North of Bend

Posted on June 20, 2012 by admin

On the third evening of my stay at the yurt in Tumalo State Park, I was joined by a dear friend from the Tri-Cities, Marilyn. It turned out that she needed to pick up her grandson in Central Oregon the same week that I would be there camping, so she called and asked if she could come see me there and check out the yurt. Of course I welcomed the company and told her to bring a sleeping bag along and stay the night — the yurt sleeps five, so there was plenty of room.

Marilyn is originally from Portland but knows all of Oregon very well, and since the day I arrived in the Northwest, she has been my travel consultant — but this was the first chance we had to actually do some touring together. I was more than happy to let her take the driver’s seat and show me around. It’s easier to crane your neck and look at all the glory of Creation surrounding you if you don’t have to worry that you might run your car off the road over a cliff.

Our first stop was the Lava Lands Visitor Center in the Deschutes National Forest 15 miles south of Bend, but we learned upon arrival that they were closed until the next day. After my drive on the Cascade Lakes Byway the day before, I really wanted to stop and see a lava field up close, so I decided it would be worth it to drive out of my way to come back to Lava Lands when they opened again (look for that blog post tomorrow) — how on earth could I drive all the way back to Washington without seeing the lava fields and the fire lookout tower on Lava Butte up close and personal?

From there, Marilyn drove us back north of Bend to the Crooked River Gorge, 9 miles north of Redmond, not far from Smith Rock State Park outside Terrebonne. I happened to be looking down at something in the car when she pulled onto the bridge on Highway 97 that crosses the gorge, and when I looked up I saw we were 300 feet over the river at the bottom of the gorge. I gasped out loud — some of you may know that I’m afraid of heights and of bridges in particular (remember my Capilano Suspension Bridge story?), and I wasn’t quite prepared to find myself in that spot. Truly breath-taking. We stopped for a while to walk around on the old two-lane bridge. This photo is of the nearby railroad bridge over the gorge, and you can’t see it because of the angle of the sun and the color of the sky at that time of day, but the Three Sisters of the Cascade Range are sticking their heads up over the bridge.

the Crooked River Gorge

Next, we headed further north towards the town of Madras and the Cove Palisades State Park, where the Crooked River flows into Lake Billy Chinook, and you can stand on the edge of the cliffs and look down into the water hundreds of feet below, or miles and miles into the distance at Mt Hood, Mt Jefferson, Three Fingered Jack, the Three Sisters, and Broken Top.

Broken Top and the Three Sisters from the Cove Palisades

By this time I was feeling like old friends with the peaks of the Cascades. Each time I saw them from a different vantage point was a reunion of sorts.

view of Mt Hood from the Cove Palisades

Thank you, Marilyn, for making my day.

another view of Mt Hood

Cascade Lakes Byway

Posted on June 19, 2012 by admin

On my recent writing retreat in Bend, Oregon, I spent part of one afternoon driving the Cascade Lakes Byway, proclaimed (by whom?) to be one of the top ten scenic byways in the U.S. I would have to agree that it’s in my own personal top ten — but have I even been on more than ten scenic byways? It’s hard to say.

The drive starts out with Mount Bachelor, majestic and spectacular in all its snow-covered glory. I don’t know why it is that snow-covered peaks are majestic, whereas rocky ones are rugged and jungle-covered ones are lush, but that’s just the way it is — there is no other word for the Cascades but majestic.

Now, I read before going on the drive that just around the bend from Mount Bachelor I would pass a lake with a perfect reflection of Mount Bachelor that rivals that first glimpse of the mountain in its majesty. I cannot attest to the veracity of this claim, however, having made my drive in the middle of June, when many of the lakes on the north end of the byway are still covered in snow.

Sparks Lake

I’m sure the drive would be all the more breath-taking later in summer when these lakes are no longer frozen, but this Texas girl is still impressed with vast expanses of snow that locals to this area might not find all that interesting. It was such a treat to me to drive along a road with plowed snow packed to within a couple feet of my lane.

near Mt Bachelor, on the Cascade Lakes Byway
- snow in June!

Elk Lake was the first of the lakes I came to that wasn’t covered in snow or frozen. The views of the mountains weren’t as stunning as I would have hoped, with a layer of clouds settling in over the peaks, but I took what I could get.

Elk Lake

Several miles on, I came to what I think might have been part of Crane Prairie Reservoir. This is the best I could get on my phone’s camera without distorting the picture — the white birds in this photo are cranes (or pelicans or storks, I honestly don’t know, I’m sort of making this up) hanging out with some Canadian geese.

waterfowl

After I took this picture, I noticed a huge dark bird circling directly over my head. It perched in a tree right above me and didn’t take off again until I began to drive away. I got a good look at its white throat and belly and consulted the North American bird app on my phone (don’t laugh — it’s come in handy several times, except as far as cranes go, but that’s a topic for another blog post) to decide that it was an osprey. I swear it winked at me as I headed on down the byway.

Somewhere along in that stretch of road, you begin to see miles and miles of lava fields — lava flow frozen in time. Miles and miles of black lava. It’s fascinating to think of the volcanos that produced this rock, once burning hot, now solidified in a 100-foot tall river of rock.

There you have it. Go drive the Cascade Lakes Byway the next chance you get.

(Still to come: North of Bend, Lava Butte, and the Painted Hills)

Oregon Trail and a Change of Plans

Posted on June 8, 2012 by admin

After my friend Jen and I stayed in a yurt at Ft Stevens State Park in Oregon in April, I had the idea to try out another couple of state parks with yurts as a writing retreat while working on West Texas Interlude. Yurts are a perfect way to camp and write — they have locks on the door, so I feel safe camping by myself and being all solitary and writerly, and they have electricity, so I can plug in my laptop. Perfect.

They’re so perfect, they’re extremely popular and booked out months in advance. So, when I got around to looking for places to stay and write this summer, my options were limited. Very limited. I had two dates available in June at two parks, or I could wait until October. I quickly booked the June dates.

And so, on Tuesday morning I set out for Wallowa Lake in northeastern Oregon — Oregon’s “dry side,” the half of the state that, unlike Portland and the coast, gets lots of sun and little precipitation. Except when I set off, it was pouring rain in Kennewick — and it poured on me all the way to the Blue Mountains, where the rain changed to snow. Snow on June 5.

No worries, I thought, I’ll just make my first stop of the trip, and surely it will clear up and I’ll be able to enjoy the Wallowa Mountains and Wallowa Lake this afternoon and tomorrow in a less rainy/snowy/cloudy haze.

That first stop was the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center outside Baker City, a fantastic little visitor center that I highly recommend if you’re ever in northeastern Oregon. They accept the National Parks Annual Pass, which was the main reason I went out of my way to see it on this trip — why not drive a little further if you don’t have to pay the $8 entrance fee?

at the top of Flagstaff Hill

I do, however, recommend not going on a day with high winds and rain, so that you can walk the 2 mile path from the interpretive center on Flagstaff Hill down to the ruts from the Oregon Trail. Just standing at the top of the hill to take a couple of photos of covered wagons was miserable for me — the hood of my rain jacket alternately flew over my eyes and threatened to strangle me, or it violently jerked me backwards. As much as I wanted to make the walk, I was too chicken/lazy/reasonable to do it.

view of the location of old Oregon Trail ruts, from the top of Flagstaff Hill

A few facts I learned at the interpretive center: One out of every ten people who started the trail died along the way. That adds up to one grave for every 80 yards of the 2,000 mile trail. The “prairie schooner” style wagons had a wagon bed 4 feet by 10 feet in size — that’s the same size as one of the raised garden beds at Quinault Community Garden (pretty big for a garden bed, small for a vehicle that holds all your earthly possessions). Some single men skipped the wagon and oxen all together and just walked the trail to Oregon, pushing their belongings in a wheel barrow. For 2,000 miles. That is a heart bent on emigrating.

By the time I finished up at the Oregon Trail and made my way back to La Grande and the turn-off to Wallowa Lake, the forecast hadn’t cleared up like I’d so optimistically assumed it would. Thick clouds still surrounded the mountains, and the online reports still called for a flood watch on the Grande Ronde River until late that afternoon. Snow and rain showers would continue through the night — the snow would be at levels above 4,500 feet, and the campground where I’d booked my yurt was at 4,600 feet. So much for the dry side of Oregon.

As much as I would love to say I’d camped in the snow in June, I’d already had enough driving on slick roads with busily flip-flopping windshield wipers for one day, and I didn’t relish giving up the interstate for a 2-lane mountain road for the next hour and a half in those conditions. Not for an overnight trip where I wouldn’t even see the mountains because of all the clouds and fog surrounding me. I headed for home (back through the snow in the Blues) and will try again next week for a writing retreat at a yurt in Bend, Oregon.

Other People’s Thoughts: On the Pecos River

Posted on March 15, 2012 by admin

“We crossed the wild Pecos,

We forded the Nueces,

We swum the Guadalupe,

And we followed the Brazos”

from Texas River Song by Townes Van Zandt

Well, on this trip so far we’ve only crossed the wild Pecos and gazed in the distance at the Rio Grande, but this song keeps going through my head. As does this quote I recently read in Three Dollars Per Mile by the Texas Surveyors Association:

“The Pecos is a remarkable stream, narrow and deep, extremely crooked in its course, and rapid in its current. Its waters are turbid and bitter, and carry, in both mechanical mixture and chemical solution, more impurities than perhaps any other river in the south. Its banks are steep, and, in a course of two hundred and forty miles, there are but few places where an animal can approach them for water in safety. Not a tree or bush marks its course; and one may stand on its banks and not know that the stream is near. The only inhabitants of its water are catfish; and the antelope and wolf alone visit its dreary, silent, and desolate shores. It is avoided even by the Indians.”

— Captain S.G. French’s description of the Pecos River from an 1849 exploratory mission for the U.S. Army

Hiking in Oregon, Pt 1

Posted on March 24, 2011 by admin

My first visitor in the Northwest arrived last Saturday (if you don’t count my dad, who didn’t so much come up here to visit me as to make sure I arrived safely in the first place), and I had to drive to Seattle to meet her flight. Like my last road trip in January, on Saturday I was checking weather forecasts and road conditions up until the last minute in order to make the right decision about which route to take across the state through potentially snowy mountains. The night before I left for Seattle, the Washington State Traveler Information website said there was heavy snow in Snoqualmie Pass, and I spent the entire next morning watching their notifications as they changed from “snow chains required” to “snow chains must be carried” to “no restrictions” by the time I left the house around noon. It’s an adjustment for me in travel planning — once upon a time, I obsessively watched for fog and rain that would keep planes from landing and taking off in Yunnan when I expected visitors. Now it’s snow and ice on roads.

So, I made it to Seattle without problems, and we headed for the Oregon coast and my first time to hike in the Northwest, outside of my weekly training at Badger Mountain. To help us decide which trails we wanted to do, I checked out a stack of books from the library and had my previous suspicions confirmed: I’ve got a lot of hiking ahead of me.

The options seem to be limitless. Looking at the maps and the lists of trails, I felt a bit like those times when I have just come back to America from living overseas and have to buy breakfast cereal for the first time. I’m used to there not being so many options, and having to make a choice can be overwhelming. An entire aisle of cereal, when all I could buy for months on end was a Chinese version of either Frosted Flakes or Froot Loops. Where do you even begin to decide? Mini-wheats? Bran flakes? With or without raisins? Granola? Cinnamon Life?

It’s the same when a girl from Fort Worth moves to the Northwest. Where do you begin with hiking in Oregon? The Columbia River Gorge? The High Desert? Mt. Hood? The Wallowa Mountains?

We started on the Oregon coast.

Our time along the coast mostly involved walking in the area right around Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock (including a cold and rainy 3 mile morning run on the sand), with a longer hike at Cape Lookout to look for migrating whales. We had a break in the typical Pacific Northwest rain for most of that hike, but we still got to experience the mud. It slowed us down, especially at first when we were picking our way daintily through what we thought were just a few muddy patches, trying not to get our pants too dirty. Soon we accepted that those “muddy patches” were closer and closer and in reality the entire hike would be sticky and slippery. So we changed our tactic to plowing through the mud as quickly as we could without falling down. Pants can always be washed. We didn’t see any whales, but the views of the coast from the height at the end of the trail were still worth every splashing step through the mud to get there.

More tomorrow…

In the Northwest

Posted on January 17, 2011 by admin

Three days to get from Fort Worth to Bakersfield, CA, and another three days to get from there to Kennewick, WA. Dad and I figure we added about 800 miles to our trip by taking this route through West Texas to southern California, but it ended up being worth it. Other than a little rain during the last half of the trip, we had great weather the whole way, for which we are grateful. Snow and ice scare Texans on the road. I may have developed some great rainy season driving skills in the mountains of Yunnan the last several years, but I am no ice road trucker.

This was my dad’s first time to be in California, and I think he was culture shocking a little at times. When we stopped for lunch after crossing the border into Oregon, folks were wearing cowboy hats and work boots and camo again, so he could breathe a bit easier. I think he’s enjoyed the past couple of days in the Northwest.

We saw a lot of beautiful country between Texas and here. The deserts of the Southwest have their own fascinating peculiarities, and I could really see myself spending more time there. Who knows. We breezed through the LA area without really stopping, out of sheer determination to stay ahead of rush hour traffic. My previous California travels were limited to LA and San Diego, and neither of us were prepared for I-5 when you get to the San Joaquin Valley. We gasped when we came down out of the mountains and the land opened up in front of us and we could once again see for what seemed like a hundred miles. By the evening of the next day, we were pretty sick of looking at those miles and miles of fields and orchards and were ready for the mountains again.

Clouds obscured the summit of Mt. Shasta as we drove through that area, but we saw the bottom two-thirds or so. We couldn’t see Mt. Hood at all. It rained the morning we went through the Columbia River Gorge, but I saw enough to know that I can’t wait to go back on a sunny day, if there is such a thing as a sunny day outside of Portland.

And now here I am in Kennewick. I’m told that they have 300 days of sunshine and only 7 inches of rain a year. And lots of parks and trails along the Columbia River. It’s good to be here, to get settled in and get connected to the church here, and to pick back up with my writing schedule — starting today.

The Desert Southwest

Posted on January 13, 2011 by admin

on the loop road in Saguaro National Park

Chihuahuan, Sonoran, Mojave — I’ve seen them all. And I could actually tell a difference between the three deserts. Don’t ask me for a comprehensive report of those differences, but I could at least give you a positive ID on ocotillo, saguaro, chollo, and the Joshua Tree.

Our original plan on the first leg of this winter road trip from Texas to Washington was to head towards the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, but that idea got scrapped when the National Parks Service website reported ice on the roads in the park the day before we left. Then about 30 minutes (literally — I’m not using my gift of exaggeration here) before we left Fort Worth, we found out that there was ice on the road to Amarillo, which meant we couldn’t go through north Texas that day.

And my dad’s flight from Washington back to Texas next week meant that we really needed to leave that day. So, we headed for southern Arizona via El Paso. Back through West Texas, this time with my dad narrating the journey with stories from his childhood. It’s definitely not the direct route, going to Washington state by driving first to the Mexican border, but I’m glad we ended up doing it. A little tired as I type this at the end of Day Three of driving, but glad to see West Texas with my dad.

El Paso, I don’t know, I really think I could live there. They’ve got good tacos. From there we drove along the border of New Mexico and Mexico, into southern Arizona and through Saguaro National Park. New desert. New cactus. From a distance the saguaro seems to be the steeple of a church on the mountain ridges, but closer up you can see it is the created, raising arms of praise to the Creator.

We spent the night in Phoenix and then headed west to southern California and Joshua Tree National Park for a drive through the huge rocks and yucca. Bakersfield tonight, somewhere north of Sacramento tomorrow, somewhere in Oregon on Friday, and Tri-Cities, Washington, on Saturday, Lord willing.

Texas to Washington

Posted on January 7, 2011 by admin

After a long weekend with friends in Ponca City in mid-November, I haven’t really done any traveling outside North Texas for about six weeks. That’s the longest I stayed in one place during 2010, with the exception of my two months in Kotzebue, Alaska — and that was only because there are no roads in or out of Kotzebue.

My next big trip, the road trip I’ve been planning for almost a year, is coming up next week. On Monday I’m leaving for Washington with my dad — he’ll fly home from Washington, but I’m staying for a while.

This trip has changed quite a bit over the past several months. It started as a two week ramble through the West during lovely fall temperatures, with a friend or two along for the first half of the ride. Then it got pushed back to January so that I could be home for the holidays (though my friends and I still did the first part of the trip in West Texas in October).

Now, at long last, I’m taking off for the Northwest. Poor Dad, 6’1” is really too tall for a Hyundai Elantra, but he’s a trooper and making the ride anyway. We’re planning on going from Fort Worth to the Tri-Cities, Washington, in 5 or 6 days, depending on the weather and how Dad’s legs are coping with the lack of room in my car.

The plan is to go west from here to the California coast and then north to Washington, in hopes that this longer route will keep us out of the winter weather typical on the shorter route through Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho. Maybe we’ll see the Grand Canyon, though northern Arizona could have road closures due to snow, so we’re keeping our itinerary open to southern Arizona as a back-up plan.

The last couple of weeks they’ve had flooding, snow, crazy low temperatures, and everything else we want to avoid in Arizona, Nevada, and southern California. Parts of I-5 have been closed by snow. So who knows, maybe the northern route really is the way to go.

Either way, I’ve practiced putting the snow chains on my tires — who would have imagined a year ago, when I was still driving around the tropics of Yunnan with the windows rolled down because the A/C in the truck was broken, that I would find myself lying on the ground with my head stuck under the car to put on snow chains?

I hope my practice is wasted, and I hope that I get to Washington next week with a boring blog entry to post about our uneventful drive.

(I have a couple of entries I’ve already written about books in 2010 and 2011 that I’ll post from the road next week, so please check back.)

White Sands

Posted on October 27, 2010 by admin

sunset at White Sands

Part 10 from the road trip series “The West Texas Idea”

After climbing Guadalupe Peak, we drove to Whites City, New Mexico, the nearest place to get a hotel room. Our campsite at Guadalupe Mountains had a fantastic view and gave us a glowing array of colors at sunrise, but it was nice to shower and sleep in a bed after a full day of hiking the mountain.

We woke up the next morning in New Mexico, decided to skip Carlsbad Caverns, drove back to Texas to eat lunch at a famous hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant inside a car wash and gas station in El Paso, then drove back to New Mexico to camp at White Sands National Monument.

Well, we planned to camp at White Sands. They have a small number of primitive campsites (read: no water or toilet and a mile of walking off the road), and we thought it would be worth it to haul a bare minimum of our junk out to the site so we could watch sunset and sunrise and all the stars in between. A night sleeping on the dunes would be a perfect way to close our road trip.

But we ended up being 2 for 3 for our campground success rate. Once again, like had happened at Chisos Basin in Big Bend, we found out when we arrived at White Sands that the campsite was closed, this time because of a missile test in the restricted area of White Sands Missile Range that surrounds the national monument. So, no camping on the dunes to end our trip. Instead, we spent the afternoon walking around in the southern New Mexico heat, stayed long enough to watch the setting sun turn the sand from white to orange, and started our drive back to Fort Worth a couple of days earlier than expected.

NEXT in The West Texas Idea

Alpine and Fort Davis

Posted on October 21, 2010 by admin

at the cemetery in Terlingua

Part 7 from the road trip series “The West Texas Idea”

To the northwest of Big Bend National Park is a triangle of towns—Alpine, Marfa, and Fort Davis—that we made the next stop on our road trip. We took the scenic way of getting there by driving west out of the national park, through the ghost town of Terlingua, and into Big Bend Ranch State Park along FM 170. Words cannot do justice to the scenery along FM 170, but since I’m writer, I should try.

Tufts of green grass dotted towering cliffs the color of adobe bricks. Boulders bigger than Janel’s car perched tentatively on the hills above us, toying with the possibility of crashing down at the whim of the next wisp of wind. Majestic vistas of the river below spread out in front of us from pull-off overlooks at the top of mountains. “You know what you’re supposed to take a picture of by the places where they’ve made pull-offs in the road,” Jen said.

She also commented that she’s been on Highway 1 in California (something I’ve yet to experience, but maybe one day soon), and FM 170 along the border of Mexico is just as spectacular—but most Americans have never heard of it nor would they be willing to make the long haul to get down to this area and see it.

Blind curve after blind curve, blind hill after blind hill, more roller coaster than road. Drives like these thrill me and sicken me with their combination of grand sights from the heights and the depths and the possibility of a mangled death around the next turn.

After the most delicioso of taco lunches on the border at Presidio, we drove to our hotel in Alpine, the Antelope Lodge. I imagine this place to be a remnant of the old-style motels that my grandmother described from the 1950s. When Jen called to make the reservation, she asked for a confirmation number but was told that they don’t use computers. No confirmation number necessary because the elderly lady running the front desk writes down all the reservations by hand in a notebook. The lodge was made up of individual houses, two guest rooms per house, with parking outside your door and a tiny kitchenette, just like my grandmother used to cook for her husband and young kids.

Our first activity in this area was at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis (the top point in this triangle of towns), a research facility of the University of Texas. Three times a week they have star parties open to the public, and we scheduled this section of our trip so that we could participate in one. By this point we had already done a lot of star gazing at Big Bend, but the “constellation tour” by the UT astronomer under the cloudless sky that night added quite a bit of interesting information to what we had been looking at. And we got to look through one of the massive domed telescopes to see Jupiter and four of its moons—mind-boggling to think of just how far away those five bright circles are.

We didn’t spend much time in Alpine aside from driving by Sul Ross State University and looking for dinner on Sunday night. Though we found several places that only served beer or homemade sangria open that night, the only places serving food were Sonic, McDonald’s, and Penny’s Diner. I told Jen and Janel that I couldn’t handle just sangria for dinner, not unless they wanted to carry me back to the Antelope Lodge, so we opted for the diner.