long lens in the Blue Mountains and the Grande Ronde Valley, waiting for Bud to come to in a La Grande hospital. I remembered watching monarchs and Leto fritillaries together on thistles at Morgan Lake, to which I frequently retreated from the bedside vigil. Walking the streets of La Grande at night beneath big birches, wondering what Bud’s life would be like if he lived. Hearing his first spoken word, “Thoreau,” when I read him a favorite quotation: “To think you could waste time without injuring eternity.” Bud survived, with his intelligence and wit intact, though his life since has been completely defined by that bad night at North Powder.
I rifled a barren patch of milkweed, then veered back north. A golden eagle sailed alongside, then nearly into the windshield, hanggliding the ridge above the road. I drove through the isolated town of Halfway, at the base of the snow-spiked peaks of the Eagle Cap Wilderness, and climbed out of a valley spattered caramel and candy-apple red by fall hawthorns. I regained the Snake at Oxbow and entered Hell’s Canyon — the deepest gorge in North America. Umber palisades began to climb skyward and close in as the narrow road entered its maw.
A patch of goldenrod by a backwater culvert was completely thronged with dozens of ochre ringlets, mylitta crescents, and Juba skippers at four o’clock. I was shocked by the late hour, especially on Mountain Time. Evening shadows come early under the steep walls of the canyon. But the sun was still staring directly at Big Bar, an onshore bottomland that seemed afloat in a yellow raft of sunflowers. The road ran above Big Bar, and I turned off to check it out. Right away I saw a monarch.
I caught the small dark female and tagged her as a second one appeared and dallied south. Then a third, a worn individual, fluttered down toward the river and disappeared. Number four was another little female, who after tagging resumed nectaring after a few yards’ flight. I watched and followed when she settled onto another sunflower. Three more times she lofted, landed, and drank, as I followed her south and finally lost her over a hill. I cruised back over the flat, conning the sunflowers. Big female alfalfa butterflies, intense Union Pacific orange with yellow-spotted black borders, stacked the sunflowers, setting off a succession of false alarms.
The fifth monarch was a big one, likely a male, that I bricked as it nectared on a fat sunflower. I felt drunk on monarchs, and I grew a little silly with my netting. Like the others, he cruised off south faster than I could follow. Shortly before sunset, a sixth sailed into a hackberry as if to roost, but I could not find it in the tree. There were many others, but these were the ones I saw clearly before the shadows fell, the sun dropped over the backside of Hell’s Canyon, the temperature dropped, and the action subsided.
John Eckels and Arthur Ritchie, who farmed Big Bar in the 1890s, won prizes for their produce at the Trans-Mississippi Fair at Omaha in 1898. Big Bar is now mostly inundated, but their sunflowers still won first prize from me, the monarchs, and the goldfinches that plucked their ripening seeds. Big Bar was also an informal recreation site, peopled by fisherfolk in campers. One family’s black lab attended noisily to me the whole time, and when I left, its owner gave me an apologetic smile and a big wave. I wished them as much luck with whatever they were fishing for as I’d had with my prey.
Several miles downstream in sunset shade, I got another smile and wave from a black dad whose family was fishing on top of the parapet of Hell’s Canyon Dam. Across and below the imposing, appalling dam stood the handsome wood-and-stone Hell’s Canyon Creek visitor’s center. How I wanted to give the river a mighty Heimlich, see it spit out this salmon-stopping hunk of concrete! But here below the dam now raged the real river, grand to see at last. And the phenomenally broken canyon, much higher and narrower than the black-basalt and red-herring rivers I’d been following for the past week. I’d seen Hell’s Canyon from the Buckhorn Viewpoint above the Imnaha River and farther downstream at the mouth of the Grande Ronde River. But this was the deepest I’d been in its belly. My mental immersion in the cold, wild-flowing river was disturbed by a huge green grasshopper that appeared on the stone wall above the drop. The only other folks at the visitor’s center noticed it too, and instead of discussing the large subjects of dam, river, and migration, we talked about the grasshopper.
As I stood watching the thunderous spume from the dam, a party put in for a twilight float downstream on the wild river, and a jet-boat arrived with a sputtering grumble. The proper uses of the river are a source of never-ending rancor in the Hell’s Canyon National Recreation Area. Many feel that the quietude of the wild river should be appreciated by floating it, without the intrusion of roaring engines; but jet-boats have been on the Snake for a long time and have their own vociferous constituency. I regard them in much the same way I do jetskis, the “personal watercraft” that rend the silence of many public lakes and waterways. It was put best by Robin Cody in Voyage of a Summer Sun, a compelling tale of canoeing the entire Columbia: “The whine of jet skis shattered the thin air. Two grown men, their wetsuits filled to capacity, throttled past and unzipped the river. I rocked in their wake. I smelled their fuel and heard them round the bend. Waiting for birdcall to come back to the river, I reflected on the whole idea of jet skiers and why we should let them live.”
It was back in 1975 when I first saw the power of the Snake River to deliver wandering butterflies into the Northwest. Five years after his accident, my brother Bud was able to accompany me in the field on a summer survey of butterflies in little-collected parts of Washington. On the last day of July we visited the confluence of the Grande Ronde and the Snake at the very mouth of Hell’s Canyon. Viceroys flew, and we even turned up a natural hybrid between a viceroy and the related Lorquin’s admiral. But the great prize was a series of seven males of a diminutive species known as the dainty sulphur or dwarf yellow: the first Nathalis iole irene ever recorded in the Pacific Northwest.
When people regard the monarch and its amazing long-distance flights, they often imagine that only a big, robust butterfly could carry out such a feat. Yet the dainty sulphur, whose wings wouldn’t cover two average thumbnails, also flies far. A resident of warm, southerly climes, N. iole pours into the North each spring, in most years filling the center of the continent with breeding butterflies by the Fourth of July. Like monarchs in spring, they leapfrog north in successive, quick generations. They cannot survive the frosts, nor do they return south in the fall. But by invading the continent each year, dwarf yellows are in position to exploit mild winters or a warming trend by surviving farther north than usual. It is also possible that they will evolve a winter diapause, as some other sulphurs have, to get them through the cold. But this can occur only if they push the envelope of their cold tolerance each year, and push it they do.
But dainty sulphurs don’t normally come to the Northwest or the Northeast. So when we found those seven fresh males on the Grande Ronde, I was not only surprised but amazed. Later I would discover a few Idaho and Montana records, and two or three very old ones from the Mid-Atlantic states. All of these occurred in big years for Nathalis iole immigration, and all were found along rivers: the Clark Fork, the Susquehanna, the Hudson. So in years of great abundance, dainty sulphurs leak way out of their normal range, following the vegetation arrayed along rivers. I had apprehended the importance of watercourses for butterfly movements ever since, as a young collector, I found mountain species on the High Plains and prairie butterflies in the foothills along the High Line Canal. But this tiny flier really showed me how rivers can order the distribution of far-flung butterflies across the landscape.
The concluding arc of my long day’s circle was a curvy, up-down, in-out drive east and south through Cambridge and Weiser, Idaho. As night deepened, wildlife came out. A big buck that had escaped the brigades of hunters so far almost became a hood ornament for Powdermilk, followed by three near-suicidal owls: a great horned sitting in the road like a stone, a little screech fluttering at the windshield, and a barn, ghosting alongside for a quarter mile before veering safely away. Back in the sack and sound asleep at Farewell Bend, I heard piggy snuffling and catty scratching near my head. Porcupine? Skunk? Badger? I didn’t even move, let alone look. The interloper loped off, and I lay looking at the stars and recalling the sight of sunflowers graced with monarchs in the late sunshine. The next thing I heard was a particularly persistent killdeer committed to waking up the whole park. It is not called Charidrias vociferus for nothing.
I got up, wet my face, and walked the shoreline, eager not to miss any waking monarchs. Sunrise blazed off the line of locusts, but the next couple of hours revealed no departures, except more killdeers and dozens of western meadowlarks migrating along the Snake. Spotted sandpipers began to fly off with the killdeers, then sorted themselves out. Migrants sometimes mix with others of different species, as with the famous waves of warblers in the East, or the various nymphs I had seen up on Dixie Summit. But usually like migrates with like.
On the picnic table I laid out a pre-dam U.S. Geological Survey topographical map of the Snake Basin and followed the long river’s loopy course with my finger. Back at its mouth, at Sacajawea Park, I had watched a monarch shoot out of the Snake and cross the Columbia — unaware that it would have to cross the river again eventually to get south — and wondered whether some Columbia Basin monarchs might not carry on southeasterly down the Powder River slot to meet the Snake just about where I had seen the first one yesterday, at a point just over one hundred miles due southeast of the Great Bifurcation. Here they would coalesce with monarchs originating all across the Palouse country, that interior upland hedged by the Spokane River to the north and the Coeur d’Alene/Salmon River country to the east, then funneled southward into Hell’s Canyon.
Later findings supported these conjectures. The following fall Thea and I would visit the confluence of the Grande Ronde and the Snake, near where the dainty sulphurs had turned up. Between Limekiln Rapids and Captain John Rapids, we found lots of monarchs nectaring on the cerise spikes of purple loosestrife blooming in a riverside seep. Once tagged, they charged off south into the mouth of Hell’s Canyon. The next day’s travel would likely have taken them most of the way to the other end of the gorge, where they might well have fetched up among the sunflowers of Big Bar. Soon thereafter, David Branch and I tagged bunches of monarchs outside of Pendleton, Oregon. They were moving up gullies that pointed over the Wallowa/Blue Mountain divide toward the Grande Ronde, the Powder, and ultimately the Snake. I didn’t know any of this as I pondered the map at Farewell Bend. But if I had, it would only have reinforced my feeling that the Snake River corridor is a powerful migratory magnet for monarchs as well as meadowlarks.
Mandolin music came again from the next-door campsite, and this time I accepted a cup of coffee and joined in on “Shenandoah” on my mouth harp before I was bound away. Packing up camp, I found a beautiful orange orb-weaver with yellow horns on her abdomen and her web strung to the ground from Powdermilk’s bumper. I transferred her to the nearby brush, as it was time to go. I had my running orders once more.