Follow The Penstock

Day 281 (One of two): When the call went out for a photographer who was willing to bushwhack through dense brush given only vague directions for finding an old and dilapidated concrete dam on the Paradise River, I waved my hand furiously in the air while jumping up and down yelling, "Me! Me! Me!" There is nothing I like better than an Adventure, and when only a handful of my colleagues had any remote idea that this dam even existed, let alone knew where it was, I couldn't resist the lure.

I suppose I should offer the backstory here because it's quite amusing. Some time in the last couple of weeks, Mount Rainier National Park received an edict from the Federal Government stating that all hydroelectric dams were to be brought up to a particular standard by such-and-so date. The Paradise River Dam was on their list. At eight feet high and approximately fifteen feet wide, it wasn't much of a power producer even in its heyday; nevertheless, its kilowatts had gone on record and no one had ever bothered to mention that it had fallen into serious disrepair. The wooden penstocks have been maintained where they are close to a trail, but where they debouch into the forest, they are often in the condition shown here if, in fact, there is even that much structure left. Mossed over, buried by soil, crushed by fallen trees, the penstock was what I needed to locate in order to track it to its source, the dam.

Well, as I said, I love an Adventure. When I lost the visible sections of the penstock, I began thinking like an engineer, puzzling out where the pipes might lay. I followed a variety of subtle visual clues, a slight subsidence of the land, a cutbank where there was no natural reason for one to occur, and eventually, I came upon an exposed section of the wire framework which held the wooden slats together. I spent some time disentangling blueberry bushes from my glasses, unhooking bootlaces from unseen sticks, freeing my packstraps from snagging branches, but yes, I found the dam. I spent a couple of hours prowling over the structure taking photos from various angles, estimating length and width and surface area of various components. It was only once I was content with the data and images I had gathered that I happened to glance up at the sky. We'd had a morning of hard thundershowers, and it looked like another system was moving in. I packed up my gear, pleased with my success, and followed the penstock back to easy trail and down the miles to the car.