Welcome
to Kosmos!
enjoy it while you can!
by Dave McBee
At the upper end of Riffe Lake, the reservoir behind the Mossyrock Dam along the Cowlitz River in southwestern Washington, the crumbled and faded remains of Kosmos, a one-time logging boomtown, have emerged. Riffe Lake is currently 130 feet below normal for this time of year. Normally brimming with rainwater and snowmelt, much of the bed of the lake consists of dry, cracked mudflats. Chunks of old highways that paralleled the original watercourse lie ruined and toppled along eroded slopes, now sporting tufts of grasses. Stumps of ancient trees submerged since the dam was built in 1968 stand , seemingly, on tiptoes, roots exposed by erosion caused by the swirling waters of the reservoir. You occasionally get little reminders of the usual status quo: nylon line and fishing lures wrapped around old tree stumps now more than 100 vertical feet above the water's edge. And then you find yourself in Kosmos.
One time headquarters of logging operations for the U.S. Plywood
Corporation and home for as many as 500 people, Kosmos was drowned
when the dam was built in 1968. Now it lies high and dry on a
dusty plain now sprouting grass. And memories.
There's really not much left: a couple of big, solid building foundations (town hall? railroad station?), railroads tracks disappearing into the dirt. One main paved road leads into town, though now badly rutted, splitting off into faded gravel roads, splitting off in turn into smaller, fainter gravel paths, each leading to small piles of house rubble, decorated now with bits of old clay water-pipes and weathered glass.
We met some locals that told us that they usually fish right where we were standing. From boats.
What happened here? The polar jet stream that usually hoses
down the seaward slopes of the Cascade Range in British
Columbia, Washington, and Oregon has, instead, shifted south
to spray the Sierras of California. We haven't received our normal
precipitation, rain or snow, and the snowpack across the Cascades
in Washington is about 50% of normal.
And Riffe Lake is not an isolated incident. Two dams along the Skagit River in northern Washington have had to completely shut down because the water level behind them has dropped below the turbine intakes. Alder Lake, another hydroelectric reservoir, along the Nisqually River in west central Washington, sports miles of brown, cracked mudflats. Oregon has similar problems.
Meanwhile, California has screwed
up its own power production (though they do have more than 400
hydroelectric plants, they only produce about one quarter of
the state's energy needs). Washington and Oregon have been ordered
by the federal government to supply energy (that, for once, we
really don't have a surplus of) to California at bargain rates.
Consumer energy bills in Washington and Oregon have been bumped
up drastically to compensate.
Washington counts on its winter snowpack to reserve water for its energy needs for the rest of the year, and unless we get a poop-load in March (entirely possible) it will be a long dry summer.
But there's always an up side: if we don't get a heavy snowpack, backpackers will be able to reach the high backcountry that much earlier. And we may get to walk the streets of Kosmos for a few months longer.
Author Dave McBee plans to save electricity this spring by retiring his pasta machine,
musical foot massager, salon bonnet hair dryer, provocatively-shaped
holiday lights, automatic nail clipper, and power tomato corer.
He won't part with his heated eyelash curling device, however.
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