Problems with my wireless adapter have prevented me from updating for the past few days, but the hotel tonight has an in-room Ethernet jack.
The redwoods are breathtaking. I can't think of any way to describe them accurately and the pictures don't do them any justice at all. You have to see them to believe how enormous they really are. You know how in "Return of the Jedi," there's all those huge trees that can't possibly be real? They've got to be a matte painting or special effects or something. Well, they're not. They shot that in the redwood forests. You just feel so minuscule next to them, like a brief flash of warm blood in the eternal verdance. I'm still in awe, days later.
Eventually, we found our way out of northern California, which is incredibly rugged and nothing like I expected, and into Oregon, which alternates between pine-covered mountains and scrubby "high desert." It's nothing like I expected, either.
Oregon has some of the dumbest signs I've ever seen. A few examples: A road sign that says simply "Congestion." A road sign that says simply "Livestock." A road sign that says simply "Rocks." A road sign that says simply "Slides." A road sign that says simply "Trucks Entering." A restaurant named "Munchie'z" A hand-painted sign advertising "SWEET CRON." A restaurant named "Flores TACO'S LOCO'S." An unidentified business named "Thundereggs." An unidentified business named "Poles Galore." A shopping center called "Shops at Frank's Laundromat." A road named "Odem Medo Rd." It's a palindrome! A hand-painted sign advertising "Homeless Trees $10." An unidentified business named "Sandy DeCor." A furniture store named "Chester Drawers."
We spent Monday night at a nice little hotel on the Rogue River, in a town with exactly one of everything. We got ice cream at a convenience store, ice cream parlor, sandwich place, taqueria, laundromat, and tube rental. And it was good ice cream.
Crater Lake is another site you really have to see to fully appreciate. Originally, several thousand years ago, it was a gigantic volcano. It erupted explosively at one point and the top of the mountain collapsed in on itself. The bowl formed by the caldera started collecting rain and snow melt, which slowly cooled the lava bubbling out of the bottom and sealed it, except for a couple of lava domes (both of which are submerged) and a cinder cone that's today called Wizard Island. The pictures can capture some of the jaw-dropping wonder, but nothing beats standing on the edge of a fifty-some-foot drop to the deepest, bluest water you've ever seen.
At the Crater Lake ranger station, I found a postcard made out of a great old WPA national park ad poster. This one was for Crater Lake, but the display showed several others, including the redwoods, Yosemite, Yellowstone, and many more. They didn't have any of those, but I did get the 800 number for the company, so I can call and find out where to buy the rest. They're right up my alley and I'll have to scan one or show you an image of them.
We flirted with Mount Hood (also a volcano, don'tchaknow) for at least two hours. For a towering, snow-capped pile of rock, that thing is surprisingly cagy. It was always darting behind stands of trees, other mountains, clouds, and traffic to keep my dad from taking a good picture of it.
We wound up the day on Tuesday with the Columbia River Gorge. All we knew about this place was that it was some kind of scenic something-or-other denoted by the national parks people and that the GPS unit was sending us a really screwy way to get there. We were driving through what looked like the suburbs of Portland for at least half an hour before we stopped at a Dairy Queen only to find out that a) none of the teenagers working there knew where this place was, and b) it was less than ten miles away, right where the GPS was leading us. The Columbia River is extremely picturesque and lined with little waterfalls like you'd see in a natural photography book. It's a nice little drive that we didn't have time to complete, so we jumped on I-5 and made for our hotel room in Suburb-of-Portland Woodland, WA.
If you're ever near the Portland airport and you're looking for a good local place, go to Uncle Vinnie's. It kinda looks like a dive, but the food is excellent. I had a shrimp pizza that I regret not putting garlic on, but I definitely don't regret stopping there.
Wednesday began with a trip to Mount St. Helens after a stop-over at the Woodland tourist information trailer. It's a mobile home parked in a parking lot, but the lady working there gave us maps of everything from here to the Canadian border, drawn on and highlighted, and even told us a place to eat lunch.
Mount St. Helens is awe-inspiring in its own way. As you're driving up the road, the trees start to get smaller and a little further apart. You notice that what used to be a big, healthy river now looks like a stream trickling through a lot of grayish dirt. Then, you start seeing the mountain, which just looks kind of rounded and big. But, as you get closer, you wind your way around to the north face, where you can see the devastation. The whole north rim is now lining the valley floor, and has spilled over into the next valley in the largest landslide in recorded history. That little stream at the bottom of the mountain you're standing on is just as big as the river you left; it's just a mile below you. All that grayish dirt is ash and debris from the explosion, cast down the river in a cement-like slurry that's deep enough to bury the Space Needle at its deepest point, and over a hundred feet thick on average. Nothing grows within about two miles of the collapsed rim. There are blasted, snapped, far-flung rotting tree trunks everywhere, all of them pointing away from the mountain. The US Geologic Survey has built an observatory on a ridge a couple miles from the mountain, and it's built into the ridge like some kind of bunker, but it's obvious that it wouldn't withstand another blast like that. It's really a miracle that only fifty-seven people were killed. While we were there taking pictures (lots of pictures), we noticed smoke rising from the central lava dome and a cloud of what may have just been wind-blown ash rising from one of the lower domes. A solemn reminder that it is by no means inactive.
From Mount St. Helens, we made our way north-ish to yet another gigantic volcano: Mt. Rainier. This mountain is huge! St. Helens is something like 11,000 feet at its highest point; Rainier is 14,000-some. Mountains that would be dramatic peaks on their own are practically ignored because of the towering figure at the center of the park. Its peak is permanently covered in snow, with drifts as far down as about 4,000 feet, which is as high as the roads go. We spent ages just driving around, taking pictures of all the waterfalls and rivers (fed by snow melt), the forests full of Douglas fir and lodge-pole pine, and the mountain itself. We've been lucky this whole trip in that the weather has cooperated splendidly, and we only had a brief instance of clouds rolling across the face of the mountain today, which just served to emphasize how enormous the thing really is.
We had no idea, but Mt. Rainier is practically in the suburban sprawl of Seattle. We came out of one gate of the park, took a couple of turns on state highways, and we were in suburbia. In fact, you can still see the mountain very clearly from the hotel where we're staying.
All this driving is starting to weigh on us, and we're getting a little tired. But tomorrow is our last full day, and we've got a big one planned in downtown Seattle. We're seeing the Experience Music Project, the Space Needle (because we have to), Pike's Pier (where they throw fish), and I don't even know what else. So, I'm going to bed.