🚀 go-pugleaf

ronf@plaza.ds.adp.com (Ron Finley ) writes:

|In article <THAkw0O5IcwP084yn@teleport.com>,
|Larry Caldwell <larryc@teleport.com> wrote:
|>In article <lream-2310951343260001@lake-city-01.iea.com>,
|>lream@comtch.iea.com (Lanny R. Ream) wrote:
|>
|>> But what is the "Pacific Northwest"? Sometimes I see Utah included in it!
|>
|>Usually it includes the Columbia River drainage:  British Columbia, 
|>Western Alberta, Western Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

|The Columbia drainage seems like a good start.  Now we need to
|include coastal streams and the portions of Oregon that are in the
|Great Basin.  How about everything in the drainages of all streams
|that flow into the Pacific Ocean between the mouth of the Klamath
|River and Vancouver B.C., and then add in anything in Oregon or
|Idaho that is still left out?  That would give us all of Oregon,
|Washington, and Idaho, plus the northernmost part of California,
|a good chunk of B.C., and I think part of Alberta.  I think it also
|includes the part of Montana west of the Continental Divide, that
|was part of the Oregon Territory.  I guess I'll have to take a good
|look at an atlas this weekend.

Including the drainage area ofthe Kalamath in the south to the Fraser in
the north covers a hugh amount of area - and not all of it is the
"Pacific NorthWest".  Compare the 'drainage area' of the Mississippi
River: Oklahhoma, Montana, Minnesota Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and
Tennesse.   While not as diverse - the Fraser-Columbia-Klamath river
basin does drain a diverse area - not to mention the political/cultural
boundary at the 49th parallel. :-)

I think you're going to have to look at _The Nine Nations of North
America_  which recognizes that the Inland Empire and analogs (all the 
territory east of the Cascade range) are different from "Ecotopia" (That
part of the region which gets all the rain.

I'd say that the "Pacific NorthWest" is that part which looks to
Vancouver, Seattle and Portland as the "port city".  But getting the
geo-ecologically diverse regions to think together is going to be hard.
On 'the coast' agriculture is logging, and 'livestock' is fishing; east
of the mountians it is crops and cattle.  Loggers and fishers vs farmers
and ranchers. (And the former two are two of the more dangerous
occupations known to OSHA.)

I dunno, I've always thought of The Pacific NorthWest as that part of
Northa Americacloses to the Pacific which gets the Rain and has access 
to the interior valley.  In its own way, it is like "New England" - from
the Pacific Northwest it is everything east of New York City ("New York
City!".  You get to New York and New England is Mass, Vermont, New
Hampsire, and Maine, You get to Boston and New England is Maine, New
Hampshire or Vermont, You go to either of those states and they'll
define a "True New Englander" as someone  a little more restrictive.
Ayup.

And Speaking of "back East" - I realized some years back that I'm
considering Colorado as 'back east' and Tulsa as 'way back east'.
Everything east of the Mississippi is concrete and urbanized.  


chus
pyotr


--
pyotr@halcyon.com  Pyotr Filipivich, amongst others.
When I was a boy, we had Outcome Based Education, too.
We called it "Being held back a year"