More of Washington

After we left Orcas we headed south to Seattle. We found a very nice RV park about 15 miles from where Scott and Sara just moved to. We hadn't seen Sara on Orcas; she was out of town visiting friends and didn’t come to Orcas with Scott. Also, we hadn’t seen their new place in Seattle.

They live in Fremont, which is an eclectic neighborhood north of downtown. We spent a couple of evenings visiting them and getting to know the area.

Lake Union

We left Seattle and headed east, to Yakima. We’d driven through the Yakima Valley before, when we left Ellensburg in August. It seemed like a nice area and a good place to hang out for a few days.

We weren’t disappointed. First of all, it was warm and sunny. We hadn’t seen the sun since we arrived in Orcas, probably ten days ago. Secondly, Yakima is a beautiful area. We found some great hiking trails in a wilderness area and really got to stretch our legs. Also, the Yakima Valley is home to some 3/4 of the nation's hop production. Our RV park was maybe a quarter-mile from a hop processing plant; in the evenings, the ambrosiacal aroma of hops permeated the atmosphere. Heavenly!

Yakima, WA

Leaving Yakima, we headed south to White Salmon, WA. White Salmon is in the Columbia Gorge, directly across the river from Hood River, OR. The gorge is a National Scenic Area; it runs for some 50-60 miles, starting some 30 miles or so east of Portland. It is dominated, of course, by the Columbia River, but includes numerous waterfalls, including Multnomah Falls, the second-highest waterfall in the US. Multnomah is actually visible from I-84, but of course is much more visible from a stop and a short hike.

Fall in the Cascades, at our RV park.

Multnomah Falls.

Mt. Hood in the distance. There's a name for those funny clouds surrounding it, but I don't know what it is.

Back to Orcas

I've previously mentioned that we were headed back to Orcas Island to help out Scott and Sara. When we were here in July, we spent a week or so putting in a deck on their cabin. Actually, we put in part of a deck. We built the structure - the posts, beams and ledgers - and some of the decking. Scott wanted to pay cash for the entire thing and he didn't have enough available to complete the job then.

So, we offered to come back up and help him move forward. Since we first proposed coming back up, he hurt his left arm in a bad fall, necessitating elbow surgery. He can now use his left arm, but is months away from putting any weight on it. For construction purposes, he's largely out of action.

That was OK with us. We (Cathy and I) had put the first part of the decking on by ourselves and pretty much knew what we were doing.

On Monday (10/14) we drove the trailer from Hoquiam to Anacortes. It costs a fortune to move an RV, or any other large vehicle, on the ferry. It was significantly cheaper for us to simply leave the trailer behind in an RV park and move into the cabin for a few days.

On Tuesday we took the ferry over to Orcas and met Scott, who had come over a couple of days earlier; Sara was out of town for the week visiting friends. We were really worried about the weather; rain was forecast every day, starting on Tuesday.

We lucked out. Wednesday, we managed to buy the decking lumber and get all of it screwed down except for the last piece, before the rain started. We wanted to keep the decking dry so we could (hopefully) brush sealer on it, so as soon as the sky started tinkling we stopped work and tarped everything up.

Thursday morning we finished up the last of the decking. While I was cutting the edges flush, Cathy got a coat of sealer on the deck. This allowed us to complete phase one of the project, which was to get all of the decking done on the east side of the house; this is a space roughly 10' by 30'.

Just getting started; Cathy is getting read to screw down the first piece of decking, which is under the far window against the house.

The edge of the decking. You can also see where the porch wall was knocked out, at the bottom of the photo.

Here's the whole east deck.

The happy campers, with the job well done!

Phase two wraps the decking around the south side of the house and continues onto the existing covered porch. The first part of this work, and all that we intended to do, was to knock out a small stone-and-mortar wall on the edge of the porch. As Scott and I had expected, the mortar was brittle enough to come flying apart with a few good whacks with a sledge hammer - a most satisfying exercise!

Besides getting this work done, we had a wonderful time visiting with Scott. There's not much else going on in the cabin, and we spent the first two nights having some nice conversations until bedtime. Our last night we walked over to the local sports bar - one of the few places open in the wintertime - and watched UCLA thrash Stanford in football. That was about all we did on Orcas, which is just as beautiful in the autumn as it is in the summer.

Orcas in the fall; this is the road in front of Scott & Sara's place.

What's next for us? We're spending a couple of days in the Seattle area and then heading south. We haven't quite determined exactly what "south" looks like. We're leaving Seattle on 10/22 and have reservations in SoCal starting on 11/20, so we've got four weeks or so to wander southward. Stay tuned!

Olympic National Park

After leaving Oregon, we spent a few days in Hoquiam, WA, which is on the coast at the southern end of the Olympic peninsula. The RV park we stayed in was a quiet, beautiful place; our space was just steps from the bank of the Hoquiam river.

The Hoquiam River, from our campsite.

The Olympic peninsula juts northward, blocking the entire Seattle-Tacoma area from direct access to the Pacific Ocean. This geography ensures that the entire region gets huge amounts of rainfall annually. We visited the Hoh rainforest in the central part of Olympic National Park. It gets vast amounts of rain, nearly 11 feet per year! Thankfully for us, the day we visited was rain-free.

A temperate rainforest like Hoh is dominated by verdant growth everywhere. We enjoyed walking amongst giant Sitka spruce, which are nearly as tall and impressive as coastal redwoods. Also present are western hemlock, Douglas fir, bigleaf maple and several other species of trees. Additionally, and not surprisingly, there are ferns, mosses, lichens, etc. growing on just about every available surface. Seeing a temperate rainforest is a must-see, and rates very highly on the spectacularness scale.

We took dozens of photos; I won't bore you with too many of them...

A fair-sized Sitka spruce

Guess what kind of maple leaf this is?

Additionally, Olympic National Park protects a goodly stretch of the coastline along the entire peninsula. The beaches and headlands here are wild and beautiful. There are numerous access points, trails and campgrounds as one winds along US 101 on the western edge of the peninsula.

Oregon Coast

We spent ten days or so on a slow meander up the Oregon coast. We drove the whole length of US 101, aka the Oregon Coast Highway, except for a small section between Reedsport and Florence.

We spent three days in Coos Bay. The RV park we stayed in was right on the beach, a beautiful, wide, unspoiled beach. Almost every time we wandered out there it was so untraveled that we could let the dogs run free.

One added bonus about Coos Bay: we discovered that our friends Russ and Mary Jo Caveness were in town for a weeklong family reunion. They were staying in a campground literally next door to us; they walked over and we spent a pleasant afternoon catching up. Cathy and Mary Jo taught together for years; she just retired in the spring of this year.

From there, we drove up the coast to Reedsport, turned inland and spent a couple of nights visiting with our friends Sunday and Jim. We met them last winter in Tucson; Sunday drove down by herself from Oregon to get out of the cold, dreary weather. She spent a month as our next-door neighbor; Jim joined her for the last week or so and they drove home together. They live in Drain, OR, a small logging town in the hills a few miles east of I-5 and an hour or so south of Eugene. They have an absolutely gorgeous place on 10+ acres. They’ve got beautiful gardens, a greenhouse, a large blueberry patch... it is truly heavenly. They’ve got a large shop and a couple of sheds to store all of their tractors and equipment; Jim’s even got a standalone wood shop.

From Drain, we headed up I-5 to Eugene, turned west and hit the coast again in Florence. We turned north and headed up to Lincoln City, a picturesque small town on 101.

Driving up 101 perfectly suited our mood at the time. It’s a fairly slow drive, especially if you’re towing. The speed limit is only 55, there’s quite a few curvy sections, and of course there are numerous small towns to drive through. I suspect our average speed along the coast is only 40 or 45. However, we didn’t care. We rather enjoyed the slow speeds, since it allowed us to savor the magnificent views along the coastline.

Here's a few pics of our journey...

On the beach in Coos Bay

It's tough to see, but the little sandy area is covered in elephant seals; there are a few sea lions present as well.

The Umpqua River, on the way to Drain, OR

The beach in Lincoln City, OR

Redwoods

We spent a few days in Fortuna, CA, a small town on US 101 in the heart of redwoods country. This is beautiful, wild country with wide-open beaches dotted with small harbors and lagoons and forests of conifers everywhere else. 101 winds its way northward from San Francisco, touching and then retreating from the coastline. We are actually following 101 all the way through Oregon, which is where I am writing this from, and on up into Washington.

Redwoods National and State Parks is an unusual collaboration between the federal National Parks Service and the state of California's Department of Parks and Recreation. It encompasses in a single administrative boundary three state parks and the national park. The collaboration works well; like all good ones, the sum is greater than the individual parts.

We had visited this area maybe 25 years ago, when the kids were fairly young. Based on my memories I thought I knew what to expect; I was mistaken. With the perspective we've gained in the past year on spectacularness, we were blown away. 

I mentioned the wide-open beaches? One of the virtues of being wide-open is that there's no one around to bitch if your golden retrievers somehow get off their leashes on the beach.

A grove of mature, old-growth redwoods looks like something that a child might draw. The trees are impossibly tall, impossibly straight and impossibly uniform. They are all grey-barked giants, rising a hundred or so feet in the air before any foliage adorns their trunks. I wish I was a better wordsmith; I lack the skill and imagination to fully convey the awe that one feels when walking amongst these giants.

Similarly, my photographic skills fail me, too.

The two photos above were taken on a walk through the Lady Bird Johnson Grove where, in 1968, she dedicated Redwoods National Park. There is a small memorial there, with a plaque on it which captures her thoughts on this magnificent place:

"One of my most unforgettable memories of the past years is walking through the Redwoods last November - seeing the shafts of light filtering through the trees so far above, feeling the majesty and silence of that forest, and watching a salmon rise in one of those swift streams... all our problems seemed to fall into perspective and I think every one of us walked out more serene and happier."