WAITING FOR THE FOG TO LIFT ABOVE BISHOP’S RAPID (left)
ROSS AND ARMSTRONG REGISTERING "GLOOM" (right)
THE “INTAKE” AT THE LITTLE DALLES (above)
WHERE WE STARTED TO LINE THE LITTLE DALLES (below)
A heavy fog filled the river gorge from bank to bank when we pushed off the following morning, and we had to nose down carefully to avoid the piers of the bridge of the Great Northern branch line to Rossland. A quarter of a mile farther down the river began shoaling over gravel bars, and out of the mist ahead came the rumble of water tumbling over boulders. This was an inconsiderable riffle called Bishop’s Rapid, but the Captain was too old a river man to care to go into it without light to choose his channel. A half hour’s wait on a gravel bar in mid-stream brought a lifting of the fog, and we ran through by the right hand of the two shallow channels without difficulty. In brilliant sunshine we pulled down a broad stretch of deep and rapidly slackening water to the gleaming white lime-stone barrier at the head of the Little Dalles.
All of Northport had been a unit in warning us not to attempt to run the Little Dalles. Nearly every one, as far as I could judge, had lost some relative there, and one man gave a very circumstantial description of how he had seen a big batteau, with six Swede lumbermen, sucked out of sight there, never to reappear. On cross-questioning, he admitted that this was at high water, and that there was nothing like so much “suck” in the whirlpools at the present stage. The Captain, however, having just received telephonic word from Nelson that “moderation” had carried in B. C. by a decisive majority, felt that nothing short of running the Little Dalles would be adequate celebration. He had managed to come through right-side-up in a Peterboro once, and he thought our skiff ought to be equal to the stunt. He held that opinion just long enough for him to climb to the top of the cliff that forms the left wall of river at the gorge and take one good, long, comprehensive look into the depths.
“Nothing doing,” he said, with a decisive shake of his broad-brimmed Stetson. “The river’s four or five feet higher than when we ran through here in ’fifteen, and that makes all the difference. It was touch-and-go for a minute then, and now it’s out of the question for a small boat. If we can’t line, we’ll have to find some way to portage.”
The Little Dalles are formed by a great reef of lime-stone which, at one time, probably made a dam all the way across the river. The narrow channel which the Columbia has worn through the stone is less than two hundred feet in width for a considerable distance, and has lofty perpendicular walls. The river is divided by a small rock island into two channels at the head, the main one, to the right, being about two hundred feet in width, and the narrow left-hand one not over forty feet. The depth of the main channel is very great—probably much greater than its narrowest width; so that here, as also at Tumwater and “Five-Mile” in the Great Dalles, it may be truly said that the Columbia “has to turn on its side to wriggle through.”
It is that little rock island at the head of the gorge, extending, as it does, almost longitudinally across the current that makes all the trouble. It starts one set of whirlpools running down the right-hand channel and another set down the left-hand. Every one of the vortices in this dual series of spinning “suckers” is more than one would care to take any liberties with if it could be avoided; and either line of whirlpools, taken alone, probably could be avoided. The impassable barrage comes a hundred feet below the point where the left-hand torrent precipitates itself at right-angles into the current of the right-hand one, and the two lines of whirlpools converge in a “V” and form one big walloping sockdolager. Him there would still be room to run by if he were “whouf-ing” there alone; but his satellites won’t have it. Their accursed team-work is such that the spreading “V” above catches everything that comes down stream and feeds it into the maw of the big whirlpool as into a hopper. Logs, ties, shingle-bolts, fence-posts—all the refuse of sawmills and the flotsam and jetsam of farms and towns—are gulped with a “whouf!” and when they reappear again, a mile or two down river, they are all scoured smooth and round-cornered by their passage through the monster’s alimentary canal.