I level my eyes 20ft ahead and endeavour to keep the front wheel of the mountain bike on the narrow brown track that plunges swiftly down Hospital Hill, crossing fingers that the landmark isn’t aptly named. Mercifully, the trail bottoms out and opens into a broad, rolling ridge peppered with lonely spindles of wild rose and shimmering groves of white oak. Will Lyons pulls up to a vista across the Columbia River Gorge into Oregon’s Hood River Valley.
“All of this land was once flat and there was a big magma chamber under Mt Hood,” he explains, indicating the 11,250-foot snow-capped peak on the opposite side of the river. “When it erupted out of the volcano it collapsed and created a massive graben – a giant subsidence. Then, about 400,000 years ago, it was stripped and denuded by the Missoula Floods.”
Even today, there’s something visibly cataclysmic about this landscape. We’re standing amid a ring of fire, formed when a dense oceanic plate slammed into North America. Read more…
