Mt Hood

They all have their Volcanoes here in the Pacific Northwest.  Northern California has Mt Shasta.  Up in Seattle they have Mt Rainier.  And here in Portland it is Mt Hood.  These Volcanic peaks are very different from the mountains we have experienced the last three years.  Although they are a part of the Cascade Range, they tend to stand alone in all their majesty and are shaped as you would expect from a volcano.

 

We took a drive out to Mt Hood and took a hike up to Mirror Lake expecting to find a beautiful mirror image of the peak reflected by the lake.  Unfortunately, there just a bit too much wind blowing across the water and the mirror didn’t work.  But if you use your imagination, you can visualize what an incredible image it would be.

 

 

Gary wanted a trail where he could try out his new boots purchased at the Danner Boots factory store in Portland.  Danner makes boots for the Marine Corps.  The new boots seemed to function well on a 4-mile round trip hike with an elevation change of about 700 feet.  We stopped for an ale in the town of Government Camp at Mt Hood Brewing Company – “a brewery with an altitude”.

Columbia River Gorge

Our first adventure in the Portland area was to the Columbia River Gorge.  The Columbia River is the great river of the Pacific Northwest.  It is the only river that passes through the Cascade Mountain Range.  It drains a huge area including major portions of the rugged mountainous States of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and parts of Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and the Province of British Columbia, Canada.  And as you can see on the map to the right, all that water, and at one time huge torrents from the melting of glaciers from the end of the last ice age, had to cut through somewhere and that one little outlet area east of the city of Portland is where it cut through the rugged Cascade Mountains.  The Gorge is up to 4,000 feet deep and runs about 80 miles in length.

Such a majestic river and the canyon it has cut produce a lot of sights including the canyon and many waterfalls.  There are rain forests of lush greenery as you wind your way along the Historic Columbia River Highway built in the earlier1900s.

 

 

Another stop was at the Bonneville Dam where we had a look at the fish ladder system that allows salmon to swim up to the headwaters of the Columbia to spawn. 

There are window walls in the Visitor’s Center where the salmon and other fish ugly looking lampreys swim by (or stay stuck on the glass in the lampreys case).

Our Third Anniversary

Today we celebrate our third year of living on the road full time in our motor home.  On our first anniversary we were in the the Niagara region of New York, on our second we were in the Salt Lake City area, and this year we are in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.  Our tally of this year’s travels yielded some very interesting results:
                                                                  Year Three     Year Two     Year One
Motor Home Miles                                           3,769           6,846            8,037
Car Miles                                                       12,021         18,476          17,463
States Visited (Excluding Repeats)                         4                  9                 27
Longest Stay (Weeks)                                          10*                4                 16
     * two stays at same place in Las Vegas of 6 and 4 weeks
We were surprised when we looked at the data.  We had to stop and think about why the motor home and car miles were down so much.  There are a few things that explain it.  First, in addition to our normal wintering of 4+ months where we slow way down on our traveling, we also spent the 10 weeks in Las Vegas.  Especially on the way north, our Las Vegas stay was somewhat out of necessity as we had to wait until the snow was off the roads in Yosemite to move on up north.  We also chose to spend a month on the Oregon coast, an extended stationary period on our northward journey that we haven’t made in the past.  The past two years by the time of our anniversary we already had reached our northernmost point in our year’s journey and were well on our way heading back south.  This year we still have a northerly trek left though Washington State and into southern BC after our anniversary date.  All of these factors also weighed in on our states visited tally which was only 4 this year – Nevada, Arizona, California and Oregon.  As for the car, in the first two years we made two round trips from the Deep South to the Midwest and back.  This year, we were much farther away from the Midwest and flew back for visits.  Our sightseeing miles in the car were about the same as in the prior years even though we mostly parked it while in Vegas and used the city bus for local travel.
But just the same, we had a spectacular year.  First and foremost, was the birth of Natasha and Andy’s first baby and our first grandchild – a big and healthy baby boy.  And there was the milestone 50th wedding anniversary of my parents.  Vegas was a blast and especially Halloween on Fremont Street.  Our self-proclaimed poker pro played a ton of live poker and at least held his own.  We made our first pilgrimage to the Mecca of wintertime RVing in the desert – Quartzsite, Arizona.   We visited Yuma, Tucson, and Phoenix.  After a Spring stint in Vegas, we toured Death Valley, Yosemite, Reno-Tahoe- Carson City, Lassen Volcanic Park, and Mount Shasta.  We are spending our tenth week in Oregon including Crater Lake, the Rogue River Valley, the giant Redwoods back in very northern costal California, and traveled about 300 miles of the Pacific Coast of Oregon.  We are finishing our stay in the Willamette Valley a region of amazing agricultural riches near Portland, the Columbia River Gorge, and Mount Hood.  We have now been in Oregon long enough that they named a bridge for us.
And we can’t close this post without a mention of our Alley Cat.  She was so thrilled about the anniversary that she wanted to go out for a walk.  Well, at least she walked for a little while.

The Football Stadiums Of Oregon

The RV shop in Junction City was between the two major universities of Oregon.  It was an easy drive to the north to Corvallis, the home of Oregon State University and and even shorter trip to the south to the University of Oregon in Eugene.

Oregon State is the land-grant university with its emphasis on agriculture and engineering.  Oregon is more focused on the arts and sciences.  But the thing Gary likes to do when visiting universities is to see their football stadiums.  Sometimes you can find a way in to look around and other times they are locked up tight as a drum.  At Oregon State some construction guys allowed us in to take a couple pictures at Reser Stadium, the home of the Beavers.  The stadium seemed larger than its stated capacity of about 46,000.

In Eugene, the home of the Oregon Ducks, we finally found an open gate at Autzen Stadium.   But as we tried to enter there were two guys coming back out with keys in their hands.  We asked if we could just take a couple quick pictures of the field, but to no avail; they were not going to let us in.  As you walk around Oregon’s football facilities and those for the other sports as well, you get the sense that a lot of money has been spent on them.  And that would be correct.  UO has a very major benefactor in Phil Knight one of the co-founders of Nike.   He is reportedly worth around $20 billion and has given hundreds of millions of dollars to Oregon with a lot of it going to the athletic department with the goal of taking Oregon into the very top tier of college athletics. 

We enjoyed both of these towns.  Corvallis has a population of around 50,000 and Eugene about 150,000 so neither is a big city.  The universities are the major feature of both.  The Willamette River flows through both on its way north to join into the Columbia in Portland.  It has been hot here in the valley and we watched as lots of people enjoyed a float on the River.  There were excellent breweries in both and once again Gary found a heaping dish of loaded tots.

In The Heart Of Oregon’s RV History

From Silverton we moved an hour south to the Junction City area.  We titled our blog “In the Heart Of Oregon’s RV History” as Oregon once had a very thriving RV industry.  Some of the most venerable motor home brands in the industry were made here – Country Coach, Beaver, Safari, Monaco, and Marathon.  Today only one of those brands, Marathon, still is manufactured in Oregon, and Marathon is a small builder of very high end coaches from Prevost RV shells.  The Monaco brand still is manufactured by another company only in Indiana and at much lower volume than before they went bankrupt in 2009.

But part of the legacy of all those RV companies that used to manufacture in Oregon is a very vibrant RV service industry.  Country Coach has a parts and service center at the site where they used to manufacture and they still make and supply parts for and service the coaches they once built.  And there are a number of very good independent service shops that can service any and all of these brands and any other brand for that matter.

It was time for us to have all our scheduled service done – motor and generator oil and filter changes, fuel filter changes, and a few minor house repairs as well.  We went to a small independent shop where there is a guy who Gary has been buying parts from during the four years we have owned our coach.  Now I have to wonder about his choice of shops when we pull in and there are cows on one side of the shop and chickens on the other (which Alley had the chance to stalk on one of her walks).  The owner of the shop building who also does the chassis work does a little farming on the side as well as his RV service work on the side of his main job as service technician at a car dealership.  Our parts guy and one other technician also work out of this same shop.  It is an interesting arrangement but among them they have a lot of capability and are more reasonable with their service rates than the bigger shops.  And we had access to fresh brown eggs even if was a bit of an “aromatic” setting.

We did run into two problems we were not anticipating.  They discovered we had a coolant pump with a slow leak.  This pump is to push hot coolant coming off the engine up to the front and back for our dash heat functions.  We now know the source of why were were observing that we were losing a bit of coolant over time.  We also knew we had a tiny water leak from the back of our electrically operated toilet.  What we all assumed would be a simple and cheap fix turned into quite the expensive one when a motorized valve assembly had to be replaced.

We also took in one other shop in the area, a cabinet shop that does a lot of RV cabinet work.  We had this access panel on the dash that had a lot of open space behind it.  We had seen another coach like ours which had this space filled with a nice little cabinet that matched the other ones in the coach.  This cabinet shop in Junction City makes them and we had one made and installed for us. 

 

Silver Falls State Park

Not too far from our Campground in Silverton is the largest State Park in Oregon -- Silver Falls.  Within the boundaries of this Park are 10 waterfalls.  There is a 9 mile trail that will take you to all of them.  We didn’t take that trail.   Well we did take parts of the trail and saw several of them.  We were fortunate that there had been hard rain  two nights before we went there so they were all flowing.

 

Among the more impressive ones was Upper North Falls.

 

 

 

 

 

And North Falls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And South Falls which the trail goes through the lava rock behind it.

 

But there is no point in now going to the Park….… I drank all the falls dry.

The Salem-Keizer Volcanoes

We watched our second baseball game of the season.  We haven’t visited many places with baseball teams this year.  But we are now in the territory of the Northwest League, a short season Class A league.  The Salem- Keizer Volcanoes are an affiliate of the San Francisco Giants.  Salem is the larger city, but the stadium is in the adjoining town of Keizer.  Attendance was a bit sparse the night we went – probably just under a thousand people and the home team Volcanoes lost by a score of 7 to 5.  Most of these guys are later round draftees who have very limited prospects of ever making “the show” but they still are living the dream that they will play in majors one day.