Oregon – That’s or-E-gun not or-uh-gone*

 It is almost criminal that it took me 38 years to finally get my butt over to Oregon.  I guess I was still holding out for a big northwest trip to see the national parks, explore the pinot noirs and see the cool volcanoes.  (Mt St Helens erupted on my birthday in 1980.  I was 6 years old and this had a massive impression on me.  For the nerds amongst you, some great footage of that time can be found here:  you tube mt st helens) 

When Jesse moved to Eugene in the early-mid 90s I heard tales of early grunge/coffee barista/snowboarding lifestyle.  He would go on and on and on about how gorgeous the forests were, how pristine the skiing (boarding) was.  I was intrigued, but did not go out and visit, being a poor student and all.

Then Katy moved there in mid noughties, and she kept banging her head in frustration when we would say we wanted to try all those wonderful wines, but yet hadn’t committed a spot in our social calendar to make the trip.  (Her house is a mere 30 minute drive to the wine country.) 

Even though our US road trip is supposed to be more serious and goal oriented (finding a place to call home), how could we pass up the chance to check out Oregon when we were within shouting distance?  We could not.  We did not. 

Now that I’ve been there,  what did I think?  Well, it’s very green.  And very wet.  And there is a lot more than just green forests across the state.  And the people are very nice.  And the food and wine are fantastic.  And everyone is so much more down to earth than you’d expect.  And there really are some crazy vegan-99%ers who sound and look exactly like those characters on Portlandia.  And the rest of the state is way more redneck than you can imagine.  (Thank you Dad for teaching me to fish or I’d have had nothing to talk about with these people).

The Columia River Gorge

Driving across Oregon - would you have guessed it was OR?

Another Unexpected Delightful Side of Oregon

It’s really too bad about the weather – we stayed in both Eugene and Portland which proved to be very nice respectfully small and medium sized cities.  They had nice houses, nice shops, nice restaurants, but damn, that weather.  It is astonishingly similar to the UK – a weather forecast with 50 shades of grey – no wonder the books are set in Portland/Seattle.  In this case Grey isn’t the S&M husband, but the abusive clouds and pounding rain. 

TrackTown USA 2012 Olympic Trials in Eugene

How can the folks at Nike stand to have their headquarters there?  Surely they should be somewhere awesomely sunny to enjoy the sporty weather.  It seems more like a home for London Fog trenchcoats and Gore-Tex than a home for track shoes.  If you don’t know the story, Nike has its origins in the track program at the University of Oregon (as does Animal House, but I don’t think those things are related) – where ex students and current coaches were playing around with waffle irons to find the right grip for the new tracks of the 1960s -- a company was formed, the rest is history.  What I don’t understand is why, when they first opened an office in Santa Monica, they chose to HQ themselves in Beaverton in the shadow of Oregon’s clouds rather than the shadow of California waves. 

Maybe it was the healthy produce?  The whole state is like a giant fruit bowl – excellent growing conditions for the world’s best strawberries (hoods), more cherry varieties than you ever knew existed, blueberries, huckleberries, more salad ingredients and micro greens than you can imagine, and yes, you even drive through the grass seed capital of the world on route 5 between Eugene and the capital, Salem.  Pass over the allergy medication, you’ll need a few handfuls a day. 

Maybe it was the wine?  The wine really is first class.  I don’t know why the Willamette region doesn’t have more praise and world reknown.   Some of the best pinot noirs and chardonnays come from the region.  This is surprising to me since the climate is a million miles away from a burgundian one, but these varietals taste different here in any case.  Pinots taste like those cherries and berries the state is famous for.  And before you go pronouncing that wrong, it’s will-am-it (dammit), not will-yam-ette.  You get corrected a lot in or-E-gun. 

Maybe it was the environment?  Raining, or snowing, or those 2 months a year when the sun comes out, those Cascade mountains really are something else.  When you read about them the word ‘prominence’ comes up a lot.  What makes these mountains so spectacular is that 1) they are actually very steep snow capped volcanoes (11k+) and 2) they spring up out of nowhere with no other mountains around to distract the eye.  They give you hiking, mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, climbing activities and then wooosh the Colombia river snakes through and gives you windsurfing, kite boarding and kayaking.  Put in a golf course here, raft some whitewater there, and oh put a few hundred miles of bike paths in too – and wow, is it easy to be out and active here.   Just make sure you grab that rain gear…because no matter what you do, it will be wet. 

*Apparently us outsiders all pronounce it incorrectly.

Northern California – what a long strange trip it’s been

(Note:  for the next 8 weeks we are off the find-a-town-to-call-home part of the trip and just enjoying a long summer vacation.  Therefore these write-ups will be more descriptive rather than evaluative. )

I just finished reading Mark Arax’s collection of essays about the lives and times of various Californians called “West of the West”.  The title is attributed to Teddy Roosevelt who once exclaimed, "When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West”.  The idea of “The West” – capital T on The – conjures up images of open plains, cowboys, stagecoaches, etc.  Even more contemporarily, if you ask someone for their imagery of the west they will describe scenes that are more Wyoming or even Texas, than the state that is truly as west as it gets in the lower 48. 

California is a lot of things, but it is not typically western.  On our 5 month journey up the state from San Diego to Eureka, we’ve gained an enlightenment on just how many different places California can be.  Coastal deserts, palm oases, urban jungles, long sandy surfing beaches, foggy shores, fertile valleys, rolling winelands, granite peaks, volcanoes, and ancient forests.  We’ve seen snow, and rain, and month-long sunshine.  But nothing prepared us for this last bit of the trip. 

It’s a funny thing that when people talk of “Northern California” they mean San Francisco (vs Los Angeles).  Take out your map, you’ll see that San Francisco is only 2/3 up the coast – wouldn’t that make it Central California?  There is this whole chunk, possibly the size of the lower 3 states in New England, or even South Carolina, which very few people know anything about.  If California is west of the west, we were north of the north for this last part of our Californian Adventure.  

Yosemite Falls as seen from a gentle raft

To the far eastern boundary, you find the mighty Yosemite national park.  I always knew of this park, but confusing it with Yellowstone, I couldn’t tell you where it was or what it was famous for.  After a bit of research we learned that the park was set aside early as a state park long before the national park system even existed.  The bulk of its 3.5 million visitors a year spend their time in the tiny 7 square mile Yosemite valley.  The valley is carved in a hollow of granite – a single slab of granite.  If you could strip away the ground and trees around the cliffs of the famed Half Dome and El Capitan, you’d find a 300 mile long, single piece of granite.  Even with our research completed, the experience of awe as you stand in this valley cannot be expected.  It is the backdrop of your childhood 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles left, right, and center around you.  The air is clearer, the sky is bluer, and that granite…oh boy.  300 miles of granite – how many kitchen counter tops is that exactly?

Lassen Peak in mid June at 8500 feet

Heading northwest from Yosemite, you’ll find another National Park at Lassen Volcanic.  Never heard of it?  I’m not surprised.  It’s a little bit out of the way, at high snow covered elevation, and one of those places that you don’t do much other than to drive thru.  Lassen itself is a volcano that had a bunch of eruptions between 1907-1921.  It was made a national park in 1916 – my hypothesis is that they were afraid of it and didn’t want anybody living out there.  In any case the place is still very active and amongst its claims to fame are the existence of all types of volcano – plug, shield, cinder and strato – but don’t ask me to explain the differences. Another claim to fame is the Bumpass Hell thermal area which is supposed to be an incredibly scenic area of boiling mudpits and steaming fumaroles.  Sadly so deep is the snow that the access hike to Bumpass Hell is only open after mid July and we were there too early.  You can’t walk down over the snow because it obscures the marked pathway and you just might fall into a pit of boiling acid – I’m therefore perfectly satisfied to see the pictures online and skip the adventure myself. 

From Lassen we headed down, from 70 degree temps to soaring 110 degree temps, and west, along California 299, the scenic byway that traces the Trinity River through the Trinity Alps.  After passing through the valley floor, home to a great percentage of the world’s fruit bowl, you climb up and down through countless ghost towns left behind after the gold rush.  Only once you go through the last pass does the temperature change again, with that part of the northern California coast never getting much warmer than 65 degrees. 

Reaching the coast, we find ourselves in Humboldt County.  Arax writes about the people of Humboldt County deep in the redwoods three hours north of San Francisco.  Humboldt Bay, in the Victorian Seaside town of Eureka, (did you even know California had a victorian seaside town?) was only accessed / found around 1850.  Explorers knew there was a bay there, but couldn’t find it by sea.  It was only when the gold rushers moved in by land that they properly found it.  (Get it? Eureka!)  There are very few bays along the Pacific Coast, so it made sense that Humboldt Bay would get settled and become a major logging town for export.  With 96% of the trees gone by about 1990, the logging business disintegrated over night.  What would these people turn to for their next business opportunity? 

Two major historical events shaped the answer to that question.  The first was in the late 60s when the summer of love exiles left San Francisco to go do hippie things in the woods.  The local (redneck) loggers didn’t mind them…there was enough land/space to go around.  Everyone tells stories of hidden marijuana groves throughout the redwood forests – stumble upon these at your peril.  Their operations were small, sourcing only what they needed to consume themselves – rarely creating a cash crop for wider distribution.  But that changed in recent times, with the 2^nd historical event that has shaped the economy of Humboldt County – legalized medical marijuana.  Today all those ex loggers have joined the hippies and have started to grow something green that matures far earlier than those ancient redwoods.  We now see a modern commercial marijuana farmer.  Technically the law states that each person can only grow 25 plants.  But grow those indoors and you get 6 harvests a year vs the 1 harvest a year of the outdoors growth.  Suddenly you’re looking at an easy $1 million or more even under the legal specifications of the law.  Drive through town and you’ll see those cute little victorian homes now have a minor renovation – you aren’t able to see through the first floor windows – for these homes are now grow rooms. Boarded up, shaded or otherwise blocking out the natural sun, these places have their electricity dials buzzing.  According to Arax, as many as 1 in 5 houses in the county is a grow house.  The hardware stores and garden centers are chock a block with hydrophonic fertilizers , soils and supplies.  It’s all very ‘wink wink’ with their exhibits showing how to grow tomato plants, but everyone knows what everyone is doing.

When Andy and I visited Eureka we expected to see little old ladies on antiquing missions oohing and ahhing at shop windows.  What we actually saw was a community of dreadlocked grungy types on skateboards smoking away on pipes in the middle of the street.  We were in town for 2 days and never saw a single policeman or police car.  When we walked into the Lost Coast brewpub, a hush fell on the crowded room. . .we were not from around here and everybody knew it.  We got the feeling that police cars are no longer necessary. Justice is served up local style.  You stay over there and I’ll stay over here.  It’ll be interesting to see when and if the gangs come in.  Maybe they are already there. 

As you drive out of Eureka you follow the 101 up the redwood coast.  Pictures cannot do these trees their justice.  It is where the forest scenes of Stars Wars were filmed.  It’s full of kitschy tourist stops – avoid the tempting Trees of Mystery stop, there was not much to see there.  There is a National Park there, but I had read that the real awe inspiring sights were in the Jedediah Smith state park.  Driving through both, I have to agree.  Maybe it’s the more rugged dirt road that forces you to slow down, maybe it was the way the rare sun dripped through the trees, but for us Jedediah Smith was the crown jewel. 

These trees actually make our car look tiny!

Not far after exiting the mighty redwoods you approach the state border with Oregon.  They should put a rest area in there, a place for voyagers to gaze back on California and wonder at the state’s marvels.  You’d have thought 5 months would be more than enough to soak of the state’s riches.  As we crossed that border we both agreed that 5 months was way too short.  California we are in love, and we will be back.  

A State full of riches