The desert country along the Columbia River is one of the WestÕs least-known desert placesÑone that most people donÕt even drive through unless they are unusually curious travelers. The Hanford Reach is the last free stretch of the river between the McNary and Priest Rapids Dams, a place boasting a varied landscape of floodplains, wetlands, deserts, orchardsÑand nuclear reactors. This is not a place that people think to visit. Known primarily for hosting the countryÕs most toxic nuclear outpost, it is public land that barely exists in public consciousness. But because the Reach has been posted off-limits by the military since 1943, this book offers readers a little-seen glimpse into what the Pacific NorthwestÕs arid east was like before the postwar boom. Susan Zwinger has kayaked the Columbia through Hanford Reach with scientists and activists who are helping to restore it, and in this book she outlines the geographical extent of the Reach, reviews its history, and takes readers through the terrain by foot, on road, and on the river. Here is a land of dark lava flows and basalt cliffs interspersed throughout subtle, pale shrub-steppe, a table of aridity cut through by one of the countryÕs most prodigious rivers. ZwingerÕs sparkling text, enhanced by Skip SmithÕs striking photos, captures the subtleties of the contrasting vistas, just as it makes clear the depth of the radioactive poisoning within the soil and wildlife. We have only just begun to unfold the landÕs treasuresÑpetroglyphs, ancient village sites, new species, and geological wondersÑand in 2000, President Clinton protected 560 square miles of land as the Hanford Reach National Monument. This book celebrates what is preserved in that buffer zone at the dawn of a new era of environmental responsibility.

Inspector Casey Ruud raised questions about the concerns of people like nearby farmer Tom Bailie, and eventually went public with facts and figures on faulty plant designs, poor maintenance, sloppy engineering practices, and mismanagement.

CLICK HERE to download the 5 out of 5 star rated hike, "Thirteen Mile Mountain" (not actually 13 miles long!) from Day Hiking Eastern Washington (Provide us with a little information and we'll send your download directly to your inbox) One of the comprehensive regional editions in the popular "Day Hiking series" for Washington State 1% of sales are donated to trail maintenance Offers many close-to-home trails near population centers like Spokane, Tri-Cities, Ellensburg, and Yakima Day Hiking: Eastern Washington features 125 day hikes throughout the eastern Washington region, roughly covering the area of the state east of Highway 97. This expansive region includes the Spokane area, Colville National Forest and northeastern Washington (Colville, Metaline Falls, Kettle Falls, Republic, Tonasket), Moses Lake, Soap Lake, Coulee Dam, Lake Roosevelt, and other parts of the mid- and upper-Columbia River basin, southeast Washington (Pullman, the Blue Mountains, Walla Walla, Tri-Cities), and the eastern reaches of the Columbia River. Who better to cover such a large geographic area than long-time eastern Washington expert Rich Landers, partnered with Day Hiking guru Craig Romano? These two trekkers have combined forces to research and write an authoritative guide that is sure to become the new gold standard. **Mountaineers Books designates 1 percent of the sales of select guidebooks in our Day Hiking series toward volunteer trail maintenance. For this book, our 1 percent of sales is going to Washington Trails Association (WTA). WTA hosts more than 750 work parties throughout Washington’s Cascades and Olympics each year, with volunteers clearing downed logs after spring snowmelt, cutting away brush, retreading worn stretches of trail, and building bridges and turnpikes. Their efforts are essential to the land managers who maintain thousands of acres on shoestring budgets.

The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. At the same time, her childhood friend Carolyn's own father was dying of radiation-induced illness: "blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out." Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?" The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iSaR9mfeeM

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Identify and learn how to catch 60+ fish species of the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Details the destruction of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest by well-intentioned Americans who saw only the benefits of the dam-building, power plant and irrigation projects, not realizing the longterm effects of killing the river.