The Hutchinsons of Crab Creek

The railroad tracks at Corfu, looking west. The photograph probably dates from around 1934

I did a Google search for Ben Hutchinson recently, and found out that he’s a sports figure of some repute in Europe. This must be a mistake, or I’m way out of touch with sports…which, come to think of it, I am! The man I’m thinking of passed on years ago.

I was a small boy when I first heard about Ben Hutchinson. My family liked to pile into a pickup or a station wagon and take a drive down what we called the Old Corfu Road, or in grandiose moments, the Old Corfu Highway. Along the way we would pass by the rear of the old Danielson Ranch near the banks of Crab Creek. My dad’s abandoned Model T truck was visible as a hunk of rusted machinery sticking up out of the sagebrush.

The Crossroads

Lower Crab Creek provided water. In Eastern Washington, that was a godsend. Temperatures on the Columbia Plateau routinely soar to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime, and rain is scarce. Cleaning irrigation ditches with a shovel west of Othello as a boy, many were the prayers I sent for even one scanty cloud to shield me from the overbearing sun.

The Sinkiuse Indians who lived there before me probably shared my distaste for the relentless sun. But they didn’t have the benefit of a well of cold water I could retire to, an air conditioner that cooled the house when I took a break. They were stuck with the weather the way it was: hot in the summertime, cold in the winter. They took a more basic approach to living on the Columbia Plateau: they stuck close to water, or if that weren’t possible, they found the shortest route from one water hole to the next.

Over centuries of migration and travel, humans developed routes that guided them along the most direct lines of travel from one pool or stream of potable water to the next.

To The Cliffs and Beyond

My son investigates the sandstone banks that have weathered out of the basalt cliffs on Saddle Mountain.

Rust coats the rails where electric trolleys once pulled passenger trains along Saddle Mountain.

My son enters the upper end of Column Crevice on Saddle Mountain.

This sportive predator was dashing to and fro across the ridge for quite a while.

It’s difficult to capture the scale of this landscape.

As the rest of the mountainside slumped into the flood, this point seems to have resisted.

My grandfather first climbed to the cliffs on Saddle Mountain in the 1920s. He was not the first visitor to a high ledge where soft sandstone is sandwiched between layers of black basalt. Names were carved into the soft rock, dated, gouged deeper on subsequent visits. My father, whose first visit to the cliffs must have been when he was a youngster in the 1920s, introduced the site to his children. Our first visits were made by motor vehicles. Rough trails still exist that can be followed by a truck with high suspension…not that I recommend the method of access. You miss so much when you’re trapped in metal.

My favorite route to the cliffs followed the Milwaukee Road tracks for a mile or so, then veered up the fenceline separating private cultivated land from the BLM sections. After you leave the railroad tracks you start a relentless climb, like going on foot up a mile-long stairway. First you traverse massive slopes of yellow clay, silt that precipitated out of the flood when the waters struck the mountain, slowed and diverted to the east and the west. These banks are composed of countless thin layers. In some places you can find petrified bones, usually blackened vertebrae of fish or small animals. We also found turtle shells and I keep a broken bison bone in my classroom, orange and yellow and imperfectly petrified.