Once Upon a Time There Was a Landslide and a Log: A Lake Sutherland Geologic Journey

I have to admit it. I've gone totally geek over this North Olympic Peninsula tale. To follow the story, it helps to visualize how Lake Sutherland, Washington sits in relationship to Olympic National Park's much larger Lake Crescent. As you can see by the mile markers on Highway 101, the lakes are separated by maybe a mile of land, Crescent to the west with the "slipper shaped" Sutherland creeping east. The turn off to our property, the focus of the story, is a bit west of mile marker 233.

That mile of land between the two lakes did not use to be there. Rather than two lakes, there was one body of water draining down a valley, through Indian Creek (see the arrow pointing to Port Angeles) toward the sea. Then one day, five thousand years before any of us had taken a breath, the earth shook and full mountain walls, walls thousands of feet high, collapsed as if the legs of a giant had been suddenly paralyzed, dropping tons of basalt from the side of Mount Storm King.. You can see Storm King labeled on the map above, 4,534 feet towering over the east side of 580 foot Lake Crescent and the southwest corner of 528 foot Sutherland. There it is, looming across the lake to the southwest of us, that snow and rock hump edging above the ridge.

Geologists have one story as to why the mountain dramatically shed so much of its skin. Native Peoples have another. The first human inhabitants of the Northern Olympic Peninsula say that Storm King and its rock-armored bulk stood bold against the flails of the Pacific Ocean; snagging bulging, black clouds, deflecting hurricane force winds, absorbing skies filled with torrents of rain, all with the stoic confidence of a god mountain. It was man, they say, that finally tested the mountain King beyond its limits.

The Quileute have likely lived along the Pacific edge of the Peninsula for millennnia. They still do today, in La Push, Washington where James Island just off of First Beach offers this sort of beauty and provided sanctuary in times of threat and an eternal home for tribal ancestors. La Push is less than 50 miles from Lake Crescent.

The Quileute were masters of the ocean, builders of mighty sea canoes, hunters of whales. And they were also hunters on land, spiritually bound to wolves, the image of which adorn many of the tribe's elaborate ceremonial masks.

The S'Klallam, Coast Salish people, also for thousands of years, have lived along and inland from what is now called the Strait of Juan de Fuca. They're still there, like their Pacific counterparts, having thrived on the bounty of this land for hundreds of centuries and then survived the onslaught of disease, the swarming of everything, every place, and policies brought by Europeans. Today there are three S'Klallam tribes on the Olympic Peninsula, the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe being the closest to Lake Crescent, maybe 20 miles away.

The Strong People the S'Klallam are called by oral tradition, their name bestowed by neighboring tribes who marveled at both their physical strength and ingenuity employed to lift and set a totem of impossible weight, as depicted by this mural in a downtown Port Angeles public space..

The Lower Elwha Klallam community is just outside Port Angeles at the mouth of the Elwha River. Several important tribal facilities are in Port Angeles, including the Elwha Klallam Heritage Center, the Great Hall of which is shown here in this photo by Eric Neurath from the tribal website

It was these two tribes, these peoples who lived just day's travel from one another, who both knew this land, its bounties, and its dangers, and who apparently stirred a danger they did not expect. As the legend goes, there at the foot of Mount Storm King, along the shores of what was then a long, low, flowing body of water working its way toward the Indian Creek valley and the Elwha River, Quileute warriors met S'Klallam warriors and went to war. I was recently told by a Lower Elwha tribal member that the two tribes have slightly different versions. Present day Quileute say that the tribes were fighting over hunting territory. The S'Klallam story is that it was all about fishing lands, either keeping the Quileute from expanding into S'Klallam's lakes, rivers, and streams or the S'Klallam doing the expanding.

Whatever the reason for the murderous din at its feet, Mount Storm King did not care. It roared to the warriors to stop the fighting. Blood up, battle charged, taste of victory or revenge, likely both, on their lips and plugging their ears, the warriors fought on. Again, THE mountain told the tribes to stop! They did not. Finally, Storm King had enough; the time for reason and mercy had passed.

When I first heard this story, it was that Mount Storm King literally picked up masses of rock with huge, god-like arms, throwing the load and smashing the tribal armies below. As told by the tribal member, Storm King shook with anger and frustration, its walls crumbling and crushing the defiant warriors of both tribes. That's pretty close to the geologic story, the one of landslides caused by the grinding, cracking earth a comforting melding of perspectives, of world views. I prefer it.

So, here is Storm King now on a winter's eve, peaceful, it's upper dome shed of an outer layer which now rests between Lakes Crescent and Sutherland, doing the larger part of separating the two beautiful lakes. Who knows if that stone is also the grave of determined warriors, ancestors of the proud tribes that love this land today. What I do know is not to fight on these shores; and I wonder sometimes, when the music is blaring on the lake and the fireworks are booming, if it not better to be over here on the north shore, anywhere but at the foot of Mount Storm King.

But none of that is our story.

You're looking at Lake Sutherland's northwest shoreline on one of those still winter mornings when cloud settles into every depression along these hills and brushes the water with strokes painters spend lifetimes trying to replicate. Our place is buried in a stretch of trees at the beginning of left third of the photo, to the left of a white slash, a neighbor's waterslide. You can see it more clearly in the closeup from the same shot below. Those green trees to the left of the white slash on the right camouflage our house.

It looks like this from just off shore. Peaceful, settled; a spot on a natural, glacier-carved lake surrounded by wooded mountainsides just miles from rainforest. Plenty interesting but there really wasn't much demanding a reason for a non-geologist to think about how our little piece of land got to be what it is.

and then, THIS!

This photo would be fun simply for its perspective, for the depth of the cut compared to the man, for how clearly it tells the story of the work Eden Evacuation did to get us a driveway and a spot to build a house, and why we feel so tiny and appreciative every time we motor or walk that little bit of road. But, there's more to the story of this photo and, consequently, our land; ...and it all turns on what that man (our builder, James Schouten, maybe?) is looking at so closely.

Last year, in my post "The Lake House: Driveway and The Wall," I wrote:

"There, 20 feet or so below the surface, poking out of a clay-like gray slash that didn't look like the rest of the dirt, was part of a tree. We're guessing that it was buried there a few thousand years ago, maybe by one of the rockslides that separated Lake Sutherland from its spectacular mother, Lake Crescent. Maybe not, but it had been preserved as a tree, still organic, and cool as heck."

I included this photo.

You can see the wood sticking out of that gray stuff; a log buried twenty, maybe thirty feet under layers of dirt that hadn't been disturbed since the Earth put it there herself. This plot of land had been logged, they say, maybe a hundred of years ago, but it had never been built upon, never mined or excavated. That old piece of log was interesting and different enough that Shar and I wanted a piece. James and the Rodmans, the excavators, took some too. All of us wondered what tales it could tell, if our samples might mean something to some geologist somewhere. James reached out here and there to see if he could stir up some interest, but came up empty.

Our piece of the ancient log sat in a small cardboard box in the storeroom, looking pretty much like this, as we moved into the house, settled in, and worked for the next year or so at figuring out the cycle of life here on the Peninsula . Because of COVID, daughter Katharine did her first year of law school in the room around the corner from the storeroom; Conor married Kelly and little Joey was born; still the ancient log sat in the box. We went to Africa, climbed a mountain, moved Kat to Chicago, and the cardboard box stayed on the shelf. Then one day Shar asked "What are we going to do with that old piece of log?" We both felt that it was too interesting to throw away, a rich "thing" from this plot of land to go with the beams of Douglas fir taken down during the build and the boulders from this ground lining the crazy driveway. We need to display it, I thought. "But not in the cardboard box." Shar was right. It deserved something better.

The stuff you can get on the internet. One acrylic display box later and the cardboard was no more.

But, still the lingering questions. Was our "ancient log" from the great slides that made Lake Crescent what it is today; sixty plus feet higher than Lake Sutherland with its own path to the Strait of Juan de Fuca via the Lyre River rather than its original route through what is now Sutherland, down Indian Creek, the Elwha River, and then the Strait? How old is the thing? And, really? No geologist is interested at all in this little find of ours? Really? Obviously, we were in no position to judge but the log and where it was found seemed sort of unique. The whole thing was beginning to feel like an itch that had to be scratched. At the very least we thought we could get a sample carbon dated, figure out how long ago it was likely buried..

But..one after another, the radiocarbon dating labs I found online were proving unavailable. Some, like this response from BETA just said no, they weren't accepting carbon dating projects that that weren't from government programs, museums, research institutes, etc.

Some were limiting testing because of the pandemic. The University of Arizona was a solid prospect until they explained that their equipment had suffered catastrophic failure and wouldn't be available for many months. I was basically striking out. Maybe if we turned toward the geologists.

We knew that there had been some geologic interest in the two lakes, Sutherland and Crescent and the landslides that harassed and separated them since the ice receded 13 thousand of years ago, or so. Our friend, Marie Marrs, a long time lake resident, had given us a copy of this article published in Washington Geology sometime in the early 1990s.

I thought that the Roberts, Logan and Schuster, might be interested in our little log but couldn't figure out how to reach them. And after all, it had been 30 years since their article. I poked around enough to figure out that Logan's 'Division of Geology and Earth Resources' was part of Washington's Department of Natural Resources (DNR). That might be a place to look; that and the geology departments of Washington State's universities. I figured I'd send emails to them all, in clusters of 3, until I ran out of schools. First, the geology departments for the University of Washington and Western Washington University and, hoping to tickle old Robert Logan, the Department of Natural Resources

My November 3, 2021 e-mails, with these photos of the log and where we found it, were straight forward and paraphrased here:

'We were excavating on Lake Sutherland, ran into this cool old tree 20-30 feet down, here's what it looks like, and wonder if it might have been left by one of the landslides separating our lake and Lake Crescent as discussed in the Logan and Schuster article. We have two questions. Any thoughts on how we can get a sample radiocarbon dated? Any thoughts on whether someone somewhere might have an interest in this little find?'

Neither UW nor WWU ever sent back so much as a "what a stupid e-mail, don't ever contact us again." Maybe 9 months isn't enough time for them to get around to it.

BUT, within an hour of hitting "send", I received this:

So, not only might someone at DNR be interested in our buried find, there was something called a "landslides group?" Who knew? And they would be in touch? Well, we'd see.

And then, dang...within a couple of days my in-box started blowing up.

First, Patrick Pringle,Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences at Centralia College , a geologist and buried and submerged tree expert, and the author of the Roadside Geology of Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, wrote asking for the specific latitude and longitude of the find. He explained his part in testing some tree samples collected underwater in Lake Crescent during explorations by Lonnie Leithold and Karl Wegmann, both of North Carolina State University. There are trees under there that were either drowned (and preserved) when the slides cut off Lakes Crescent and Sutherland raising the water level or which were swept into the water by landslides (and preserved). 4000 , 3000, and 300 year old trees to compare with evidence of "megaturbidite deposition" triggered by of post-glacial (Holocene) ruptures in fault systems, etc, etc... information they're using to develop the geologic stories of this part of the Peninsula and which I can barely understand. And, he had dated a 280 year old tree cited in the 1991 Logan (who goes by Josh, it turns out) and Schuster article. Pat added, much to my delight, that he'd let both of them know about our "ancient log" and that Bob Schuster turned 94 in August, 2021. Pat and I exchanged several e-mails, his filled with helpful explanations of everything from lidar to who on the landslide team works where. He would reach out to others to help answer my questions, describe the calibration process used to interpret radiocarbon testing raw data, and offer suggestions about preparing samples for submission.

Michal Polenz, Geologist with the DNR's Geologic Mapping Section reached out not long after Pat with an excited, helpful e-mail chock full of information, professional article references, and radiocarbon dating laboratory options. He sent links to several articles like this on the right, offered details about radiocarbon dating labs, even Googling other options for us. He, like others, asked to be kept in the loop on what we learn and for permission to share the information with others who might be interested. He too identifyed everyone he brought into the loop. He joined in describing the sample submiting process and analyzing the obvious landslides visible via lidar. He pointed out that it looks as if our particular landslide appears on lidar to be older than others nearby because the others are more "hummocky," more bumpy...not yet as worn by the elements. So much geeky fun. Michael seems to really love the beauty and crazy geological story of this peninsula and would eventually offer me the opportunity to access a fascinating series of colorful lidar images he generated while mapping the Elwha and Angeles Point quadrangles a while back. They were spectacular.

In case you're unfamiliar, a little bit about lidar. Light Detection and Ranging Technology (lidar) involves a platform, plane, helicopter, etc, (like in this image from a CBS News article) flying over an area with a laser, scanner, and fancy GPS device to pulse light through soft stuff like trees and capture the 3D outline of harder material like the earth, man-made structures, and holes in the ground

Archeologists use lidar, for example, to look through otherwise impenetrable jungles and along difficult to interpret earth contours to find outlines and detail of ancient Mayan ruins in Mesoamerica. Check out these images of Aguada Fénix, a massive, thousands of years old Mayan complex in Mexico. Not much to look at in this first photo. (Found on-line in Science News)

But, as archeologist Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona discovered, check out the evidence of an extensive, complex, civilization hidden beneath the trees. These lidar images are Professor Inomata's from the Science News article

Folks like Michael Polenz have applied the same technology to study the geology of Washington State and the Olympic Peninsula. Here is a lidar view of our spot, including the area shown in the highway map on the first page of this post. This is what lidar sees, and allows us to see, peering down at the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Lake Crescent, Lake Sutherland, the. Sol Doc River Valley, and the surrounding ridge lines. Such detail. And as you enlarge specific targets, the detail just gets better and better. (The writing in blue ink is Associate Professor Karl Wegeman's. More on Karl in a second.)

And this is a close up of the western part Lake Sutherland, with our place where our log' was found marked as "Los Gran Rocas." (I know, Spanish speakers, it's supposed to be "Las." But what can I do, it's what I wrote on the map.) You can see the detail of the land, unlike the drone shot below; like the parallel lines of the excavated Shadow Mountain store and RV camp.

A little different perspective, a little further out with more of Lake Crescent and the mountain to the north, was perfect for Professor Karl Wegmann to thrill me with an in-person tutorial. A native of Port Angeles, Karl teaches geology at North Carolina State University. He has pursued research projects and mentored students at extraordinary sites around the world but he particularly loves the Olympic Peninsula and has studied the hyperactive geological history of this place with a passion. So, when he came through town to see family he took the time to sit down with us and our little piece of old wood. That's Karl's blue ink below and it sketches some of what he has learned and published about the history of rock slides around Lake Crescent. He explained that "Our Place," as it is marked, is the product of a landslide, but not the ones which separated Sutherland from Crescent, those are further west a bit. And there was a landslide after ours, further up the hill but stopping mostly where Highway 101 is. They've enough evidence to date the separating landslides at around 5,000 years ago. So, then when was ours???

Well, there really wasn't anything to available to date the landslide that gave us this piece of ground. Except, remember, we started this whole wonderful dance by wanting to radiocarbon date the log. Pat, Karl, Mark, all of them agreed that a good and available choice was a Washington State company,

DirectAMS. I packed up a fingernail sized piece of log, cleaned as suggested, sent it off, and waited.

A few weeks later, sooner than expected, the results. I'd been warned that they would require some interpretation but by then I had this passel of wonderful scientists who had been so eager to help. I shipped the results off to everybody. Pat Pringle and Karl Wegmann both responded. Karl's e-mail lays it out nicely.

The true age our "ancient log" is between 7, 259 and 7,156 years old! Holy Cow! No one can tell if the tree was alive when the earth shook and side of the mountain to our back smothered everything with that twenty-five foot plus layer of rock and dirt we had to dig through to build this house. It may have been dead before the landslide but that would only affect the age via the dating by a few dozen years, if that. It's 7,000 any way you look at it. Karl has some information with which to compare this data from his and other's studies and explorations over the years. It's interesting but I could not possibly do the interpretations justice so I'll leave discussing that to Karl and his colleagues.

What Shar and I do know is that 7,000 plus years ago, thousands of years before the Mesopotamians established the first real civilization on Earth or the founding of today's great religions, but while people traveled this peninsula, a landslide, likely deafening, roared down from behind where this great drone shot was taken by our friend and neighbor, Scott McGee. (he and Carolita do this kind of cool photography with Forest2Sea Real Estate Photography), The slide likely buried a stream bed, judging by the sand layer down 30 feet, carried with it a tree from up the mountain and buried it. And then the ground just waited, watching, maybe, as two tribes raised hell as they battered each other nearby, as the ground shook time and again, as a greater slide across the water broke loose from the mighty Mount Storm King and as other, lesser slides cleared their throats. The ground and the tree waited as the S'Klallam embraced the beauty of what is now Lake Sutherland with the Nahkeeta lake creation story, a lake springing from tribal tears shed over the death of a beloved child. And as a European mountain man, John Sutherland named the lake for himself.

This is another Scott McGee drone shot, Lake Sutherland from the west. Mount Storm King's great slide from the right, and the smaller ones from the north (left) are the land below us here. Lake Crescent is behind. It has been wonderful to unlock a mystery or two about the ground underneath all of those trees. So many have loved this place for so long. We are very new but all of this has helped us dig in a little.

A deep and hearty thank you to the Department of Natural Resources landslide team and to all those who responded so eagerly to our elementary inquiry and questions. Thank you Pat Pringle, Michael Polenz, Karl Wegmann, Trevor Contreras, Paula Reimer, and Tom Braziunas, for helping us and our little, rough piece of wood, our "ancient log."

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