Hanford Reach: A Bend in the River
PUSHING OFF FROM a muddy bank, we nose our kayaks through a clump of submerged saplings and into the gravitational pull of the Great River of The West. A few feet from the shore, our boats are gripped by the current and pulled gently but inescapably downstream. From the shore, the surface appeared deceptively calm. But here it swirls and hisses and gurgles like a pot ready to boil. We are riding a whispering torrent that drains the wet corner of a continent at a pace of more than 200,000 cubic feet of water per second, and there is no turning back.
We are a flyweight fleet of four, drifting like flotsam toward the steel span of the Vernita Bridge, where the river collides with a dull roar against concrete columns. For decades, this bridge marked the end of the known, workaday world and the beginning of a closely kept military secret, where intruders were confronted by armed guards and helicopters.
We have entered Hanford Reach, the last 50 miles of free-flowing, undammed river above Bonneville Dam. Few Washingtonians outside the Tri-Cities area have ever seen this place, yet its future is bubbling into a regional debate. We - Glen Sims, kayaker extraordinaire; Dan Evans, staff director and river adviser to Sen. Patty Murray; photographer Tom Reese; and myself - have come to see for ourselves.
The river carries us eastward through an arid, treeless landscape, the most prominent landmark being the gray silhouette of Plant B, perched on the right bank five miles downriver from the bridge. Fifty-two years ago, this concrete hulk was constructed in a matter of months to produce the plutonium for the atomic bomb that leveled Nagasaki. It closed down nearly three decades ago, but the plant remains sealed tight, unsafe for human beings, tumbleweed piled against its barbed-wire fences as a reminder that the desert, given a few hundred or thousand years, intends to reclaim its turf.
We paddle furiously across the current for a closer look. At the river's edge is a concrete pumphouse that once sucked enough river water to service the population of Seattle, pumping it through the superheated core of the reactor and immediately back into the river.
There were several reasons wartime engineers picked Hanford for their nuclear-weapons project. It was remote, far from population centers and major highways - a good place to keep a secret. There was ample hydro-electricity. And there was the river - a seemingly infinite source of water for cooling hot reactor cores.
That project changed the course of human history, but its impact on the river and sagebrush environment has been oddly mixed. On one hand, poorly designed waste dumps continue to pose a threat to the surrounding environment. Yet the same project also helped to preserve it. For the next 10 miles, the river bends to the northeast, bisecting an ecological contradiction. On the right-hand bank, we pass within yards of one of the most polluted places on Earth. Some 61 million gallons of radioactive waste are stored in 177 underground tanks, the legacy of 50 years of experimentation with things the experts didn't fully understand. Three miles downstream we pass within sight of the notorious K-Basins, concrete pools filled with river water that cool radioactive canisters just 1,000 feet from the river bank. Cleaning up the mess will take decades and billions of dollars.
Yet on the other side of the river is the marshy edge of the 90,000-acre Saddle Mountain Wildlife Refuge, home to mule deer, coyote, jack rabbit, rattlesnake, sage grouse and scores more desert-dwellers that have been pushed out of their habitat elsewhere. Blue heron and glistening white pelicans swoop low over the river, protesting our intrusion. For them, Hanford is a godsend.
The river itself remains one of the the finest salmon-fishing areas in the state. Each fall and spring, up to 100,000 king salmon and steelhead migrate from the Pacific up the Columbia, struggling 400 miles and around four dams to spawn in the bottom of Hanford Reach. Sports fishermen converge on this place in hip waders or aluminum boats, drifting in the current and casting their lines, while bald eagles and coyotes patrol the river banks, feasting on the spawned-out carcasses.
Fish thrive here not in spite of nuclear energy, but because of it. A generation ago, Army engineers planned yet another dam, just upriver from Richland, that would have backed the river into yet another lake, silting the bottom just as it has most of the way from Bonneville to the Canadian border. The Pentagon vetoed that plan; the generals didn't want anybody that close to their secrets. So the river flows free, scouring its bottom for salmon spawning. Now scientists cite Hanford Reach as a example of how salmon runs could be restored by lowering reservoirs, allowing the river to flow free again.
AT THE 20-MILE POINT, the Columbia takes a sweeping turn to the east and immediately southeast. Here an ancient lake bed called the Ringold Formation was thrust upward eons ago, allowing the river to sculpt vertical bluffs up to 300 feet high on its northeast shore.
We beach our boats on a steep, sandy stretch decorated with fresh deer tracks and pitch our tents in ankle-high grass on a plateau at the foot of the bluffs. Here we are joined by Rich Steele, a semi-retired construction worker and self-appointed caretaker of Hanford Reach. He has driven his 20-foot aluminum jetboat 40 miles upriver from Richland to deliver a bottle of decent merlot and a passionate defense of his cause. He will be the only human being we will encounter in 24 hours and 40 miles of river.
Beneath a darkening sky, we hike past the remains of a turn-of-the-century homestead demolished decades ago by the military (no cover for snoopers!) and climb a steep game trail through the grass and up the back side of the bluff. From here we can scan most of the vast Hanford site, from the Vernita Bridge to the Rattlesnake Hills and the braided channels of the lower river. The treeless, monochromatic panorama, studded by the dark, brooding towers of nine nuclear reactors, is a landscape that might have inspired Salvador Dali.
"I never get tired of it," says Steele. "I can't stay away."
For Steele, this place has become an obsession. It began decades ago, when his family moved to Richland and he discovered steelhead fishing that was beyond his wildest dreams. He worked his career at Hanford, building and operating the nuclear plants, returning on the weekends to fish. Like the military, Steele kept his secret as long as he could. Now he can no longer afford to stay quiet; he has become a near full-time tour guide for politicians, scientists, environmentalists, filmmakers and the occasional journalist.
"What you see should never change," Steele says, gazing across the river. "It should stay just the way it is."
This is no certainty. The future of the Reach is being debated from the Tri-Cities to the floor of Congress. All except one of the nuclear plants were shut down years ago. The local economy now depends not on nuclear production, but on cleaning it up. The river, however, and its northern shores are another question. Pollution from Hanford is not the issue. Instead it is a clash between federal and local officials, between farmers and environmentalists.
Standing atop the White Bluffs, we survey the alternatives. Turning north from the Hanford site, the landscape consists of dry hills, speckled with sagebrush, rising gently toward the Saddle Mountains. Halfway up this rise, known as the Wahluke Slope, the desert gives way abruptly to regimented rows of green fruit trees.
When the Hanford site was laid out, a buffer zone was created extending several miles north of the river. About 1,200 people in and around three small communities were forced to sell and move out. Since then, farmers have used Columbia River water and hydropower to transform much of the Columbia Plateau, including the northern portion of the Wahluke Slope, into a garden. Now farmers want to reclaim some 57,000 acres of that slope, bringing irrigation to the area.
The agricultural community has enlisted the support of county commissioners in Grant and Adams counties, who covet the expanded tax base. They are supported by Republican Rep. Doc Hastings and Sen. Slade Gorton, who argue for local control.
Steele doesn't understand why anybody would want to do this. He points downriver, where massive slides have dumped millions of yards of earth from the bluffs into the river. Federal geologists blame those slides on irrigation miles behind the bluffs, a dry landscape suddenly saturated with water that seeped downhill and undermined the bluffs. So Steele has allied himself with fishing and environment groups, who favor federal control. Sen. Patty Murray has taken up their cause, formally proposing that Hanford Reach be protected as a "wild and scenic river," and the Wahluke Slope maintained as federal wildlife refuge.
Last spring, Murray toured the Wahluke Slope with a delegation of local farmers and county commissioners. At one point, the issue was neatly laid out through the windows of her tour bus. On the right, she scanned miles of dry, seemingly empty desert; on the left, irrigated orchards.
Eventually, the group sat atop the bluffs, many miles downriver, debating the issue. Mark Hedman, a compact West Point graduate who came home to his Wahluke farm, explained why the slope is prime agricultural land - fertile, volcanic soil in proximity to irrigation. All it needs is water and sweat.
Wildlife authorities are resisting. The slope, they say, is one of the last fragments of sagebrush habitat, refuge to jack rabbits and sage grouse that are in danger of disappearing. "If you want to have these species for future generations," one biologist argued, "we have to preserve what's left of their habitat."
"There are plenty of grouse and jack rabbits," another farmer said.
So what about these bluffs? said another official.
Smarter, more efficient irrigation can prevent any damage to the bluffs, Hedman answered. "We have two natural resources on this slope - wildlife resources and the land itself."
But there is no shortage of farmland, a biologist protested.
"How can you say that?" Hedman responded. "Less than 3 percent of the globe looks like this. This land is precious. . . . Food in this country is cheap, but if we keep locking up agricultural land, that will change. Maybe we should wait until people are spending 20 or 30 percent of their income on food, and then see how people feel about this land."
One place, two very different points of view - biodiversity versus primary producer, equally impassioned, informed and persuasive. Now, standing atop the bluffs, common ground seems impossibly distant. Can we afford to lock up productive farmlands? How much closer can those orchards march before they're growing apples at the brink of the White Bluffs?
Steele climbs back into his boat, and we push him off. He guns his engine, banks into the current and speeds downstream toward home.
We sift through the questions over a meal of smoked-salmon pasta as bass and juvenile salmon leap and splash in the river eddy. The last rays of a dying sun treat us to an evening light show on the face of the bluffs, accompanied by a chorus of invisible coyotes mourning the day's end.
THE NEXT MORNING, we rejoin the river, which treats us to a leisurely ride along the base of the bluffs. Thousands of swallows swarm along the shore, carrying mud from the bank, beakful by beakful, up to the walls to construct a colony of mud nests. Why all this effort, since they appear to have abandoned an identical colony a few yards downstream?
A mile further, the current carries us around that monstrous landslide and to the lee shore of Locke Island, a mile-long island constructed by centuries of silt. We beach our boats and explore grass-filled depressions that are the remains of ancient shelters used by Native Americans, for whom this was a favorite seasonal fishing spot.
Locke Island faces dual threats. First, a wet winter and spring have sent record volumes of water downstream. The current has been deflected by the landslide onto the island's flank, undercutting the bank and destroying archeological sites hundreds of years old. The island also has become a popular stop for souvenir hunters in search of a genuine arrowhead or spear point to keep in the dresser drawer. At least one of the sites shows signs of recent excavation, probably by amateurs.
Today the island is occupied by geese, heron and other water birds who protest our intrusion. We watch as a mother killdeer staggers through the grass, feigning a broken wing in an attempt to lure us away from her nest - a winged emissary, perhaps, for ancient spirits. We take the hint and return to our boats.
The remaining 25-mile voyage to Richland is another study in contrasts. The first sign of civilization is an aluminum boat anchored near the shore, a fishing pole and a pair of Nike sneakers extending over the transom. On the right bank we drift past the old Hanford townsite, then past one mysterious complex after another. A mile from shore we can see the stacks of the huge WPPSS reactor, the only one that continues to gurgle.
On the left, outside the Hanford boundary, the shore is blanketed with orchards - rows of fruit trees surrounding modern ranch houses with picture windows facing the river.
To Steele and others, the orchards conjure images as fearsome as nuclear reactors. The nukes, after all, are history; more orchards, however, could be prevented.
And they will be. Nobody - not even Mark Hedman - proposes to plant apples on the banks of Hanford Reach. The question is how close can they get without changing this place.
But as we drift toward Richland, I wonder if Steele and friends are crusading bravely against environmental threats and overlooking another unseen enemy.
That would be us.
Steele's strategy is to expose as many people as possible to Hanford Reach. "I want to show people what they have to lose," he says. He is doing a fine job of it. This summer, he and his allies will escort hundreds of visitors down the river. In one day last spring, they took 38 people in eight boats. Many of those people will want to come back, maybe do some fishing, or hiking, or kayaking.
I think back to our campsite at the foot of the bluffs. Kayakers are low-impact campers - small tents, backpack stoves, and we take our garbage back to town. But we left a well-trodden beach, tromped up and down erosion-prone hillsides, squished three patches of prairie grass for our tents and apparently irritated the neighborhood coyote.
This landscape has a low tolerance for human intrusion. Who could be lower-impact than those Native American folks, whose campsites remain visible more than a century later? Whoever manages Hanford Reach, and whatever they eventually call it, this place is too rare, too spectacular to remain undiscovered. People will want to come here - in kayaks, canoes, inflatables, jetboats. Soon enough there will be color brochures and expeditions organized by REI and The Mountaineers. How long before authorities feel compelled to erect information boards, picnic tables and outhouses?
Then what? If I can come in my kayak, why not my neighbor and his Winnebago?
The Columbia will roll on, of course. And wildlife authorities will try to fend us off. But for all the hoopla over endangered species, these battles are rarely won by the critters.
It is, after all, our place. And we have a right to come here and see what we have to lose.
Copyright (c) 1996 Seattle Times Company,.
