Rapeseed Field

Some years ago I stumbled across a photographer who calls himself Old Man Travels. He lives here in the Northwest and often his travels are relatively nearby.  His photo essays include interesting narratives.  Check him out.

J. Harlen Bretz Floods

Old Man Travels did a wonderful photo series on the Missoula Floods.  I think he is as fascinated by the Missoula Floods story as I am.  These were ice age floods that originated from a glacier near Missoula Montana.  They were huge floods.  This is a quote from "Cataclysms on the Columbia"

"Most geologists now believe that for slightly more than 2000 years .... at least 40 tremendous cataclysms of almost inconceivable force and dimensions swept across part parts of the Columbia River drainage basin. These occurred between 15,000 and 12,800 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. More than 16,000 square miles were repeatedly inundated to depths of hundreds of feet, ..... These floods on the Columbia contained up to ten times the flow of all the rivers in the world, 60 times the flow of the Amazon River."

These floods shaped the Columbia Gorge and made all its waterfalls.  They also gave the Willamette Valley 100 feet of topsoil because that is where there was enough room for the water to spread out and stop moving.  Thanks Eastern Washington for all the topsoil!

Old Man Travels calls them the Bretz floods because he was the geologist who first figured out that the floods happened.  Of course he was ridiculed at the time.  This link will take you to his photo essay on the Bretz Floods.


This is a photo of a back road on his journey.  I wish I was driving on this road.  I need a road trip...

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Mount Hood looking fiery

 This is quite a photo of Mount Hood.

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A tunnel of trees in the snow

This photo is from Old Man Travels.  He is a great photographer who loves the outdoors and lives in the Pacific Northwest.  I love his photographs and the stories he writes about them.  Click the link and scroll down to read the story that goes with this one...

This one is really nice, too.

The lure of the carnival

I ran across this photo here.  Oh, the carnival, lit up at night.  It looks so magical and alluring.  I think how it looks is probably the best part....

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the dry side

Izaak Walton Inn

Several years ago we did a cross country ski trip in Glacier Park with Portland Parks.  We got on the train in Portland in the evening and traveled all night to Glacier Park.  At around seven in the morning, the train dropped us in Essex at the Izaak Walton Inn, which is an old railroad dormitory turned into an inn.  The train stops right at the Inn, which was cool.

The town of Essex including the inn is under threat from the Glacier Park wildfire.  This blog has great photos and the story and history of the inn.  The blog is pretty interesting because it covers a lot of small Montana towns and their history.

How big?

That is how big a grizzly paw is

Hood River Valley fruit trees

They grow a lot of fruit in the Hood River Valley.  This year the fruit trees are blooming about a month ahead of schedule.  That's Mount Hood in the background.

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Shore Acres

Breaking Waves from Uncage the Soul Productions on Vimeo.

Shore Acres is on the Oregon Coast.  It takes a while to get there because you have to drive through Coos Bay and wind around a bit.  It's a wonderful place to visit and I miss going there.  It has an interesting history as well.  At one point it was owned by lumber baron Louis Simpson.    It is now a state park.

Stranded on the Pacific Crest Trail

Last spring when John and I were hiking on Eagle Creek, we met a young woman who was training to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.  I followed her trail journal.  Then I read in the news that she had been rescued in Southwest Washington after being stranded in the snow for a week.

Her journal account of her experience in the snow is here.

Wildfire season

It's wildfire season in the West, including Oregon.  There are lots of photos out there but I thought this one was hauntingly beautiful.  Imagine what it looks like at night... it must be so scary.

I grew up on a farm in Eastern Montana and I remember some fires lighting up the sky at night even though they were quite far away.  You could see smoke from both fires in the daytime and at night a huge piece of the sky was red from the larger further away fire and in the other direction, you could see the yellow flames of the fire...I remember being afraid, especially of that ominous red sky.

Credit: Candice and Dallas Smith 

Beautiful photos of the Mckenzie River

This photo is from pdxgene, who hangs out at Portland Hikers.  He takes excellent photos and these are of a place near and dear to my heart.  And, yes, it really IS that beautiful.  Check out his trip report on Portland Hikers for more photos.

pdxgene photo

Goin' Round 'the Mountain'

In Portland, Mt Hood is referred to as "the Mountain", as in "this weekend we are going to the mountain".  Well, today we we went round "the mountain".  We drove out 84 to Hood River and then took 35 to 26 and back home....that means we went around Mt. Hood.  It was a beautiful day to be out.

Mt Hood from 35

We drove up the Hood River Valley with all its many fruit orchards.

Mt Hood 

We stopped and hiked a bit on the Lower Salmon River Trail.  Trailmom aka Linda's Lens  wrote  a very descriptive trip report with great photos on Portland Hikers.  Her hike was a little later in the year but it was lovely today, too.

View Larger Map

Sailing across the Zumwalt Prairie

The Zumwalt Prairie in NE Oregon has been designated as a National Natural Landmark.  From OregonLive, "Zumwalt Prairie is the best example of bunch grass prairie remaining in North America, according to the park service."

from Praise Photography

It's a lovely place.  We've been there several times driving from Joseph to Buckhorn Point.  John calls it sailing across the prairie.  I think it has been too long since our last visit.

from WestVirginiaVille

from OregonLive

Here is an image search on Zumwalt Prairie.... lots of great photos.

Cool place to live in Seattle

The pyramid atop the Smith Tower in Seattle is a residence, which includes access to the very tippy top.  I've always been attracted to high up places like fire lookouts and lighthouses.  The apartment occupies the space where the water tower used to be.  You can see photos and videos from these links.


Woman who lives there

She has a blog with posts about living there.  Here is a  blog post that talks about how they ended up living way up there.

Woody Guthrie and the Columbia River

The Bonneville Power company paid Woody Guthrie ten dollars a song to sell building dams on the Columbia River.  Shilling for Bonneville Power seems at odds with a man who wrote beloved folk songs and was a champion of  the underdog.

Bonneville Power hired him when he was poor and hungry.  Was he aware of the consequences of the dams?  Did he understand that it would destroy Celilo Falls which was a very important fishing site for native Americans?  Did he understand that it would turn the mighty Columbia into a big slow lake?  Did he know what it would do to the salmon?  I can't find answers to these questions.


Woody Guthrie and Bonneville Power

Palouse Falls and the Missoula Floods

I am fascinated by the Lake Missoula Floods.  That's where a gigantic ice age lake near what is now Missoula Montana broke through an ice plug and roared across parts of  Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.  In Oregon, it came down the Columbia Gorge at an estimated speed of 70-80 miles per hour, and that is why we have all those wonderful waterfalls.  It happened more than once, filling the Columbia Gorge, carrying lots of soil and rocks the size of school buses.  When it reached the Willamette Valley, it had the room to slow down and deposit all that soil from Eastern Washington.   The topsoil in the Willamette Valley is 300-400 feet deep.   Sorry, Washington.  We have all your topsoil and we aren't giving it back.

Palouse Falls are in the scablands of Washington and are part of the Missoula Floods geology.  I'd love to go there.  Recently a Portland Hiker named Dean did and he took some fabulous photos.  Portland Hikers lets people post trip reports for their hikes and their are many great photographers who post their photos.  There is lots of other cool information about hiking on Portland Hikers as well.

Dean's trip to Palouse Falls

Map showing Missoula Flood path

Missoula Floods

Hozomeen

from summitpost.org

This is Hozomeen, a double peaked mountain in the North Cascades just south of Canada.  I learned of Hozomeen from the book Poets on the Peaks by John Suiter.  Jack Kerouac spent a summer in a fire lookout called Desolation Peak and it had a view of Hozomeen.  Kerouac said Hozomeen was the most beautiful mountain he'd ever seen.  But he also said he couldn't turn his back on it for the first few weeks he lived there because it scared him.  I think I'd like to go there, be in awe of it, but it might seem as frightening to me as it did to him.  I like awe.  Not so big on fear.

Ramona Falls Hike

It was the last day before the rainy season and it was such a perfect day.  We hiked the Ramona Falls Trail on Mt Hood.  The first part of the hike is a slog through the sand and everything is dry, dry dry.  Then  you start following a lovely stream and it is like a different world and one much more to my liking.

The vine maples are showing their colors.

And this is Ramona Falls

You can see more of our photos here.

Ramona Fall Hike