By Scott McMillion
Photographs by Karen Ballard
Strapping myself into the back seat of the helicopter, I’m ready for anything. Except maybe rap music at 6 in the morning. Yet there it is, thumping through the radio headset while the chopper, red as a firetruck, lifts from the pad and zips us south into Hells Canyon, the Snake River slithering below, shining with a bazillion scales reflecting the early sunlight.
Breaking through the rap come static and buzz, coordinates, directions, and talk of invaders and how to kill them. Poisons and fire. Bioweapons. Thumpity thump all the time.
Then the driver takes a side canyon and finds enemies, a whole field of them, and hovers there while the man in the front seat works his computer, noting this spot and the trouble it means.
The chopper twists aloft and zooms again, the wash from the noisy rotor kicking up sand and water, casting rainbows below, while the talk turns to eradication strategies, search-and-destroy missions, the whereabouts of the SWAT team.
What next, I ask myself. Napalm in the morning?
Nah. There’s no napalm. But there is a war going on here. The enemies are noxious weeds, and they number in the millions.
A Biological Treasure Trove
Hells Canyon is a stunning place. Dropping almost 8,000 feet from snowy crag to blistered canyon bottom, it’s the deepest river gorge in the contiguous United States. From the river you look up and see mostly grassy hillsides — steep as a cow’s face, as we say in the West — with trees in the coulees and on the benches, punctuated with massive rock.
Flying through it in a helicopter, flitting between long stretches of columnar basalt, like organ pipes jutting from the canyon walls, you get a very different view. Below, sandy beaches reveal the wanderings of mule deer and bighorn sheep, turkeys and geese. From the air, the Snake’s famous rapids look almost silky.
Side canyons enter often, some as clean and slick as a butcher’s slice, others mashed and garbled, the colors crumbled together. At twilight on a clear day, everything glows: sky, hillsides, river, all of it. Later, all those stars come out and, if you time your visit right, moonlight creeps down the canyon walls. Get really lucky and you’ll see the aurora.
It’s full of life, too.
Cougars haunt this canyon, plus bobcats and black bear. Eagles ride the thermals, mule deer hop all over the place, and, come September, elk make music with lusty bugles. There are catbirds and doves, ducks and cranes, rattlesnakes and rabbits, and the list goes on to include 380 species. The roster of native plants, some found nowhere else on Earth, is even longer: 1,000 species or more. Biologically, this place is a treasure.
Like many magnificent places, you wouldn’t call this dry and rocky canyon hospitable. Still, as in most of the West, people tried hard to make a living here. Miners scratched at the earth, digging pits and holes, but mostly they spent more money than they earned. Homesteaders with sheep and cattle claimed what flat spots they could find.
But markets were so distant, and the river so treacherous, that the homesteaders eventually threw up their hands and took a boat downriver, looking for another place or another line of work.
But the toughness that drove most settlers away is what kept this place so fruitful for wildlife. For the most part, it’s been spared the energies and damages of mankind, the opposable thumbs, and the itch to tinker. Hells Canyon today still supports that amazing diversity of life, still has what the rest of the American West once had: vast acreages of native plants and big populations of native critters to eat them and each other. It’s an ecosystem that works.
But much of this is threatened. We saw the invaders from the helicopter.
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Nature picture credits: Photos © Karen Ballard
