Traffic.
Where did all of the people come from? Where exactly are they going? Why am I sitting in a traffic jam at 2 pm on a Tuesday?
Either the infrastructure is awful in some way that I have yet to figure out or there a hell of a lot of people in the greater Portland area -all of whom who want to go somewhere in their cars. I think the cause of the problem may be infrastructure. There are two large North-South thoroughfares, the I5 and 99W. They run parallel, obviously, but there are really no roads running east to west between them. The end result is that if a person wants to go to a location somewhere between Portland and Salem (that is a long "a" in "Saylem" for you "non-locals") you either have to suffer two-lane small-town stoplight hell for an hour or you can drive all the south to Saylem (I need to type it that way so I stop saying Sahlem. Sahlem really must annoy the locals because they will go out of their way to correct you for using -to the point of butting into a conversation that they are not part of to point out your blunder.) and head North on 99W. If you need to get somewhere in the North of the Willamette Valley (the a in Willamette is a diphthong ae...not really long or short. I've been corrected on that one too.), you can go North to Portland and South on 99W.
Traffic to the coast I have yet to see aside from the way it chokes up the I5 and 99W, but if it is anything like the rest of the traffic, it is probably extremely slow and incredibly dangerous. Yes, dangerous. We saw two more accidents today. That brings our tally for two weeks to 6 serious accidents. Five crashes involved roll-overs and the sixth was a Chevy Suburban towing a water-ski boat that crossed the yellow line, crossed on-coming traffic and then plowed through the guard-rail. We must have arrived minutes after the accident, because the Suburban was still dangling over the cliff. The driver should buy stock in the hitch manufacturer, because the hitch between the boat trailer and his truck probably saved his life. Straight out of a Mel Gibson movie, the truck was suspended over the edge of the road by nothing more than the boat trailer and some mangled guard rail. The cliff on the side of the road wasn't monumental, but it was a good 50-100 feet.
Five rollovers and a near cliff-dive is a lot of action for two weeks. To put it in perspective (my perspective), in the past two years I have driven from Virginny to Colotucky and back twice. I have driven from Virginny to Orygun and in 2008 I drove nearly sixty thousand miles. In all of that driving I have not seen as many serious accidents as I have in the last two weeks. It isn't like I am just seeing the hours-later aftermath either. Glass, body panels and luggage strewn all over the highway. People on stretchers. EMTs treating people in the median. I used to think the Colorado I70 corridor in winter was dangerous. Not so much anymore.
Akiko and I figured it can't be the roads. If the roads were at fault, Richmond would have been a lot worse. If two foot deep potholes in a 65 mph zone couldn't cause major carnage, the relatively benign road damage here sure shouldn't. Regarding the two deep pothole in Richmond, as I swerved around this particular pothole, I looked down into it, past the re-bar and was able to see the damned rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland. The potholes in Richmond were also a part of the reason that I bought a pickup.
I hope that I am just seeing some sort of statistical anomaly here and that there is not some weird phenomenon that makes driving in Orygun dangerous.
Mt. Hood National Forest
So now that I have whined a little bit, I can talk about some of the fun that we are having. We have made two outings two the Mt. Hood National Forest so far; today and last Sunday. Last Sunday our plan was to drive down to Saylem, drive across to Detroit, take some Forest Service roads to Hood River and then the I84 along the Columbia river back to Portland. Somewhere between Detroit and Hood River we planned to get out of the truck and hike for a while. I really really really should have known better, but I need this type of trip every now and again to remind myself. Remind myself to be at least a little prepared. Having a Tom-Tom and a Rand McNally Atlas of the USA for navigation is prepared for driving from Virginia to Oregon. They don't help much when following Forest Service roads in the Cascades. Who would have thought?
Last Sunday we tallied nearly 100 miles driving washboarded, cliffside, narrow washed-out dirt roads. Luckily we did not have the dogs in the back of the truck, because the roads were so dry and dusty that by time we finally got home there was a quarter inch of fine sand-dust in the back of the truck...and nearly as much in the cab. Worse than Moab! It was actually a fun trip, even though we did not achieve our original goal -not by a long shot. We did get to hike an awesome trail that I am going back to ride sometime soon. We ate lots of fresh wild blue berries. We scared ourselves silly wondering when we were going to meet a bear, because the place we were hiking was lousy with bear-victuals.
We wound up driving so far, because we let Tom-Tom guide us. The trip from Detroit to Hood River is actually pretty easy: you follow FSD 46 from Detroit to Hood River. That's it. Tom-Tom decided to take us a different route. Whether it was a short-cut, the scenic route, technically the fastest or shortest, a practical joke played by the navigation-algorithm programmers or just a glitch I cannot say, but it was a navigational train wreck. Thank god it was at least fun. How often do you get to see the same road closed sign from the front and back in one trip?
The crowning Tom-Tom moment was when it insisted that we make a right down the shear cliff that the road we were on was traversing. Why the Tom-Tom "thought" there was a road there now or had ever been a road there is beyond me. This particular incident proved to be a real pain in the ass. When we ignored the order to turn right, we were told to turn around as soon as possible. We tried to tell the damned thing that we did not want take that route, but for whatever reason it insisted. We finally wound up doing an 83-point turn on the cliff side road that we were on. Then as we approached the phantom road off the cliff, which was on our left now, we told Tom Tom that there was a road block in front of us. The subsequent re-route led to yet another white-knuckle seat-swallowing-puckerfest as we did another multi-point turn on the narrow road. Why didn't we just go out the way we came in? Two reasons: 1) as stated before, Akiko and I are dangerously stubborn and 2) we were by this point hopelessly lost and completely dependent on the stupid Tom-Tom.
We finally did go back out the way we came and headed back to Portland -actually to Tigard, which is pronounced with a long "i." For today's trip we were armed with a topo-atlas of the area and a safely turned-off and stowed Tom-Tom. Without the Tom-Tom we arrived exactly where we wanted a little ahead of schedule and completely without 100 mile detours. How boring.
The trail we walked was not boring. Last week when we finally decided to give being lost a break for a while and got out of the car for a walk, we were at a lot higher elevations. The trail we walked traversed an area that had either been logged or burnt recently. (Not sure if the Forest Service sub-contracts forest management / allows commercial logging National Forests...) The growth was dense and scrubby. Today's terrain was completely different. Old growth! I had heard about old growth, read about it and saw pictures of it, but was not ready for experiencing it first hand. It is breath taking! No forest that I have seen before compares to this. Nothing in the Appalachians, nothing in the Rockies, nothing in the Alps, nothing in the Pyrenes, nothing in Asia! I am sure there are places that compare, but nowhere that I have been. I am sure the Sequoias in California and the big Cedars in British Columbia are even more impressive, but this was my first time to see really BIG trees. I was blown away.
These are the real sky-scrapers. It was a still day, so the trees were perfectly motionless. We stared up the trunks and tried to imagine how long it would take us to run to the end (assuming the trunks weren't shooting into the sky). There were Doug firs and Cedars. The Douglas firs were more plentiful and easily two to three times the width of the Cedars at the base. The Cedars just barely made up for their lack of girth in overall height -at least as far as we could tell standing on the ground. The shape of the Cedars and the D-firs were completely different for trees that appeared to grow to the same height. Whereas the D-firs were retained their thickness to incredible heights, the Cedars tapered down very quickly, but seemed to grow on and on to a tiny needle point at the end.
It was also impressive to see the dead-falls. There were two that fell just perfectly as to form a bridge out over a depression and back. A very long and fairly high bridge. Akiko saw me looking at them and knew immediately what I was thinking. "Go on. I'll take a picture from here." I denied that she had been able to read my mind. Mostly because I hadn't been doing any stupid-person-tricks lately and was not feeling too confident, but nearly as much because the natural bridge made by the trees was pretty damned high. A mis-step would probably not be fatal, but would definitely hurt. "Go on. Are you scared? You ride your bike on stuff like that all the time." I seriously wondered for a second if she had a secret life insurance policy and was trying to off me. I have been pretty cranky lately.
She was right on both counts though. I was scared and I do ride my bike on a lot more technical "stunts" pretty regularly. There was not much more I could argue, but I tried. "Come on. It's getting late." My desperate last grasp argument seemed to work and Akiko shrugged and headed down the trail. Unfortunately, she turned around and saw me still looking at the bridge. "Oh, go on!"
In the end it wasn't worth all the drama. The bridge was high and a bit exposed, the dead-falls were probably 20 feet of the ground at the highest point, but they were also 3-4 feet in diameter. It was like walking down a sidewalk...20 feet off the ground. The first couple of steps out were hesitant. I was just planning on walking out a little, having Akiko snap a picture and then scurrying back to safety. Once on the big old boardwalk, I decided to walk to the middle. As always looking down was sobering and brought to mind thoughts like: Am I the 200 lbs straw that is going to break this camels back? What happens if the bark under my feet is loose and shears off under my weight? Looking straight ahead and focusing on walking calmly and breathing regularly pushed those thoughts away. After completing the little bridge walk I remembered why I liked adrenaline sports and also realized that I have become a total sissy. The elevated heart rate, the slow motion, the clarity and then the sheesh-that-was-easy feeling have been missing from life. Time to dust off my "man-card" and go do more stupid stuff. Probably should grab the health insurance card, for whatever its worth, too.
Me on the elevated boardwalk. That look on my face is somewhere between shit-eating-grin and get-me-outta-here.
Akiko trying not to fall in. The difference in air temperature at this little fall was impressive and welcome. It gets pretty stifling in the dense part of the forest.
