Oregon 2, California 1
My buddy Bill drove up from
San Diego to pick me up in San Francisco and we did a quick 4 day loop up
to Oregon in the wondervan, covering natural parks, wine tasting in the Willamette
Valley, a drink with friends at a bar in Portland converted from an elementary
school with creepy hallway paintings, and a stop in the Timberline Lodge,
recognizeable as the haunted hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining
.
A view from the lip
of crystal blue Crater Lake, from the southern lip. Still snowbound in
May, the 7100 ft (2200m) high park was one of the coldest spots in the
continental United States when we were there. Only the road from the south
entrance of the park to the southern lip was plowed, so circumnavigation
or a descent to the surface of Crater Lake, one of the deepest lakes in
the world, was out of the question.
The spectacular two-chute
Multnomah Falls is only the most famous out of many waterfalls in the Columbia
River Gorge near Portland. The Columbia River, unique water passage through
the northwest United States toward the Pacific Ocean and dividing the states
of Washington and Oregon, carved out its passage leaving behind gorge-ous
cliff walls on both sides. The snow melt from Mount Hood and the rest of
the northern Oregon Cascade mountains drains into the Columbia River over
the series of waterfalls lining the south face of the gorge.
A walk in the glacier
at the snowline of Mount Shasta. This extinct volcano is not a part of a
mountain range and thus commands a dramatic 360 degree panoramic view over
all of northern California and southern Oregon. An eight hour expedition
over the snow would lead you to the second highest point in the continental
United States at about 14,100 ft (4300m), behind Mount Whitney in the Sierra
Nevada mountains further south.