Concrete combined with electricity and eagles

It was harvest time last week in the vineyard at the estate winery that members of our family own and operate, and my wife and I volunteered to help pick grapes. We decided to use the need to get in the car as an excuse to have an overnight adventure somewhere near the winery in Sedro‐Woolley, and the first thing to come to mind when imagining ourselves as vagabonds in Skagit County was bald eagles. The population of bald eagles in the Skagit River watershed is seasonal: large numbers migrate in the winter from as far away as Alaska to eat the dead salmon carcasses that abound in the river and its tributaries, and, although the best watching season is from late November to late January, we estimated that we would not see any eagles if we did not go look. Many years ago, we purchased an autographed print of a photograph of a bald eagle from the wildlife photographer and author Bruce Sanford that has been framed and hanging in our downstairs hall ever since, and the prospect of seeing one of its cousins was fun to consider. There are also five major hydroelectric dams that were constructed in the Skagit River watershed between 1924 and 1959 — three for Seattle City Light and two for Puget Sound Energy — at least one of which we figured we should visit to remind ourselves where some of the energy for our gadgets comes from.

The Animal Planet television series Treehouse Masters and Nelson Treehouse Supply at home here in Fall City have piqued my curiosity for years about a stay in a treehouse. As I was poking around the internet to find a hotel room from which to embark on our daily excursions, I found Treehouse Junction in Concrete, a town situated at the confluence of the Baker and Skagit Rivers virtually at the base of Lower Baker Dam, one of the Puget Sound Energy dams. Completed in 1925 and raised thirty‐three feet in 1927 to its existing height of 285 feet, Lower Baker Dam was the tallest hydroelectric dam in the world at that time. A treehouse close to one of the Skagit River watershed dams where bald eagles fly? I clicked the Reserve button, and we were on our way.

Skagit Valley Burgers Express in Sedro‐Woolley has been on our friend‐recommended list of burger places to try for several months, and, as we were cruising along State Route 9 Wednesday morning, it occurred to us that we would pass within a few hundred yards of their parking lot in perfect alignment with lunch time. An hour or so later, with a left turn instead of a right, we arrived with appetites that soon declared themselves quite pleased to have heeded the recommendation. The burger, fries, and onion rings were special, and, as the burger was being made to vanish, a thick, creamy, nine‐ounce milkshake was a welcome smaller size to satisfy the hankering for a shake and overcome the alarm of not having room for one.

There is little mistaking when one has arrived at Concrete, as the silos of the Superior Portland Cement company adjacent to the highway with Welcome to Concrete stenciled on their sides are hard to miss. Completed in 1908, the cement plant became the largest on the Pacific Coast, supplying cement for projects as varied as the Hiram M. Chittenden (Ballard) Locks in Seattle and U.S. military runways in the Philippines during the Second World War. The company was awarded the initial contract for Grand Coulee Dam in 1935 with an order for two million barrels of cement at 300 pounds of cement per barrel and would be one of five suppliers used throughout construction, which consumed twenty million tons of concrete. By 1967, with cement dust covering the trees for miles around Concrete, the plant, unable to meet evolving air quality rules, closed. The site today is a park‐and‐ride lot for Skagit Transit.

Each August, the town hosts Cascade Days, a carnival celebration that began in the 1930s in order to promote the construction of what was then known as the North Cross State Highway. Not until September 2, 1972, did that highway open, its regional portion known today as the North Cascades Highway, a component of State Route 20 and of the scenic Cascade Loop byway, tracking the boundary between the northern and southern units of North Cascades National Park. Once part of SR 20, Main Street in Concrete at its intersection with Douglas Vose Ⅲ Way is now one block north of that reconfigured highway, and there stands a thirty‐two‐foot long, thirteen‐foot tall wooden sign commemorating the 2009 town centennial. The five cedar logs used to create the sign were carved with eagles, fish, logging trucks, and other images by Whidbey Island chainsaw artist Steve Backus and his crew in 2008 during the now‐defunct Fall Colors Festival in town. The two of us walked from there along Main Street through downtown Concrete on Wednesday afternoon studying the details of the Upper Skagit Library building, formerly the Heskett‐Arnold American Legion Hall Post 132 (1948); the high poured cement walls of the 140‐seat Concrete Theater (1923); the Mirawall façade of the former office of The Concrete Herald newspaper (The Voice of Eastern Skagit County), now a liquor store, originally a Ford garage and service station (1918); and the 1940s glass block inserts wrapping the northwest corner of the Cascade Supply building. The same year that Backus carved the centennial sign, he starred in a Pacific Northwest lifestyle commercial for PEMCO Insurance in which he carved a small bear that doubled as a toilet paper holder while the announcer told a story about chainsaw carving and then declared, Roadside Chainsaw Woodcarver, you’re one of us.  The main street of Concrete was a perfect setting for a commissioned piece of his rustic art.

We unpacked at the treehouse late in the afternoon like two kids on a trip to Disneyland. There was a small pond at the foot of the trees into the midst of which the house had been positioned, complete with a deck and railing against which to lean to listen to a small waterfall splashing into the tannic stillness of the pond. A stairway, adorned with strings of party lights and built with found branches for its balusters, led to the porch of the treehouse, where two lamps marked its entrance. Inside, the space was cozy but uncramped, full of colorful fabrics and whimsical tchotchkes tempered by warm light illuminating the carefully chosen decor. The trunk of one tree pierced the bedroom from floor to ceiling, which was perhaps the coolest feature of many cool features to be found as we explored the rooms. After folding away our clothes, we headed to Annie’s Pizza Station for dinner, where we licked our plates clean and enjoyed talking with one of the members of the family that has owned the restaurant for nearly thirty years. As we later tucked ourselves into bed at the end of a busy day, the drumming of rain on the roof overhead acted as an incantation for sound slumber.

The rain might be said to have been the reason we had come to the North Cascades. Without it, there would be no Skagit River watershed into which migrating salmon swim, no feasting eagles, no water to be impounded behind dams. The river is the third largest in the coterminous states that drains into the Pacific Ocean, and it continues to host runs of all five anadromous salmonid species, remarkable given the agriculture, development, diking, dredging, channeling, logging, mining, and hydropower projects that have altered its environment. From where a natural gas pipeline crosses the Skagit River in Sedro‐Woolley to its confluence with Bacon Creek near the boundary of the national park, the river is listed as a recreational waterway in the National Wild and Scenic River program; the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife owns 603 acres on the river at Rockport that is set aside for conservation and protection of bald eagle winter habitat, and, with cups of coffee in hand from North Cascade’s Perks Espresso & Deli on Thursday morning, we roosted on that scenic shoreline in the drizzle at the Sutter Creek Picnic Area just upstream of and opposite to that protected habitat, there to await a passing bald eagle. Our patience was rewarded despite the early season when, after a couple of hours of observation, we had seen a few eagles on the wing over the Skagit River before us. What a relief to take a break from being homeowners, taxpayers, voters, and consumers to spy on these redoubtable birds, at once familiar and remote, there in the riparian cottonwoods.

With that part of our agenda satisfied, we drove onward to the Gorge Overlook Trail and made the short hike to see the lower end of the narrow, fourteen‐mile Skagit River gorge and Gorge Dam, the first of the Seattle City Light hydroelectric plants built on the river. The reservoir, Gorge Lake, with a maximum capacity of 9,758 acre‐feet, is the smallest created by the three Seattle City Light dams across the Skagit but easily admired from the overlook trail. The river is dewatered for two miles between the dam and its powerhouse downstream for much of the year, diverted to a tunnel through the bedrock on the river left, which offers a clue as to why its wild and scenic designation does not extend to the gorge.

Across the river to the west of the Gorge powerhouse is the town of Newhalem, a planned community of a rare type — the municipally‐owned company town. Founded as a camp for construction workers and repository for materials and supplies, today it is home to Seattle City Light employees and contractors of the Skagit River Hydroelectric Project or of local county, state, or federal agencies. Slowing down for the unhurried drive through the tidy streets of Newhalem always reminds me of childhood, the sounds of lawnmowers and impact sprinklers, and the smell of peanut brittle.

The boundaries of the Skagit River & Newhalem Creek Hydroelectric Projects Historic District extend from Newhalem to the Diablo Powerhouse and Dam, so we continued east to drive across the crest of Diablo Dam. The second of the Seattle City Light dams to be built on the Skagit River, at the time of its completion in 1930, it was, at 389 feet, the tallest thin arch dam in the world. It has a base thickness of 140 feet. Its concrete‐lined power tunnel is 1,990 feet long and nearly twenty feet in diameter. We were able to park unchallenged at one side of the dam upon the unfenced verge of the reservoir within just a few feet of the first in a row of nineteen Tainter gates. A surreal quality shrouded the moment: This is a post‐9/11 world. Airports engage in rituals that involve armed federal agents and bomb‐sniffing dogs. The international border with Canada, traditionally extolled as the longest undefended border in the world, is no longer a permissive frontier. Between 2018 and 2020, the United States government undertook what it labeled counterterrorism activities in eighty‐five countries, including air and drone strikes and on‐the‐ground combat,¹ and for 2021 acknowledged conducting a further 441 air strikes worldwide — all under the authority granted to George W. Bush by Congress in 2001 to conduct a Global War On Terror. How does one conduct a war against a tactic? It is more than twenty years on, and the security apparatus, still lacking a theory of victory, has metastasized into a tool for the suppression of dissent. There in the still of the autumn day, with clouds hovering in the treetops and cat’s paws wrinkling the lake, we stood at the shoulder of the massive gravity abutment of the dam, certain that we could feel through the soles of our shoes the vibrations of the water plunging through the power tunnel beneath us. The solitude of the place and the decorative streetlamps in the 1930s Streamline Moderne style lining the roadway across the dam evoked an era of faith in the innocence of visitors. The absence of imperial troops brandishing machine guns made one look overhead for evidence of circling drones.

Two more dams were at one time on the Seattle City Light drawing board as additions to its Skagit River hydroelectric project. One of those would have diverted Thunder Creek, which debouches into Diablo Lake, via a tunnel into Ross Lake behind Ross Dam, the third of the City Light dams built on the Skagit River; the other would have impounded the Skagit River at Copper Creek downstream of the Gorge Dam to use for hydroelectric power generation, just as the river approaches the boundary of its wild and scenic district at Bacon Creek a short distance away. The Copper Creek project was shelved in 1981 after intense public opposition, and the Thunder Creek project was legislated out of existence in 1988.² Captivating as I find manipulations of the environment through massive infrastructure projects such as those we visited on this day, I am equally happy to see birds in the trees. The destruction of habitat that would have accompanied these projects is something I am glad has not happened. I am also glad when the lights go on as the sun goes down, but the City of Seattle has not gone dark in their absence, while today 92% of its retail load is served by renewable and non‐emitting resources.³

After a very satisfying day of sightseeing, we returned late in the afternoon to North Cascade’s Perks Espresso & Deli, hoping for a latté to take back to the treehouse with us before dinner, but they had closed at 2∶00 p.m. Annie’s Pizza Station was open and fixed us up. We had spotted Birdsview Diner Wednesday on the highway into town and decided it looked like a place where we should have dinner. Once there Thursday evening, we were let in on the secret, which is that they make one of the great Reuben sandwiches. We spent the remainder of the evening relaxing in the treehouse and talking about the events of the day, to awaken the next morning in a grape‐picking mood.