The following series of posts are copied from the emails sent out to friends and family during our tour of Oregon and Northern California in a van during the pandemic, 2020.
#1
Dear friends and family,
I thought I’d send a picture or two a day from our travels - if you’d like to opt out of following along for the next 12 days, please let me know.
Frank and I took a full day to organize and load the van we rented and happily left the dust of the kitchen remodel for a 2 week road trip. Leaving at 8:30 pm with a nearly full moon rising in the eastern sky and Mt Rainier a soft silhouette, we found a place to sleep an hour and 1/2 later and the vancation began!
Love and face masks,
Kris and Frank
#2
Van life continues with a lot of taking stuff out and putting it away - one of Frank’s least favorite activities. We have found quiet places for each night on Nat’l Forest land with no neighbors other than mosquitoes and gnats.
Late afternoon sun on the Columbia
Mt Jefferson viewed from Mt Hood
Where they ski in the summer!
#3
Two years ago, chasing the solar eclipse, we drove past major forest fires in Sisters, OR. This year we drove the McKenzie highway through that landscape of scorched silvery remains of fir trees rising out of lava beds (that was a fire from eons ago - though recent geologic time).
After a quiet night in a lovely tree-lined meadow,
we visited the source of the Metolius River, a full river pouring out of the side of a hill.
Today we drove through the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon - high passes (5,500’) that skim the tops of meadow covered hills.
#5
The Blue Mountains and the Strawberry Mountains in eastern Oregon are a well kept secret area of great beauty! We pass very few cars and see towns of very few people: the incorporated city of Granite claims a population of 38 and the larger metropolis of Sumpter has 204 residents. You can buy this sweet 5 bedroom home with a view, with its version of a picket fence, for about $200,000.
And here’s its view:
Forest fires from 2 years ago tore through the Strawberrys leaving a landscape of silvery spires... too sad to stop to photograph.
Love and face masks, Kris and Frank!
#6
Eastern Oregon has a number of mountain ranges but none as unusual as Steens Mountain, which isn’t actually a mountain - more the tilting of vast terrain along a fault line leaving a gentle slope up one side and a cliff down the other... going from 5,000 feet to 10,000 feet. It was chilly up there! None of the photos quote show this phenomenon, but the second one shows the desert terrain below the cliff.
And there was also a mistaken turn, taking us about 12 miles out or our way but through an amazingly vast wetland - part of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, at 5,000 feet where it’s mostly dry plateau but somehow this basin is full of water and BIRDS!
#7
The land up to the top of Steens Mountain - many square miles - is private land managed by a “Western Horseman’s Association.” There were equestrian campgrounds up there, though we didn’t see any horses camping. We did see several herds of free ranging horses. They must prefer the dispersed camping sites like we do...
We camped in a forest and set up the screen tent since we were near a stream and expected mosquitoes. There were none and we didn’t use the tent - though we are getting more efficient at putting it up and taking it down.
Frank prefers the old paper maps, and has discovered we have the time to drive around Lake Tahoe. We should have some pretty pictures to send from there!
Call us naive, or or slow, but we finally figured out where all the people are... Lake Tahoe is bustling! We have been passing 5-10 cars an hour for most of this trip and so encountering a traffic jam at 7,000 feet in the midst of stunning beauty was quite a shock. We drove clockwise around the lake as quick as possible, and glad we weren’t going the other way as those cars were at a standstill miles long. Here’s our first glimpse of the lake.
All the campgrounds around the lake looked like acres of tents so we veered up into National Forest land and camped solo, though not far from a staging area for dirt bikes which became more active in the morning.
We were struck by the changes in ecology between high plateau desert of Nevada and the dense greed conifer forest of the Sierras. Here’s a picture of a desert lake in August in Nevada. (Not much, if any, water.)
#9
Yesterday was a fairly long drive - because we took winding roads rather than direct routes. We couldn’t get to Mt Lassen, though we tried and instead popped into this little roadside “resort” beside a river, with its own trout pond. Frank was thrilled with having more than 8 square feet to share in our combined bedroom/bath.
Our waitress at this “fine dining establishment” was a high schooler who moved to Sierra City from Durango Mexico at age 4. She is in a graduating class of 6 having attended a K-12 school of 50, with a total of 8 teachers. Not a bad student/teacher ratio! Apparently a couple of them are married to each other and have been teaching there for 40 years... and she said they were quite disciplined toward college-prep. She’ll head off to one of the UC schools.
A recreational favorite up in the Sierras is off roading... whether 2 wheeling (the electric bikes actually look somewhat appealing to me), ATV, or these big jeeps. Trailheads are filled with trucks and empty trailers.
Now, we’re off to Lassen, the southernmost volcano in the Cascade range...
Love and face masks, Kris and Frank!
#10
Nether of us have been in the high Sierras before - what an idyllic place! Here’s one of the many mountain lakes at about 6,500’.
Then, on to Mt Lassen, which isn’t simply “a“ mountain. Unlike Rainier, Hood, St Helens, etc., Lassen is a shield volcano with at least 5 locations of eruptions. So it seems like more an area than a mountain, though we did drive up to 8,500’ on one of its mounds where there was a boiling hole of mud as well as great views.
We’re off to see the Pacific today, crossing the Coast Range of the Trinity’s along the way, where I hear there are some fires. We’ve been lucky this far to not encounter smoke, and hopefully today we will not go near where the fires are...
Love and face masks, Kris and Frank!
#11
Temperatures dropped 40 degrees as we descended to the coast, where we found mist in the evening and in the morning we were completely socked in. I have so enjoyed the experience of real summer during this trip and wasn’t ready for typical Pacific NW overcast fog, so we left quickly.
We drove through a beautiful redwood forest on the way out and into the Illinois Valley, where we will spend the afternoon and evening with my long time friend, Terry.
Let me offer a correction about the Trinity mountains: they are not coast range mountains as I wrote in my last missive. They were actually micro-continents that collided with the North American continent and made a very complicated range of mountains that is not a coastal range.
We’re nearing the end of this journey - Crater Lake tomorrow and then a visit with my brother, sister-in-law, niece and her husband in Eugene before we head home on Saturday. We’ll send at least one more “postcard“ and then our lives will become boringly normal (which Frank is really looking forward to) and not worthy of photos and comments ;-)
Love and face masks, Kris and Frank!
#12
One last postcard from our tour of the geology, geography and anthropology of the Pacific Northwest. Mt Mazama blew 7,700 years ago and lost 3-4,000 feet of its height and formed a crater more than 2-3,000 feet deep that took 740 years to fill with pristine blue water. It must have brought what NK Jemisin calls a long “fifth season” to a huge area of the people who had arrived 2,000 years earlier. The survival of those far enough away to not have been killed instantly, would depend on which way the wind blew. We can thank that blanket of ash for our fertile soil!
The local Klamath people believed the eruption was due to a rivalry between the god of the underworld (Liao) and the god of the skies (Skell). One version has Liao offended by a Klamath woman rejecting his offer of immortality in exchange for becoming his consort. He threw fire and rocks on the people of Mt Mazama. Skell defended those people by getting on top of Mt Shasta and throwing rocks at Liao. Two holy men sacrificed themselves which gave Skell the power to overwhelm Liao and he pushed Liao down into the crater and put a rock on top of him... another good mother/bad mother story, from us humans trying to make sense of living in an unpredictable and dangerous world.
However it occurred, we’re now blessed with this beauty:
And here’s a picture of our final camp site. We drove about half a mile down a forest service road that is probably used for cross country skiing or snowmobiling in the winter and found a spot that was reasonably level for a good night’s sleep.
Thanks for sharing our journey with us,
Love and face masks, Kris and Frank!
