Hat Rock State Park

Jill's Journal: The girls have probably exceeded their Lewis and Clark quota for U.S. history by this point, but I figure a little bit more never hurts. Today we visited Hat Rock State Park, site of the first landform in Oregon named by Lewis and Clark in their journals. They noted it on October 19, 1805 and labeled it on their map as “a rock in a Lar.d (larboard or left side) resembling a hat.”

They saw it as they paddled down, in their words, “the great Columbia River.” The river may look calm here, but they somehow navigated the Columbia’s Class V whitewater rapids in dugout canoes.

“The landscape has changed since Lewis and Clark explored it: rivers have been dammed, forests cut over, prairies plowed under, and roads built to the horizon. Although remnants of wilderness still exist, imagine this land as Lewis and Clark first saw it two centuries ago.” –Oregon State Park literature

Hat Rock is one of the few landmarks noted by Lewis and Clark that remains today. Most of the rest are now underwater due to dams on the Columbia. Sad.

Here’s the distinctive rock, a little closer. The monolith rises 70 feet above its base. Around 50 years after Lewis and Clark first noted it, wagon trails followed routes near the landmark.

The girls and I hiked up to the fence at Hat Rock’s base. They were more than a little disappointed they couldn’t climb the rock itself.

“President Thomas Jefferson had instructed Lewis and Clark to observe and describe ‘with great pains and accuracy’ all they could about the West. At that time, this land was still a mystery to the new Americans. Some even speculated that elephants or mammoths lived here.

“Lewis was a skilled naturalist. He spent many hours wandering with his dog, Seaman, observing and collecting plants he had never seen before. Lewis’ journals refer several times to sagebrush, describing it as an ‘aromatic shrub.’ In those days, this landscape was dominated by vast sagebrush shrub-steppe.

“Captain Clark was skilled in geography, and he was mainly in charge of navigation, mapmaking, and illustration. The sextant and the compass were his tools, and even today, historians marvel at the accuracy of his work.” –Oregon State Park literature

Now seriously, does this look like Oregon? It’s our second day in Hermiston and we still don’t quite believe this “sagebrush desert” is the same lush state we’ve been in for nearly two months!