Dust Devils, bombs and missionaries

There will be a test on this at the end of class.

After visiting Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens, it was time to head out of the mountains. We hauled the trailer up and over White Pass and down into the desert of south-central Washington. One clue is that we moved from an area that receives 90 inches of rain annually to 7 inches. It’s a good thing the Yakima River is there for irrigation.

Indeed, as we headed toward the Tri-Cities (Pasco, Richland and Kennewick) we drove by thousands of acres of agriculture, including lots of hay and corn and apple orchards, as is expected in the summer in fields near a river in Washington. But there were also lots of fields covered in propped-up vineyards and hop vines. It seems Yakima, which we passed through heading east, grows 75% of the hops in the country. We assume that you – as a dedicated Pasley blog reader – know the significance of this statistic; that is that hops are one of the main ingredients in our beverage of choice. They also call themselves “The Palm Springs of Washington.” We agreed that – heat-wise – they were probably right.

On our drive past Yakima to the Tri Cities, we saw lots of agriculture through the window, including this hop field. Yakima grows 75% of the hops in the U.S. for use in brewing beer.

It’s too bad we’re not wine aficionados, because attached to many of the vineyards were some of the 100+ wineries that have popped up in this region since 1977, when an Army guy and his buddy decided to try making their own wine.

We were excited to make it to Columbia Sun RV Resort in Kennewick, since it had received an unheard-of 9.5 (out of 10) rating on our favorite review site (rvcampgroundreviews.com). The check-in process and customer service were over the top, and many of the sites were top-notch. But, frugal as we are, we selected one of the lower-priced gravel pads. Luckily we weren’t right on top of our neighbor as we sometimes are, and were happy to use Columbia Sun as our home base to explore Oregon Trail and nuclear energy pioneers in the next two days.

But our first order of business was driving across the Columbia River to the Tri-City Dust Devils game in Pasco. It was “Christmas in July” night (you gotta love those minor league promotions), and also fireworks night.

I doubt many of the kids there made it to the fireworks at the end of the game because the second inning alone lasted almost an hour as the home team committed three errors to extend what should have been a short inning, allowing the visiting Spokane Indians to score 10 runs.

By the way, while we didn’t visit all the minor league baseball stadiums in Washington, we did manage to see all the professional baseball teams in Washington play. Spokane was not in town during our stay at the beginning of our trip.

Betsy with Dusty at the Tri-City Dust Devils game. Well-named, because the home team played like hell, giving up 10 runs with 3 errors in the second inning.

We forgot about Russell Wilson playing professional baseball until we saw this life-sized bobblehead at the Dust Devils stadium. We think he made a good decision to switch to football.

Who needs plutonium?

The Hanford nuclear site is one of three associated with the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, along with Los Alamos in New Mexico and Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Established in 2015 in partnership with the Department of Energy, it is one of the newest national park sites.

We had visited Oak Ridge earlier on a visit to Tennessee and wondered how these sites differed. When the idea of nuclear fission was advanced by Enrico Fermi’s “Chicago pile” experiment in 1942, scientists were unsure if uranium enrichment or the newly discovered element of plutonium was best – so they built a reactor for both.

Oak Ridge was created to test four separate techniques, and then its reactor was built to enrich uranium. Hanford was chosen for a full-scale reactor to produce plutonium from uranium. One uranium bomb from Oak Ridge was dropped on Hiroshima Aug. 6, 1945, and three plutonium bombs were produced at Hanford: one for the New Mexico Trinity test July 16, one that ended the war after leveling Nagasaki on Aug. 9, and a third in case it was needed. Thankfully, it wasn’t.

More than 600,000 Americans worked in the three areas, and quite a few citizens were displaced to make way for these three sites. In both cases, few really had an idea of the true objective of their efforts.

Our tour group was bused from Richland across 45 desolate miles to the B Reactor building. Ron, a nice senior volunteer docent, regaled us with stories of his days working at the site, and shared the government's rationale for choosing the 600-square-mile location; it was remote, had a reliable water source in the Columbia River, had plenty of electricity from the upgraded Grand Coulee Dam nearby, and sat on a solid foundational base of basalt.

The interpretation once we arrived at the reactor was amazing, as docent Andy picked up the story. He is a mechanical engineer still working at the site, and we felt we were going back through basic high school chemistry and physics – but with a great teacher. I couldn’t recount all the things we learned about Uranium 238 and 235 and why that creates plutonium, but his lesson helped us understand the dozens of rooms and displays we were able to investigate in our two hours there.

All this time, you have to remember that this was ALL new and computers didn’t exist yet. 

Here are some of the crazy facts I picked up:

-This full-scale reactor was built in 18 months.

-The Columbia River water that entered the reactor at 60 degrees would heat to 180 in the one second it spent in the unit

-The reactor featured 2,004 tubes

- One ton of uranium was needed to flow through the reactor tubes to create one pound of plutonium (a bomb needs around 20 pounds, according to Andy.)

The reactor operated through WWII and the Cold War, shutting down in 1987. So do we have enough plutonium after all those years? According to Andy, we have a “stupid” amount of it, most of which is in secret storage sites with some used in missiles on ships and submarines. He expressed his wish that we could use some of the surplus for energy rather than for defensive purposes. Wouldn’t that be nice.

The B reactor at Hanford was the first to produce plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.

The 600-acre Hanford site was intentionally built in a desolate part of Washington state. Not much out here.

Of course, something that wasn’t discussed much on the tour was the fact there are two Superfund cleanup sites at Hanford. The docents were equally reticent about a recent tunnel collapse at Hanford, but they did refer us to the DOE site to learn about remediation efforts there.

We topped off the tour by filling a growler at the Bombing Range Brewery next door to the visitor center.

It looks like it’s time to travel to Los Alamos to complete the Manhattan Project tour.

Here’s a bombastic logo at the Bombing Range Brewery, which happened to be next to the Hanford nuclear site visitor center.

Methodist missionaries of the 1830s

The next day our agenda included a visit to the site of a different type of pioneer from a century earlier. When Methodist Marcus Whitman joined other aspirational missionaries on a 1835 reconnaissance trip west, he was one of the first white settlers to travel the Oregon Trail begun by explorers and fur trappers. Marcus identified a site near the Cayuse Indian tribe near the Walla Walla River, returned to his home in upstate New York, and brought his young new wife Narcissa out west a year later. In the same party were his fellow missionaries Henry and Eliza Spalding, the Presbyterians who stopped further east to minister to the Nez Perce (at the Idaho NPS site we crossed over to visit in our first few days in Washington state.)

(By the way, later in 1842 Whitman retraced his steps in a winter trip east, by way of Taos, in a bid to keep the mission going, stopping in St. Louis, Boston, D.C. and New York to make his case. He was a traveling son of a gun.)

The difference between Whitman and Spalding was described to us in detail by rangers at both sites. To wit, the Whitmans didn’t try to learn the Cayuse language or rituals. At the Nez Perce location, however, the Spaldings not only learned the language of their fellow residents, they printed books in the tribe’s language, the first books published in the Pacific Northwest.

Meanwhile, the Whitman’s were frustrated by the failure of their mission work, so they shifted focus to assisting Oregon Trail visitors instead. Their story ended tragically after 11 years of increasing tensions with the Cayuse. Measles might have been the catalyst. Whitman was a doctor who seemed to be able to cure most of the white settlers but few of the Cayuse, who lost half their tribe of 250 to the white man's disease. Of course, we know now that the Indians had no resistance to these diseases, but the suspicion at the time was that Whitman was poisoning them. So one morning several Cayuse stormed the house, killing Marcus, Narcissa, and other white men, women and children.

The "Whitman Massacre" became a catalyst for creation of the Oregon Territory, the first formal territorial government west of the Rocky Mountains.

What’s interesting is that all that remains of Spalding is his headstone in the Nez Perce cemetery, while Whitman has been immortalized through college names, National Forests, and other legacies.

So is this a lesson of Methodists vs. Presbyterians? I’m not going there. According to the two rangers we talked to, it was probably more about their willingness to understand and respect (or lack therof) of the different cultures. 

 

50 years after the Whitmans were murdered by the ungrateful Cayuse (who lost half their tribe to measles), this monument was erected on top of a hill overlooking their mission site.

The "state" waterfall 

From Whitman Mission National Historic Site we continued on to the state waterfall, Palouse Falls. It’s a fabulous feature tucked into the rolling, fertile Palous region. The falls anchor another gorge carved out by the ice age floods, similar to those we saw earlier in our trip. To recap, a huge ice sheet formed Lake Missoula to the east, creating a huge ice dam. When the dam collapsed it released a 500-foot-tall flood of water that surged at 10 times the combined strength of all the world’s rivers (!). It re-formed and flooded several times, ripping away topsoil and cutting canyons to create the Scablands, which can now be seen from space.

The Palouse Falls provide an incredible backdrop to this Ice Age flood-carved gorge, and is the “official” waterfall of Washington State, thanks to the lobbying efforts of some local schoolchildren.

What didn't happen in Washington 

So far we've recapped what did happen in our six weeks here, but here is a list of what didn’t happen in the time we spent in this beautiful state:

- “The big one” didn’t happen (although a small earthquake was recorded north of Seattle while we were on the peninsula)

- No tsunamis

- None of the many volcanoes erupted

- No landslides

- No Lahars 

- We didn’t get run over by a logging truck

- We didn’t fall into a slag heap or toxic lake on a Superfund site

- No wildfires (although there was a small one in Hanford a week before we arrived there)

- We didn’t get caught in a roundabout 

- Betsy didn’t get arrested for shoplifting at the Amazon Go store


Sadly, it's time now to leave the state and head east. More to come.