The title of this post is somewhat optimistic. It suggests that there will be more posts on this same subject coming. And while I can well believe that will be true since there are many, many posts I can imagine writing about the 1804-1806 trek across the continent by Lewis and Clark, right now I have no specific plans to do so. We'll see if there's ever a part 2. I guess ultimately I do have some control over that.
In July of 1803, President Thomas Jefferson, with of course the full backing of Congress, went shopping. The merch in his shopping cart that month? The Louisiana Territory, a piece of land that included all or parts of 15 present day states and two Canadian provinces that would about double the size of the less than 30 year old United States of America. This was not an uncomplicated purchase. It involved delicate negotiations with France (the seller); smoothing over hurt feelings with Spain who used to own the place and never really came to grips with France possessing it in the first place; threats of overstepping the bounds of presidential authority; and a whole boatload of cash, like 68 million francs in cash and forgiven debts. That's about 600 billion of today's dollars. Yes, billion!
The story of the Louisiana Purchase could fill books. I'm not going to write any more about it because this post isn't about that slice of American history.
Before he had even taken possession of his new territory, Jefferson was already planning to have the place explored. Call it due diligence, if you will, although in this case he was exploring it after he had put it in his cart and checked out. I guess I would have preferred to know what I was getting before I plunked down millions and millions of francs for a piece of land, but in Jefferson's defense, it probably turned out to be a good investment.
To lead this expedition, which became known as the Corps of Discovery, Jefferson turned to his private secretary and army veteran Captain Meriwether Lewis. Co-captaining the journey would be Second Lieutenant William Clark who had met Lewis while serving in the army in Ohio and the Northwest Territory. Their stated mission was to explore the Missouri River to find the most practical navigable waterway across the continent. There may have been some secondary goals like making sure the Native Americans who were already on the land understood that their land now belonged to the United States and some other, you know...minor stuff like that in there. Typical white man conqueror stuff, you know?
On May 14, 1804, William Clark left Camp River Dubois in Illinois where the men of the Corps had spent the winter and headed (along with those men) to join Meriwether Lewis in St. Charles, Missouri. The Corps of Discovery was off, a band that would ultimately involve 57 men, one woman, one child and one dog. Most of them would not be seen again until they arrived back in St. Louis on September 23, 1806, more than two years and four months later. Long time.
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| The courtyard of Fort Clatsop. |
I am fascinated by the Corps of Discovery. I mean, it's just at the turn of the 19th century, the average life expectancy is like the late 30s and here's this opportunity for a bunch of young men (plus one woman, her child and a dog in case you didn't get that the first time) to go explore a completely unknown land potentially filled with innumerable and brand new ways to die and they are all in.
So they set out with a couple of years worth of food and a boat that they are supposed to be able to dismantle to carry around waterfalls and things like that and venture into a land where they know they will likely run into people hostile to them who are better armed and know the territory better than they do. They are charged with a mission that we now know is completely insane since there is no water route through the continent but which somehow seems like a reasonable request I guess. And they do it anyway. All of it.
They start out by rowing their boat upriver on the Missouri; almost get killed by the Lakota; get attacked by grizzly bears (which they have never seen before) and killer mosquitos (which might be worse than the bears); have to spend the winter in the middle of North Dakota (although it wasn't called that then); find out there's no water route across the continent when the Missouri gets too small to navigate; almost die of starvation twice before getting bailed out by the Shoshone and Nez Perce; and that's not even considering the fact that they almost froze to death in the Bitterroot Mountains in present day Idaho. Along the way they lost one man. ONE! And he died of appendicitis. And they made it all the way back again. How badass is that?
I get that I've way abbreviated all the hardship and near death that these people endured 200 plus years ago in the prior three paragraphs or so but the point there was to express why I am intrigued with this journey, not to tell a complete tale of their journey there and back again.
Lewis and Clark's voyage from St. Louis to what is now the western coast of the United States is probably the first epic American road trip, although for reasons detailed above they probably wouldn't label it quite that way. In 2011, I made my own version of the cross country drive across our nation. From Washington, DC to St. Louis, we improvised, going where we had the most interest as we weaved our way across the midwest. But starting at the Mississippi, we pretty much followed the route blazed by the Corps of Discovery all the way to the Pacific, although admittedly after traveling up to the border of South Dakota we hung an abrupt left rather than following Lewis and Clark and Co. into North Dakota.
Understandably, there are tons and tons of sites along the roads and rivers from the Gateway Arch to the Oregon-Washington border that were touched by these two men and the rest of their crew. To visit every one of them would probably take about as long as it took the Corps to get out to the west coast, or at the very least several months. But seeing as we were all the way out in northwest Oregon in late June and seeing as I'm a little fixated on the story of the Corps, we figured we may as well check out some of the spots where they spent some time at the end of their journey before they decided to turn around and do it all over again in reverse.
I can't imagine what a relief it was for William Clark when he wrote "Ocian (sic) in view! O! the joy." in his journal on November 7, 1805. Almost 18 months after the start of their journey, the object of the whole quest in the first place was in sight even if they didn't make it the whole way on water like Jefferson had imagined they would.
Unfortunately for Clark, the Pacific Ocean was not actually in sight. What he had mistaken for the ocean was just a very wide part of the Columbia River. The Pacific would show up about two weeks or so later after they had gone a little further west down the Columbia. By the time they got there, I imagine Clark and the rest of the Corps had to have known that they were not turning back any time soon, that winter was coming (or was already there) and that heading back through the Cascades or the Bitterroots or the Rockies was just out of the question right then. They'd have to spend the winter around the mouth of the Columbia and they would need to set to work solving that problem immediately.
After a little searching, they found a spot on a tributary just south of Youngs Bay right near where the Columbia meets the Pacific. Today that river is called Lewis and Clark River and the place where they made shelter for the winter is the center of the Lewis and Clark National and State Historical Parks, a joint venture between the National Park Service and the states of Washington and Oregon, consisting of 12 separate sites arrayed along a distance of about 40 miles along and near the Pacific coast of the two states.
Visiting all 12 sites in the Park will likely take you the better part of a day, if not more than that. We decided to visit two of the 12: the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washington's Cape Disappointment State Park and Fort Clatsop, a 2006 reconstruction of the log fort that the Corps ended up staying in from December 7, 1805 to March 23 of the following year. The Interpretive Center is just awesome. If there's everything and anything you could want to know about the Corps of Discovery once they cleared the Rocky Mountains and made their way into Washington and Oregon, you can go to Cape Disappointment (how awesome a name is that by the way?) and learn yourself all of it.
The Interpretive Center was a great bonus to our Lewis and Clark day, but we didn't set out from Portland to make that the centerpiece of day out. That honor was reserved for Fort Clatsop and a site just a bit to the north in Long Beach, WA. But we'll come back to that second one.
Of the many many many sites associated with the Corps of Discovery that I referred to earlier in this post, very few have actual tangible objects associated with what happened on the voyage to the Pacific and back. Most are "Lewis and Clark stopped here" sites. Indeed, most of the pieces and parts that make up Lewis and Clark National Park are just those kinds of places. Fort Clatsop stands out as an exceptional site in this regard. Not only do they have something for us to look at that's real, it's a replica of a building where the expedition actually stayed for a few months. It's not the first replica, by the way; the first one was built in 1955 and lasted until it was destroyed by fire in 2005.
With all our comforts of modern life, it is difficult to imagine that 31 people (and a dog) could last an entire winter in northwest Oregon in an un-insulated, seven-room fort made of logs, especially when you consider that four of the seven rooms were pretty much devoted to about 20% of the people living there. I guess the business of staying alive likely kept them way more occupied than we are today with that same task. Most of their waking hours were probably spent hunting for meat and trading for vegetables with the native Chinook and Clatsop around the Fort area.
Oh...and apparently of the 106 days the company lived in the fort, it rained all but 12 of them. I can't imagine that made things any better.
It doesn't take long to check out the entirety of Fort Clatsop, and that's if you linger at the area at the back of the Fort used for meat curing and cooking. It was, I am sure, a tough winter for everyone but of course, everyone made it through alive (I didn't write this earlier but the one death of the trip happened in present day Iowa, not out west). I'm sure it helped that Lewis and Clark insisted on running life at the Fort like they were in the military (which I guess they really were anyway), with the routines of hoisting and lowering the flag daily and posting a sentry on guard 24 hours a day.
The Fort replica looks incredible. I'm sure it's a product of it being just 12 years old at the time of our visit. In fact, it looked so good that I questioned if the original fort back over 200 years ago was anywhere close to the quality of workmanship of the replica. I highly doubted it. I also questioned the veracity of the reproduction. I mean, it's not like there were photographs of the original Fort, right? And there's no way it survived for many years after it was abandoned in the spring of 1806.
Turns out I might be wrong on both counts. In their company, Lewis and Clark had a man named Patrick Gass, who had worked as a carpenter or carpenter's apprentice for five years before volunteering for the Corps of Discovery. And at least some of his experience was in house building. I'm not sure that he was building log forts and I'm sure he didn't have the resources at his disposal that our National Park Service had in 2006, but I guess it's feasible that he came somewhat close to what's standing in western Oregon today.
And of course, there's a dimensioned plan of the Fort for the Park Service to build from. William Clark drew one on the cover of his journal. No three dimensional renderings or anything but I guess written descriptions probably got the NPS close enough when they rebuilt the thing.
Between the time William Clark mistakenly identified the Columbia River as the Pacific Ocean and the completion of construction at Fort Clatsop, the Corps of Discovery did actually reach the west coast for real. And when they did on November 19, 1805, Clark made his mark for anyone in the future to see. According to his journal entry of that day he carved "my name on a Small pine, the Day of the month & Year, Etc." The alleged official inscription he gouged into the tree he selected for this purpose was "William Clark. November 19, 1805. By land from U. States."
This was not the first time either Clark or Meriwether Lewis had made record of their passage (or in this case, arrival) by inscribing their names and the date into something. There are other locations in the "U. States" where such carvings exist, most famously at Pompey's Pillar National Monument in Yellowstone County, Montana. But this one was the last on the way out for sure, since it marked the discovery of the Pacific and anything else was on the way back.
What are the odds that tree is standing, either dead or alive, some 213 years later? Well, actually...zero. It's gone. I read one account that it was removed by a road cleanup crew but since the article offered no more proof than that opinion or any details about the date (I mean, not even a date range...) then I'm just extremely skeptical of its accuracy. Nonetheless, it ain't there anymore and it hasn't been for a while.
There is, however, a replacement tree in Long Beach, Washington for the Lewis and Clark faithful to visit and feel like they've checked one more box on some mystical Corps of Discovery checklist. After stops at Fort Clatsop and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, we made our own way to Clark's Tree, which is not an actual tree but a bronze sculpture of a tree by artist Stanley Wanlass complete with the words William Clark is alleged to have carved.
This experience, accessed by walking down a path to the beach shown in the photograph above can either be a check the box experience or a pivotal stop at an historic point in American history, depending on the level of romance you choose to bring to the occasion. I prefer the latter. This was as valuable as spending some time at Fort Clatsop; I felt like we were standing at the point where something super-historically important happened, even though I admit I have no idea whether the spot where Clark's Tree stands today is the exact same one as that pine Clark wrote about in his journal a couple of centuries ago.
The Clark's Tree sculpture is one stop on The Lewis and Clark Discovery Trail, a 16.4 mile long path along the Washington shore. Other stops along the Trail include a statue of Lewis and Clark and a sculpture depicting the skeleton of a grey whale that the Corps encountered during the winter of 1805-1806. I wanted to see the Tree and Fort Clatsop so we skipped those two, along with the other ten sites that make up the Lewis and Clark National Park. There's only so much of a completist about this subject I can be and that's as far as I chose to push it on this trip. Plus, you know...there's microbrewed beer in Portland that was calling my name.
I have no idea whether I will ever make it to another important checkpoint of the Corps of Discovery but I can think of four or five spots that I would love to find or return to. There's a long list of places still to go. I hope one day I'll get to write a blog post called Lewis & Clark, Part 2. But before I end this post, I just have one more thing to say which as it turns out will actually take five paragraphs.
The Corps of Discovery ultimately counted among its number 59 people. 56 of those people were white men. Three were not. Among their company were a Shoshone woman named Sacagawea, her son Jean Baptiste Charbonneau and York, William Clark's slave. Sacagawea was part of the expedition because Lewis and Clark hired her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, a trapper from Quebec, as a guide through the western part of the journey. And where Charbonneau went, so did his wife, whom he had purchased one or two years earlier from the Hidatsa after they had kidnapped her in a raid on the Shoshone. York was part of the Corps because he was Clark's property and if we thought Sacagawea had little choice in whether she went along or not, York had even less. Jean Baptiste was born along the way.
Both Sacagawea and York had important parts to play in the journey to the Pacific. At times it appeared they were treated like full and equal members of the company as they were both recorded as full voting members in a decision as to where to look for a campsite in the winter of 1805. By all accounts, York enjoyed more freedom while traveling across the continent and away from the east coast than he ever had in his life. I said "more freedom", not "freedom". He also probably worked as hard if not harder than all the enlisted men and likely received less, if any, compensation, although I could find no evidence either way so I'm really just speculating here. Accounts of what happened to York after he returned to the States are unclear. Versions of the tale include that he was freed by Clark either immediately or after a ten year period and some even indicate he was freed and then voluntarily returned to slavery. That last point seems ridiculous by the way.
Sacagawea's role in the Corps seems more certain. She was a factor in Lewis and Clark engaging the services of Charbonneau, as she was the only member of the expedition who spoke Shoshone and it seemed pretty certain that they would bump into that nation at some point along the way to the coast.
They did. In August of 1805. And Sacagawea was probably responsible for saving the lives of everyone in the expedition. By that point, the Corps of Discovery was almost ruined with no boats, no horses and no way to cross the mountains they would need to pass to reach the Pacific. Their only hope lay in Sacagawea's ability to convince the Shoshone to trade some horses, a task made eminently simpler by her recognizing that the chief of the village was her brother Cameahwait, whom she had been separated from some years earlier when she was taken by the Hidatsa. Who knows if she would have been successful if she didn't have her brother to help her, but that connection couldn't have hurt.
She also saved all the records and journals of both Lewis and Clark in May 1805 when she jumped into the river to save these items which had fallen from a capsized boat. Where would history be without this woman?
So they set out with a couple of years worth of food and a boat that they are supposed to be able to dismantle to carry around waterfalls and things like that and venture into a land where they know they will likely run into people hostile to them who are better armed and know the territory better than they do. They are charged with a mission that we now know is completely insane since there is no water route through the continent but which somehow seems like a reasonable request I guess. And they do it anyway. All of it.
They start out by rowing their boat upriver on the Missouri; almost get killed by the Lakota; get attacked by grizzly bears (which they have never seen before) and killer mosquitos (which might be worse than the bears); have to spend the winter in the middle of North Dakota (although it wasn't called that then); find out there's no water route across the continent when the Missouri gets too small to navigate; almost die of starvation twice before getting bailed out by the Shoshone and Nez Perce; and that's not even considering the fact that they almost froze to death in the Bitterroot Mountains in present day Idaho. Along the way they lost one man. ONE! And he died of appendicitis. And they made it all the way back again. How badass is that?
I get that I've way abbreviated all the hardship and near death that these people endured 200 plus years ago in the prior three paragraphs or so but the point there was to express why I am intrigued with this journey, not to tell a complete tale of their journey there and back again.
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| William Clark's triumphal message. |
Understandably, there are tons and tons of sites along the roads and rivers from the Gateway Arch to the Oregon-Washington border that were touched by these two men and the rest of their crew. To visit every one of them would probably take about as long as it took the Corps to get out to the west coast, or at the very least several months. But seeing as we were all the way out in northwest Oregon in late June and seeing as I'm a little fixated on the story of the Corps, we figured we may as well check out some of the spots where they spent some time at the end of their journey before they decided to turn around and do it all over again in reverse.
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| Fort Clatsop. There's a Columbian black-tailed deer eating lunch or breakfast just to the left of the main gate. |
Unfortunately for Clark, the Pacific Ocean was not actually in sight. What he had mistaken for the ocean was just a very wide part of the Columbia River. The Pacific would show up about two weeks or so later after they had gone a little further west down the Columbia. By the time they got there, I imagine Clark and the rest of the Corps had to have known that they were not turning back any time soon, that winter was coming (or was already there) and that heading back through the Cascades or the Bitterroots or the Rockies was just out of the question right then. They'd have to spend the winter around the mouth of the Columbia and they would need to set to work solving that problem immediately.
After a little searching, they found a spot on a tributary just south of Youngs Bay right near where the Columbia meets the Pacific. Today that river is called Lewis and Clark River and the place where they made shelter for the winter is the center of the Lewis and Clark National and State Historical Parks, a joint venture between the National Park Service and the states of Washington and Oregon, consisting of 12 separate sites arrayed along a distance of about 40 miles along and near the Pacific coast of the two states.
Visiting all 12 sites in the Park will likely take you the better part of a day, if not more than that. We decided to visit two of the 12: the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washington's Cape Disappointment State Park and Fort Clatsop, a 2006 reconstruction of the log fort that the Corps ended up staying in from December 7, 1805 to March 23 of the following year. The Interpretive Center is just awesome. If there's everything and anything you could want to know about the Corps of Discovery once they cleared the Rocky Mountains and made their way into Washington and Oregon, you can go to Cape Disappointment (how awesome a name is that by the way?) and learn yourself all of it.
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| The interior of Fort Clatsop. |
Of the many many many sites associated with the Corps of Discovery that I referred to earlier in this post, very few have actual tangible objects associated with what happened on the voyage to the Pacific and back. Most are "Lewis and Clark stopped here" sites. Indeed, most of the pieces and parts that make up Lewis and Clark National Park are just those kinds of places. Fort Clatsop stands out as an exceptional site in this regard. Not only do they have something for us to look at that's real, it's a replica of a building where the expedition actually stayed for a few months. It's not the first replica, by the way; the first one was built in 1955 and lasted until it was destroyed by fire in 2005.
With all our comforts of modern life, it is difficult to imagine that 31 people (and a dog) could last an entire winter in northwest Oregon in an un-insulated, seven-room fort made of logs, especially when you consider that four of the seven rooms were pretty much devoted to about 20% of the people living there. I guess the business of staying alive likely kept them way more occupied than we are today with that same task. Most of their waking hours were probably spent hunting for meat and trading for vegetables with the native Chinook and Clatsop around the Fort area.
Oh...and apparently of the 106 days the company lived in the fort, it rained all but 12 of them. I can't imagine that made things any better.
It doesn't take long to check out the entirety of Fort Clatsop, and that's if you linger at the area at the back of the Fort used for meat curing and cooking. It was, I am sure, a tough winter for everyone but of course, everyone made it through alive (I didn't write this earlier but the one death of the trip happened in present day Iowa, not out west). I'm sure it helped that Lewis and Clark insisted on running life at the Fort like they were in the military (which I guess they really were anyway), with the routines of hoisting and lowering the flag daily and posting a sentry on guard 24 hours a day.
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| William Clark's dimensioned sketch of Fort Clatsop. |
Turns out I might be wrong on both counts. In their company, Lewis and Clark had a man named Patrick Gass, who had worked as a carpenter or carpenter's apprentice for five years before volunteering for the Corps of Discovery. And at least some of his experience was in house building. I'm not sure that he was building log forts and I'm sure he didn't have the resources at his disposal that our National Park Service had in 2006, but I guess it's feasible that he came somewhat close to what's standing in western Oregon today.
And of course, there's a dimensioned plan of the Fort for the Park Service to build from. William Clark drew one on the cover of his journal. No three dimensional renderings or anything but I guess written descriptions probably got the NPS close enough when they rebuilt the thing.
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| The beginning of the path to Clark's Tree. |
This was not the first time either Clark or Meriwether Lewis had made record of their passage (or in this case, arrival) by inscribing their names and the date into something. There are other locations in the "U. States" where such carvings exist, most famously at Pompey's Pillar National Monument in Yellowstone County, Montana. But this one was the last on the way out for sure, since it marked the discovery of the Pacific and anything else was on the way back.
What are the odds that tree is standing, either dead or alive, some 213 years later? Well, actually...zero. It's gone. I read one account that it was removed by a road cleanup crew but since the article offered no more proof than that opinion or any details about the date (I mean, not even a date range...) then I'm just extremely skeptical of its accuracy. Nonetheless, it ain't there anymore and it hasn't been for a while.
There is, however, a replacement tree in Long Beach, Washington for the Lewis and Clark faithful to visit and feel like they've checked one more box on some mystical Corps of Discovery checklist. After stops at Fort Clatsop and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, we made our own way to Clark's Tree, which is not an actual tree but a bronze sculpture of a tree by artist Stanley Wanlass complete with the words William Clark is alleged to have carved.
This experience, accessed by walking down a path to the beach shown in the photograph above can either be a check the box experience or a pivotal stop at an historic point in American history, depending on the level of romance you choose to bring to the occasion. I prefer the latter. This was as valuable as spending some time at Fort Clatsop; I felt like we were standing at the point where something super-historically important happened, even though I admit I have no idea whether the spot where Clark's Tree stands today is the exact same one as that pine Clark wrote about in his journal a couple of centuries ago.
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| Clark's Tree. Stanley Wanlass, artist. |
I have no idea whether I will ever make it to another important checkpoint of the Corps of Discovery but I can think of four or five spots that I would love to find or return to. There's a long list of places still to go. I hope one day I'll get to write a blog post called Lewis & Clark, Part 2. But before I end this post, I just have one more thing to say which as it turns out will actually take five paragraphs.
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| Sacagawea, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau and Seaman the dog. Cascade Locks, OR. |
Both Sacagawea and York had important parts to play in the journey to the Pacific. At times it appeared they were treated like full and equal members of the company as they were both recorded as full voting members in a decision as to where to look for a campsite in the winter of 1805. By all accounts, York enjoyed more freedom while traveling across the continent and away from the east coast than he ever had in his life. I said "more freedom", not "freedom". He also probably worked as hard if not harder than all the enlisted men and likely received less, if any, compensation, although I could find no evidence either way so I'm really just speculating here. Accounts of what happened to York after he returned to the States are unclear. Versions of the tale include that he was freed by Clark either immediately or after a ten year period and some even indicate he was freed and then voluntarily returned to slavery. That last point seems ridiculous by the way.
Sacagawea's role in the Corps seems more certain. She was a factor in Lewis and Clark engaging the services of Charbonneau, as she was the only member of the expedition who spoke Shoshone and it seemed pretty certain that they would bump into that nation at some point along the way to the coast.
They did. In August of 1805. And Sacagawea was probably responsible for saving the lives of everyone in the expedition. By that point, the Corps of Discovery was almost ruined with no boats, no horses and no way to cross the mountains they would need to pass to reach the Pacific. Their only hope lay in Sacagawea's ability to convince the Shoshone to trade some horses, a task made eminently simpler by her recognizing that the chief of the village was her brother Cameahwait, whom she had been separated from some years earlier when she was taken by the Hidatsa. Who knows if she would have been successful if she didn't have her brother to help her, but that connection couldn't have hurt.
She also saved all the records and journals of both Lewis and Clark in May 1805 when she jumped into the river to save these items which had fallen from a capsized boat. Where would history be without this woman?
How We Did It
The Pacific coast of Oregon and Washington are about two to two and a half hours' drive west from Portland, depending on which site you are traveling to.
Fort Clatsop and the Visitor Center for Lewis and Clark National and State Historic Parks are open from 9 am to 6 pm in the summer months and 9 am to 5 pm the rest of the year. They are closed on Christmas Day. Check the Park's website for when exactly summer starts and ends.
The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center at Cape Disappointment State Park is open from 10 am to 5 pm daily from April 1 through September 30. Outside of that date range the Center is only open Wednesday through Sunday but it keeps the same hours. The Center is closed on some holidays. Check the Center's website for the particular details. There is a fee to park in the Park. There is a parking machine that dispenses tickets near the Center.
Clark's Tree is in Long Beach, Washington on the beach. You can access it at the end of 26th Street NW in Long Beach and it's about maybe a half a mile from where you are no longer allowed to drive. We found parking at The Breakers hotel parking lot. I have no idea if you are allowed to park there to visit the Tree but nothing bad happened to us when we did it. Interestingly, the hotel's website has a picture of Clark's Tree front and center on their homepage.
Fort Clatsop and the Visitor Center for Lewis and Clark National and State Historic Parks are open from 9 am to 6 pm in the summer months and 9 am to 5 pm the rest of the year. They are closed on Christmas Day. Check the Park's website for when exactly summer starts and ends.
The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center at Cape Disappointment State Park is open from 10 am to 5 pm daily from April 1 through September 30. Outside of that date range the Center is only open Wednesday through Sunday but it keeps the same hours. The Center is closed on some holidays. Check the Center's website for the particular details. There is a fee to park in the Park. There is a parking machine that dispenses tickets near the Center.
Clark's Tree is in Long Beach, Washington on the beach. You can access it at the end of 26th Street NW in Long Beach and it's about maybe a half a mile from where you are no longer allowed to drive. We found parking at The Breakers hotel parking lot. I have no idea if you are allowed to park there to visit the Tree but nothing bad happened to us when we did it. Interestingly, the hotel's website has a picture of Clark's Tree front and center on their homepage.
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