Temani Pesh-wa and She Who Watches

This shore was one of the great gathering places of the Columbia, and the basalt along it was covered with images pecked and painted into the rock. In a side canyon just downstream, Petroglyph Canyon, they ran by the hundreds. When The Dalles Dam was built, the reservoir was going to put all of it under water. In 1956 the National Park Service picked out forty-three panels from the canyon walls to save, and crews cut them out with jackhammers in the weeks before the gates closed. Most of the rest, an estimated eight or nine hundred images along this reach, went under.

The rescued panels then sat in storage at the dam for forty-six years, out of sight. In 2003 and 2004 the treaty tribes, the Army Corps of Engineers and Washington State Parks brought them back to the river, a short way upstream from where they were made, and set them along a paved path that opened in 2004. The trail is called Temani Pesh-wa, written on the rock.

Above the park, on the rimrock that stayed dry, is the best known image on the river: Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches, a face with great ringed eyes, carved and painted, which the Wishram tell of as a chief turned to stone to keep watch over her people. Vandals shot at her and scrawled on the rocks around her, and since then the only way to see her is on a guided walk with a park ranger, booked well ahead.