Prior to the construction of the Mott Bridge people would take a boat across the river to the south side camp where Clarence Gordon built the North Umpqua Lodge after taking over Zeke Allen's lease. The Lodge was on the flat where the houses are now that were apart of the Steamboat Ranger Station, now rented out by Steamboat Inn.  The location of the crossing was  a couple hundred feet below the ledge that forms the Upper Boat Pool.  It was at that location where the old road and trail leveled out after descending from up on the hillside above where Steamboat Inn is now.  Use of a boat to cross the river is how these pools received their names, names still existing today. 

All supplies and people for the south side camp were ferried across at that point. The boat could also be used for access to the south side trail that extended from just below Wright Creek to where the trail joined another trail just above the Glen Echo swinging bridge that crossed to the south side of the river about two miles above Steamboat.   There was another swinging bridge over the river just above where Bogus Creek campground is today.

Frank Moore 

Toby Sprinkle in the Upper Boat Pool,  August 2011: 

Upper and Lower Boat Pool taken in 1920:

I retired from the Forest Service in 1992 just before the Northwest Forest Plan became public.  In those days buzz words were landscape perspective and what the hydrologists called accumulated effects.  There was some concern for how much of a watershed could be logged before stream hydrology and site potential began to deteriorate.  So now in a Steamboaters meeting I'm hearing a recently retired fish biologist, Jeff Dose, say he hasn't seen even a few coast range streams that he would call pristine because  of current and past logging practices overlain by a checkerboard ownership pattern of federal and private lands.  Shutting down harvest on federal lands intensified harvest on private ownership so we now see log trucks taking out "pecker poles" off lands  whose cutting rotation is assumed to be 40 years.  Recently the local fish wrapper, The News-Review, stated "since 1990 timber harvest on federal land in Oregon has dropped 90 percent".   This is a systems issue of a greater scale than landscapes or watersheds.  The Wyden-DeFasio proposal to manage the O & C lands suggests even the politicians are perplexed.  We have essentially done it to ourselves.  In an effort to protect one piece of the ecosystem, the spotted owl, we have shifted timber harvest  to another part of the system, the private land base,  where there is less administrative control, which affects another part of the ecosystem, the riparian habitat and the critters it supports.  Maybe we have traded fish for birds, what do you think?

Anyway back to those fresh water mussels.  They are there because much of the higher elevation watersheds  that feed the North Umpqua are in federal ownership.  It's a river compared to no other here in the lower 48.  Take a minute to thank your God that you have a passion for that river.  Make a vow that you won't, under your watch, let it deteriorate like so many other rivers coming off the Cascades or the Coast Range elsewhere in our state.