Hal and Nancy's Lewis and Clark Trip with Road Scholar, May–June 2022
This is Hal’s report of Hal and Nancy’s Lewis and Clark excursion with Road Scholar (the program “The Corps of Discovery: Montana to Oregon by Land & River”). It was a combination bus tour with Road Scholar from Great Falls, MT, following Lewis and Clark to Idaho, and then a seven-day cruise on the Snake and Columbia Rivers to the Pacific, ending up in Portland. It was my (Hal’s) 21st Road Scholar learning adventure, Nancy’s 19th.
This report is in two parts:
- Land portion of our trip from Great Falls to Spokane
- River cruise on the American Empress from Clarkston to the Pacific (this page)
Sunday, May 29 — Prepping for the Cruise in Spokane, WA
It was a 75-minute drive to Spokane, WA. This takes us off the Lewis and Clark route, but is necessary because that’s where the American Queen riverboat company administers the mandatory Covid-19 test. When we arrived at the Historic Davenport Hotel, our room wasn’t ready so we went directly to testing. After a 30-minute wait, we both passed and did some remaining cruise paperwork, then sat in the beautiful lobby awaiting our room. Dinner was a good one at the Post Street Ale House next to the hotel.
May 30 — Spokane to Clarkston, WA
Memorial Day! We packed up our bags for pickup from inside our room at 8 and delivery to our cabin on the boat. I used Apple AirTags in the bags to track their progress. Breakfast was in a ballroom with every other cruise passenger, about 175 we were told. At 9 we Road Scholars started on a walking tour with a different guide, a local guy who was way knowledgeable about the area. He talked about the history of the town, the main industries, and famous citizens, most prominently Bing Crosby.
We had good walking weather, chilly and overcast. The main attraction in Spokane is the impressive waterfall downtown on the Spokane River. We wandered around Waterfront Park, site of the Expo 74 world’s fair, and talked about native tribes past and present.
Rhonda met us again with her bus and we drove into the surrounding hills to Palisades Park where we heard about local flora and fauna and had a very interesting lecture about the Missoula ice-age floods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods We we’re destined to hear about this topic numerous times because the floods about 12,000 years made the Columbia River Gorge what it is.
We lunched at Gander and Ryegrass, a restaurant with excellent food, but there was a time mixup and we had to rush through our very delicious homemade pasta entrees and skip dessert; they provided boxed chocolate truffles to go.
The boat company assigned us to a 1:45 bus, more comfortable than the Road Scholar bus, for the two hours to Clarkston WA (which is directly across the Snake River from the larger town of Lewiston ID). It was a pretty ride through rolling hills of farm country. Once at the dock, getting on the American Empress riverboat was fast and easy because all the formalities had been accomplished at the hotel yesterday. We had an easy emergency life preserver drill and then an early dinner at 5:15; the food was pretty good and the local wine excellent. There were two large tables reserved for the Road Scholar group. At 8:15 there was a shore excursion talk, but we decided to skip the show that started at 8:30, a quartet of musicians, one of whom was the cruise director. The boat remained docked at Clarkston all night.
Our “deluxe veranda” cabin is rather small by modern cruise standards and the bathroom is quite tight. It would be more comfortable for a single passenger. The boat seems based on a 19th century design when men were 6 inches shorter. 😉 The cabin also has paper thin walls and you can clearly hear conversations in adjoining rooms, as well as toilet flushing as far as a few cabins away—no late sleeping on this boat because at least some of your neighbors are flushing at 5:30 AM. There is free Wi-Fi, but it is sometimes slower than regular cellular service and there are mysterious connectivity problems that imply they are blocking certain types of internet transactions (such as downloading YouTube videos and syncing iOS photos and Notes files, all of which work fine when you switch to the cellular network, and also worked on the Portland Airport public Wi-Fi at the end of the trip).
Tuesday, May 31 — Clarkston and Hell’s Canyon, Snake River
We’re up early for a “premium“ shore excursion, included in the Road Scholar package, for a jet boat ride up the Snake River to Hell’s Canyon. (Each port has a freebie hopping bus tour, but some have extra-charge packages.) From the names Hell and Jet, and from an internet video I saw recently, I was expecting an exciting thrill ride through dark ominous terrain, women screaming through dangerous high-speed maneuvers, etc. But what we got a more sedate experience. We took a five minute bus ride to another dock and boarded the 40-passenger “Hell Bound,” a welded aluminum boat with three 440 horsepower Ford engines squirting water out the back (hence, “jet”). We expected a chilly ride, but there were clear plastic window coverings and the weather turned out to be the best of the trip so far, sunny and low 70s.
We proceeded through a large reservoir and then onto the narrow Snake. Following a lot of recent rain, the hills were beautiful green and the river high and brown. Our captain, Eric, said the river was currently twice its normal size. We passed by quite a number of riverside houses, and as we got farther south, they were completely disconnected from civilization, without power grid, water, or sewage services. The ones on the Idaho side had only boat access. It took 90 minutes to reach the official start of Hell’s Canyon and by then the mountains were steep and very high above us, rocky with grass—nary a tree. (Hell’s Canyon is known as the deepest gorge in the US.) We saw ospreys, pelicans, and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep just past birthing season, perched precariously on the steep cliffs with their lambs.
We stopped for 45 minutes at the Lodge at Garden Creek Preserve, originally settled in the mid 1800s by Chinese immigrants, who planted an orchard now about 100 years old. It was our only rest stop; drinks and cookies were provided. We turned around at 45.877°N, about 50 river miles south of Clarkston. On the return we stopped mid-river to see the Buffalo Eddy Petroglyphs, carved by ancestors of the Nez Perce, possibly 7000 years old. Eric said that no one knows exactly how Hell’s Canyon got its name, but I informed him that it was a result of no internet access. 🤓
We returned to the Empress at 1 pm and had a nice lunch at the River Grill buffet restaurant, getting excellent cheeseburgers with a good local Pinot Noir. We sailed at 3 pm and enjoyed the passing river scenery 50 yards away from our veranda. Unfortunately, cell and Wi-Fi service crapped out immediately and it will not return until Richland in the morning. Someone should call Elon Musk about StarLink service.
At 4:30 was our first lecture by the boat’s “Riverlorian,” who described the statistics and mechanics of the boat in great detail, some geology of the area, and the Missoula ice-age floods. He outlined the schedule for passage through eight upcoming locks and I was disappointed to hear that many of these would occur very late at night.
Dinner was a step down in quality, although once again the wines were quite good. There was a kerfuffle when the power went out and then some undisclosed problem caused us to sit idly in the first set of locks for quite awhile. Crewmen could be seen running on deck outside. The captain announced that there were filters needing replacement, but we would get underway again soon. There were rumors going around that there was some problem with the anchor.
The evening show was a very talented guy who sang and played guitar, electric guitar, and violin with a small group backing him. He once appeared as Buddy Holly in a San Antonio musical. My favorite tune was "Ashoken Farewell," which had an unusual arrangement with a piano and clarinet accompaniment, but was lovely. He also did "When the Devil Comes to Georgia" almost as well as Charlie Daniels.
Wednesday, June 1 — Richland, Sacajawea, and Hanford
Our progress down the Snake has been delayed a few hours, which is actually good because we had a great time at breakfast watching our transit of the Ice Harbor dam, 100 feet high. Unlike, say, the Panama Canal, the lock doors are huge single slabs raised vertically by two towers. (Ice Harbor is so-named because the riverboats used to hide in a little inlet here when big ice flows were passing through.) We missed the three preceding dams in the night: Lower Granite, Little Goose, and Lower Monumental. There are four to come on the Columbia.
We landed right on schedule at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, Sacajawea State Park, nestling up to shore and using the retractable bow gangway. On shore we gathered and Ned talked about the Corps at Canoe Camp on the Clearwater River, where they spent 11 days building canoes. Then we split up and wandered around the nice park. There were seven Maya Lin “story circles” as part of the Confluence Project. Lin is best known for her design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Her seven Story Circles, some above ground and others buried in the ground, feature tribal stories, excerpts from Lewis and Clark's journals and natural history of a site used as a gathering place for 10,000 years.
The Sacajawea Museum is small but decent, with a lot of info about the Lewis and Clark timeline as well as the famous Indian lady. It’s funny that this spelling of the name is on the door, but they acknowledge Sacagawea is the more correct version and it’s used on the exhibits inside. (The J version is her supposed Shoshone name, the G her Hidatsa, and Lewis’s notes leaned toward the latter, although he spelled it various ways. The two versions are pronounced differently, too: Sacka-jaw-WE-uh vs. Suh-CAHG-a-we-uh.)
We walked around the park awhile and were happy to see two bald eagles soaring overhead, and some wild turkeys too. We had an early lunch on the boat (an excellent chicken and sausage gumbo) and then took the hopping bus to the REACH Museum in Richland, about a 40-minute drive. The museum specializes in two subjects: the Hanford Engineering Works of the Manhattan Project, and the geology and ecology of the Tri-Cities area. I spent about 45 minutes in the former and just a few in the latter. Nicely done with a lot of info about the 50,000 people who worked on plutonium production for the bomb (but didn’t know what they were working on!)? The National Park Service has an interpretative center at the old B Reactor itself, a few miles north of Richland, and I hope to visit that some day.
At 3 we had a Road Scholar cocktail party, which probably would have made more sense earlier in the trip when we didn’t know each other as well, but it was nice with a few hors d’oeuvres and a fully open bar. Dinner was about average, with the wines continuing to be excellent. It’s interesting that over half of our group is now choosing to skip the main dining room. We got to watch a full passage through the McNary dam lock, the first for us on the Columbia. (These passages are quite silent so it’s not always apparent that they’re happening, especially late at night.) There was a quick Disembarkation lecture at 8:15, but then we skipped the country western show at 8:30.
Thursday, June 2 — The Dalles, Columbia Gorge
The boat transited the Dalles dam locks without waking us and then docked downtown. The Dalles was a decision point for settlers on the Oregon Trail—should they risk a raft down the river or take a dangerous road around Mt Hood called the Barlow Road? Mt Hood, 30 miles away, was beautiful this morning.
Our group took the 9 am hopping bus to its first stop, the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center. On the way we had guide commentary and she pointed out an enormous Google data center that she said cost $1.8 billion! We rode on US Route 30, which I have driven many times in Gettysburg, the Lincoln Highway. The museum is excellent, with lots of interesting content and great graphic and interior design. There was a room that described Lewis and Clark, concentrating in great detail on the logistical aspects of hauling so much cargo. There was a lot of info on the ice age, the geological effects, and the giant, now extinct, animals of the era. I was particularly struck by the 440 lb Giant Beaver. And there was a mammoth replica that was simply mammoth, over 13 feet high. In a section on native tribes there was a fascinating plank house with illustrations of how the natives stripped planks of wood directly from the standing tree.
The other half of the museum was dedicated to Wasco County, which in its first iteration comprised two-thirds of the state—all but the coastal third—but a series of maps showed how it shrank over the years to its current modest size. They showed the industries, agriculture, and some of the more recent history of the county. John C. Frémont was here is 1843. Nancy enjoyed seeing lots of historic saddles on display and films of early farm combines, pulled by dozens of horses.
The hopping bus made a few stops and we hopped off at the National Neon Sign Museum. Unfortunately, we were time-limited, so we had to rush through. There was an excellent video by a sign artist about how to build neon (or argon) tube signs. Wandering back to the boat, we saw a good deal of The Dalles, which has a somewhat depressing downtown. Lots of breweries and wine tasting rooms, though. Our group regathered itself at the boat and we walked about a half mile to Lewis and Clark’s Rock Fort; their Nez Perce guides bailed out here and the party was concerned about a possible attack from other tribes that were “less gracious” to them, so they quickly fortified a small position here.
The Empress departed at 12:30 and we had a few quiet, sunny hours enjoying the passing shoreline from our veranda. At 3 pm we had a special session in the show lounge; Ned talked (mostly) about the winding roads taken by the various Lewis and Clark personal journals to publication and the public reaction to the expedition. After 4 we docked at the tiny town of Stevenson, WA, which is only about 25 miles from The Dalles. Dinner in the main dining room was okay. Nancy and I took a walk on shore to check out the small town of Stevenson, but found little of note other than a middle school band concert on the town square, viewed by well over 100 people. A female singer was the headliner in the boat showroom, but we didn’t bother. We did hear some pretty high notes all the way inside our cabin.
Friday, June 3 — Stevenson, Multnomah Falls, Bonneville Dam
A cold and dreary morning, the first suboptimal weather of the trip, but we never got an appreciable amount of rainfall. Our only morning activity was Ned in the showroom presenting 75 more minutes of Lewis and Clark PowerPoint. Some of it was random tidbits, including a lot of Indian portraits and more details on missing journals, but eventually he eased into a time sequence of events starting at the Great Falls portage. Just before lunch I led some friends onto shore to visit Skunk Brothers Spirits, where we had a tasting of five different spirits—really tiny tastes. There was a bourbon and some corn whiskeys and some moonshines, and some cordials that we skipped over. The most unusual was a gin that did not have a juniper taste and was purple. Lunch in the River Grill was as good as usual, today featuring a large Mac-and-cheese with shrimp and sausage. My judgment is that lunch in the grill is generally more to my current taste than is dinner in the main dining room.
Our group had a special bus arranged at 1 pm and we drove over the Bridge of the Gods to Multnomah Falls in Oregon, where we crammed twenty minutes of scenery and gift shop into an hour stop. The Forest Service visitor center has been closed since Covid, and it plans to open next week. The falls is 620 feet high, the second tallest in the US. According to Ned, Lewis and Clark didn’t notice it on their trip down the Columbia.
Nearby was the Bonneville Dam and locks, and our visit was regrettably short. There’s a very interesting film, which we had to cut short, fish ladders, fish viewing, and generator room, which we couldn’t make time to see. Lots of interesting exhibit signs went unread.
We tried dinner in the River Grill tonight and were pleased. They had a big prime rib with baked potato as well as most of the entrees and wines in the main dining room; appetizers and desserts less so. It as also quick enough that we got into the 6:30 show, which is usually for the 8:30 dinner crowd. A man named Greg Pendzick performed Broadway show tunes, strongly in costume and personality, and we thought he was excellent. (It turned out that he is the husband of the singer we heard last night.)
Saturday, June 4 — Columbia River Cruising
The boat remained in Stevenson overnight and had an early start down the river for a full day of cruising. At 7:30 we transited the Bonneville locks. We returned to the show room at 9 for a final Lewis and Clark PowerPoint with Ned, this time following up on where the members of the Corps went after they returned. Summary: one third went missing (to history), one third stayed home, and one third went back west as fur traders and guides, but most of this latter group ended up being killed by Indians. The Riverlorian then came in to do the first of two presentations on Lewis and Clark, but we’d had enough of the topic, so adjourned to the River Grill for (real) hot chocolate and pastries.
Back on our veranda, we watched a lot of shore-side activities as we passed Vancouver WA. We turned off the Columbia and headed up the Willamette River to add some time to our cruising—because our dock won’t be available in Astoria until late afternoon—turning back around at the Broadway Bridge in downtown Portland. We saw a big Holland American Line ship in a floating dry dock. And we passed under the picturesque St John’s Bridge, which has memories for me because I ran across it in 2007 during my very first marathon.
As we sailed back on the Columbia, we saw lots and lots of ocean freighters, which are impressive, experienced only yards away from our windows. At 4 we had a Road Scholar session that recapped the whole journey; tomorrow is planned to be too busy to accommodate that. Dinner at the River Grill again, with prime rib and lobster tails. The evening show was pretty good, a tribute to 60s and (mostly) 70s rock.
Sunday, June 5 — Astoria, OR
Today looks to be the only significantly rainy one of the trip. We took the 8:30 hopping bus to the Astoria Column, a monument to the early settlers here, donated to the town by the Astor family. It is reminiscent of Trajan’s Column in Rome, with 22 bas-relief scenes of the past wrapped around in an ascending style called sgraffito. It’s 125 feet tall and has an internal spiral staircase of 164 steps. Some of our friends quickly climbed up and launched balsa wood airplanes from the top, but since it was cold, rainy, and completely fogged in, we decided to demure. Since the tower is on a 600-foot hill, you’d expect the view to be pretty spectacular on a nice day. We mostly huddled in the tiny gift shop until another hopping bus returned after 25 minutes. We saw quite a lot of the 10,000-person town of Astoria, dominated by old Victorian homes, but rather glum in the poor weather, which seems to be pretty typical November through June.
The second stop was the Columbia River Maritime Museum. It’s roughly divided in half between Cost Guard rescue services and historical info on the hundreds of shipwrecks on the bar at the mouth of the Columbia. The National Motor Lifeboat School is near here because, as a sign indicated, “the surf and weather conditions on the Columbia River bar are consistently the worst in the US.” But there was also a gallery on early mapping of the coast and other exhibits about the salmon canning industry. All very attractive and well done. There was a 25-minute movie, but our schedule didn’t work for us to partake. Then it was back to our boat for lunch.
The Road Scholars got a dedicated bus for the afternoon excursion devoted to Lewis and Clark. First stop was Fort Clatsop, at Lewis and Clark National Historic Park, where the Corps wintered over 1805–6. There is a replica fort that looks quite substantial, although not too comfortable in cold rainy winter. A short walking path takes you to see a natural spring they used. The bookshop here has the most extensive Lewis and Clark book collection we saw at any previous site.
We crossed the tall cantilever Astoria-Megler Bridge (which is US 101) and drove into Washington. A small park on the shore named Dismal Nitch marks where the Corps spent a miserable six days in standing water and almost continuous rain, unable to paddle away because of high waves. Then Station Camp, or Middle Village, where Clark completed some cartographic measurements and it became the camp farthest west in their trip. Here they sent discovery parties around Cape Disappointment and then voted to go south of the river for winter quarters. Finally we rode north to Cape Disappointment State Park, where you can see the mouth of the Columbia meet the ocean. They have a really excellent museum with the best little movie about the expedition, but we weren’t allotted enough time (50 minutes should have been 90) and had to skip some of the movie and a third of the exhibits. Now I know what gives Cape Disappointment its name. 😉
Back on our boat, we all met for dinner in the main dining room. No big speeches, just a good time. The boat departed as we ate. We didn’t bother with the farewell show and just packed up the bags and put them in the hallway before 11.
Monday, June 6 — Portland to Home
Our transfer bus to the airport left at 7:30, so we had to sit at PDX for 4.5 hours; when cruise lines book your tickets they are very conservative with timing. Apparently it rained in the Bay Area the day before, so the view of San Francisco from the plane window was spectacular.
We had a really good time on our trip. All of the Road Scholar stuff worked well, we met a lot of nice folks, and learned a lot about Lewis and Clark and the Pacific Northwest. The American Empress riverboat was pretty good, with friendly staff who tried hard, but because of the small cabin and rather uninteresting food, we may not choose to sail with them again. It was very convenient to have Road Scholar book the cruise for us because they handled all of the extra charges usually cropping up, such as tips and excursion fees, and we walked off with a zero account balance. So there are probably more Road Scholar adventures in the future for us.