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The Longest Day {Photo Friday}
Somehow, after all the other things we did that first day in Oregon, we still ended up all the way out at the Columbia River before dark.
The Columbia Gorge separates Oregon and Washington, and is…massive. See that tiny, tiny speck of which just above the water in that photo above? Click on it to enlarge it if you need to. I’ll wait.
That is a tractor-trailer on the highway on the Washington state side of the river. That’s how big those mountains are.
Holy cow.
Oh, and we arrived at the gorge just in time for a spectacular clouded sunset.
Night was falling pretty fast, so we didn’t do much shore exploring. We did find a short trail that led to a nice little clearing where someone had built a driftwood shelter and fire pit with a view downriver.
Some of the driftwood logs in great piles on the shore — real logs, full trees — had strange markings.
But really I mostly just stared at the sunset.
{See everything from Oregon here.}
Cascade Locks {Photo Friday}
This is Cascade Locks, Oregon. Wikipedia says, “The city took its name from a set of locks built to improve navigation past the Cascades Rapids of the Columbia River. The U.S. federal government approved the plan for the locks in 1875, construction began in 1878, and the locks were completed on November 5, 1896. The locks were subsequently submerged in 1938, replaced by Bonneville Lock and Dam.”
Here’s how it looked into 1920 (via):
By the time we got there in 2011, it wasn’t all that clear what had originally been there. Part of the river splashes through a narrow concrete canal, crowned by a bridge connecting the mainland and a small, low man-made island. Here’s all that’s left today:
The view from the island was rather nice. (And more on the spectacular bridge in the next post.)
The view from the other side of the island, out across the river toward Washington? Even nicer.
Not a rainbow, but some strange coincidental cloud shape. A cloudbow?
{See everything from Oregon here.}
A private place {Photo Friday}
How did we manage to fit so much into one day on that Portland trip? In addition to all these wonderful things, we found a half-abandoned municipal park on the mountain’s lowest slopes and had it all to ourselves for an hour.
{See everything from Oregon here.}
What I learned in a field just outside Parkdale, Oregon {Photo Friday}
On the first full day of our Portland trip, I couldn’t shake off the vicious headache from the cross-country flight the day before.
We spent the day exploring, shivering, discovering Trillium Lake, crossing bridges. As the day wore on, I got crankier and groggier and all-around miserable. Determined not to waste time, I insisted we keep going.
Finally, after circumnavigating the entire mountain and pretending to be fine, I admitted defeat. We ended up huddled in folding chairs over a rickety table inside a grocery store in tiny Parkdale, Oregon.
After caffeine, water, and some food (a lack of all three probably hadn’t helped), the tiny-but-vicious pickax swingers in my skull subsided a bit. Sweet relief.
Good timing, too. It was almost golden hour, and we had no more plans for the day. I’d caught a glimpse of Mount Hood past the buildings as we drove into Parkdale, and was determined to find a vantage point. An entire day in the area, and we hadn’t actually seen the mountain since we landed — it had been veiled by fog or just out of sight.
The land right around Parkdale is very flat, so the choice of direction was easy. Toward the mountain peeking over the rooftops.
A quarter mile out of town, the trees fell away into even fields on one side of the highway and an immaculate orchard on the other. Luckily, the highway had broad shoulders and little traffic, because I’d finally found the perfect spot to see the mountain.
I dove for the shoulder, parked the car in a daze, left The Programmer patiently waiting in the passenger seat, and just stood on the shoulder and stared.
Barring a long-ago trip to Illinois, this journey was my first venture off the east coast. On some obscure level, I was a bit worried that seeing amazing things in person might somehow make them less special, less imposing, less incredible.
Oh, how wrong I was.
{See everything from Oregon here.}
Klickitat and Wy’east {Inspiration Wednesday}
The Native American legends about the Bridge of the Gods landslide are really interesting. Here’s a summary of one (via):
The most famous of these is the Bridge of the Gods legend told by the Klickitats. In their tale, the chief of all the gods, Tyhee Saghalie and his two sons, Pahto (also called Klickitat) and Wy’east, traveled down the Columbia River from the Far North in search for a suitable area to settle.
They came upon an area that is now called The Dalles and thought they had never seen a land so beautiful. The sons quarreled over the land and to solve the dispute their father shot two arrows from his mighty bow; one to the north and the other to the south. Pahto followed the arrow to the north and settled there while Wy’east did the same for the arrow to the south. Saghalie then built Tanmahawis, the Bridge of the Gods, so his family could meet periodically.
When the two sons of the Saghalie fell in love with a beautiful maiden named Loowit, she could not choose between them. The two young chiefs fought over her, burying villages and forests in the process. The area was devastated and the earth shook so violently that the huge bridge fell into the river, creating the Cascades Rapids of the Columbia River Gorge.
For punishment, Saghalie struck down each of the lovers and transformed them into great mountains where they fell. Wy’east, with his head lifted in pride, became the volcano known today as Mount Hood and Pahto, with his head bent toward his fallen love, was turned into Mount Adams. The fair Loowit became Mount St. Helens, known to the Klickitats as Louwala-Clough which means “smoking or fire mountain” in their language (the Sahaptin called the mountain Loowit).
{See everything from Oregon here.}
Timber and stone {Texture Tuesday}
Bouyant horizontal branches. Silken clouds. Smooth sky.
Rushing river, stony shallows.
A stiff radius of needles against the scattered, cluttered sand.
Evening sunlight rippling across the mountains near Cascade Locks.
{Want more? Check out all the Texture Tuesday posts.}
{See everything from Oregon here.}
Mountains are funny things. {Photo Friday}
One one side of Mt. Hood, gray and grim.
On the other side, cheerful and bright.
Really bright, which made capturing things here interesting in a different way. At Trillium Lake, I’d cranked the ISO up to 1600 and spent lots of time doing noise reduction later in Lightroom. Here, it was the “bright sun” setting and careful aiming.
Rushing frigid river.
Lovely spot where small stones had piled up behind a larger one and showed clearly through the water.
A month after standing in this spot, it’s hard to believe we were really there.
Tiny perfect pine sproutling.
This was Not a Nice Bridge (though less terrifying than the Giant Swinging Bridge of Intimidation). It looks sturdy enough, but about halfway across you start swaying with the wind and oh, no, not nice.
I took this from the far side of the bridge, though, so there’s proof I made it across and back. Phew.
Aren’t these lovely? I haven’t identified them yet.
Preparing for the return journey across the bridge.
{See everything from Oregon here.}
Stern and unyielding {Texture Tuesday}
When you’re in some paradise, it’s easy to ogle at the mountains or the sea and forget the small things. These textures from the Columbia Gorge include some of each.
Rings of cracked wood, each pulling away from its neighbor.
A puff of moss on a tree. Right now, yielding and spongy. Later in the year, fragile and brittle.
A whole crowd of nodding stems and horizontal blooms.
So many textures in this mountain face: a huge rockslide on the left, bands of stone in the center, trees and clearings on the right. This is part of the Cascade mountain range across the river in Washington State.
Insect markings on a decaying log on the shore of the Columbia River.
Unyielding stone steps leading straight into the water at Cascade Locks.
{Want more? Check out all the Texture Tuesday posts.}
{See everything from Oregon here.}
Either way, I’ll take it.
On a lovely evening at Trillium Lake, the view of Mount Hood looks something like this:
(via bretvogel on Flickr)
The day we visited, it looked like this:
No incredible view, but oh, such lovely mist instead.
The parking lot was still half-covered in snow. In the middle of June!
{I spent a lot of time on this trip saying, "…but it’s the middle of June!"}
We did find one beautiful trillium. I haven’t seen one since I was able to wander about in my mountains years ago, before we moved to Virginia. ♥
It’s funny. Since we made that move, I’ve had problems with seasonal depression in winter. It was just as cold in gloomy in Boone, where we lived before, but the gloom doesn’t affect me nearly as much when it involves mist spilling down over high ridges.
Such amazing color in this decayed trunk.
Funny yellow marsh flowers near the lake. This is apparently skunk cabbage, Lysichiton americanus. It "grows in tree-shaded freshwater swamps, marshes, wet edges of streams, from coast to low elevations."
{See everything from Oregon here.}
The winds will blow their own freshness.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. ~John Muir
{See everything from Oregon here.}
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