The Rt 66 Mother Road Festival - Springfield

 Every year Springfield, MO hosts the Rt 66 Mother Road Festival. Our caravan happened to be in town for the event. As this is the 100th anniversary of Rt 66, the festival was planned to be even better than previous years. We did not attend the evening concerts, but we did go into town to view some of the 1,498 cars at the car show.  The center of town was blocked off to traffic and cars were parked along the sides of the streets on at least a dozen blocks. 

Check out the Matchbox Car on the air filter!

I HAD to take a photo of this car. 

Check out the 'badge'!

While we were in Springfield our group was camped at the Double J Campground in nearby Chatham. This was a clean, flat campground with great gravel roads and sites. There was a fun walking trail through woods and weeds. The girls enjoyed the curving trail, and loved coming upon a bunny that seemed to find a way to run through the weeds and miraculously show up on the next section of our trail! Here are a few shots of "the weeds":

The campground is next to a corn field. At our last campground we saw tall cornstalks one day, and the next they were gone. The harvesters had come in and worked through the night. In case you have never had the opportunity to stand next to a corn field, I took this shot so you can see that the corn really is as high as an elephant's eye! 

On to Pontiac...Illinois

We visited Pontiac, IL

We had a brief trolley tour around the city to see some historic sites and to learn about some of the murals. 

There are 24 murals depicting the history of Pontiac. 

Bob Waldmire painted this map mural in the Rt 66 museum in Pontiac.

He painted murals in many locations on Rt 66.

This map was never finished. Bob died before he could finish painting the truck,

which you can see penciled in between the print of the grain elevator and Towanda.

Here are a few other murals around town: 

In addition to the murals, the town has cute cars and trucks along many sidewalks.

These were the result of an art collaboration. 

Pontiac constructed an open air plaza in mid town. 

The sign was created to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Rt 66.

It was made to look like signs of yore.

As we left Pontiac we stopped at few gas stations

that once served customers on the mother road. 

 

End of the Trail

We travelled close to 4,000 miles from St. Louis to Astoria, OR following the trail set by Lewis & Clark in 1805. We managed the trek in 47 days as opposed to their 18 months of travel. However, we didn't need to build a fort to spend a winter. We didn't have to cordelle boats against the current of the river. We only needed to hunt for restaurants or grocery stores to feed our group. We didn't need to find Shoshone Indians to barter for horses, and we didn't need to traverse the Bitterroot mountains by foot, stepping over downed trees, around boulders and wading through snow. Even though our trip was far shorter than that they experienced, we had similar feelings of joy as we reached the end of the trail.

When we visited the Anheuser-Busch facility in St. Louis we were all given a bottle of beer at the end of the tour. As a group we decided to carry that bottle across the country and enjoy it at the "end of the road". One of the members of our tour suggested drinking the beer at Cape Disappointment as we were disappointed that the beer we received was only a Bud Light...so, that's what we did! My bottle of beer is perched on the monument at the Cape Disappointment Visitor's Center.

Before the Corps of Discovery reached the end of the trail, they had to stop at a "dismal nitch" where they were trapped by the weather on a rock outcropping above the waves. They were soaked to the skin. A storm raged, and they had no food. Once the storm broke they continued on their way. 

The expedition hoped a ship would be in the area that could take them back to the eastern, US, but any that were there had left the area. Winter was once again approaching, so the group built another fort, Fort Clatsop. It was similar in construction and design to Fort Mandan. 

Winter was bleak at Ft. Clatsop. From November to March there were only 12 days without rain!

Lewis & Clark traveled to what is now "Seaside, OR" while looking for whales. A bronze statue now commemorates the team.

 

Mt St Helens - 43 years later

Mt. St. Helens - clouds hanging just above the crater

I had the opportunity to visit Mt St Helens in 2012, and now, eleven years later. However, due to a mudslide a few weeks ago, we could not go to the Johnston Ridge Observatory. 

It was interesting to see the changes (sadly, I didn't put up a blog post about our original visit - and don't have access to pictures from that time) What really struck me was the huge number of green and healthy large trees I could see now, where during my first visit many of the hillsides were still covered in downed trees blown over by the blast. 

I recall having a discussion with the Mister on our first visit about public and private lands and how they were treated differently after the blast. The public lands, those in the park, were left to recover on their own. Forested areas on private lands were managed, and downed trees were collected and harvested. 

Looking at the top half of the picture below, one can see a line that moves diagonally from mid center, bottom to the left. On the right is land that was left to return without any interference by man. The lush, green forest on the left side is managed forest. Here downed trees were removed. New trees were planted and the forest is maintained by cutting, thinning and fertilization.

Here is a picture of a hillside shortly after the volcano exploded in 1980, and that same hillside today. Scientists and locals who were familiar with the land around Mt St Helens commented that after the blast they struggled to recognize the land. In looking at the then and now picture, one could almost say the same thing. This particular area of land is part of the park and is not managed. It has regrown, but the changes are not quite as dramatic as those in managed lands.

Managed lands recovered as much lumber after the eruption as they could. They had to. They were in the businessselloing wood, and the blast effectively removed their product. 

Trees were replanted on managed lands. Research and experimentation led the foresters to discover that the optimal way to replant was to dig down through the ash and plant the seedlings so that roots could reach the soil. If planted just in the ash, there was little to hold water and there were no nutrients and the seedlings died. They also learned that they needed to trench away from each tree so any water that collected could run off. Without a trench water sat in the bowl of dust and ultimately drowned the tree. 

There were wonderful displays at the visitors center that engaged kids (and young at heart) in understanding the concepts of managing forests and the importance of wood products in our lives. Toothpaste...from trees?? (Play "I Spy" to see if you can find the Colgate package)

This was once a river of mud, ash and timber. Much of that still remains.