Mt. Hood and the Columbia River Gorge, OR
July 17th-July 18th
So it was time to get on the road again. It actually feels like more work travelling sometimes than actually working. I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world, though. Our first destination was Mt. Hood, the pretty mountain you can see from Portland, Oregon, that has the only American ski resort open year-round. Our destination: the Timberline Lodge. (It’s also famous for being the setting of than unforgettable Kubrik move, The Shining. Today, the weather was not on our side. We drove up through a cold, misty fog (actually somehow appropriate for the site of a horror movie.) The Timberline Lodge from the outside is a little bizarre. It’s more gray stone than log cabin, but the interior is very inviting with its huge fireplaces and basement pub. The parking lot was full of vans from ski schools and training camps and the lifts were running on July 17th. The first thing that came to mind was…gee the weather was better in January in France than it was here in July, but I guess this was fluky weather. From Timberline, we drove down to Government Camp, a little village built in the 20s to house the workers who built Timberline Lodge (it was another CCC project.) It’s hard to imagine where our country would be today without Roosevelt’s New Deal, so much of our American “legacy” was preserved through those projects. The weather was just as dismal in Government Camp, so we decided to continue our drive towards Hood River, where we were planning to pick up the Columbia River Gorge Parkway.
Our instincts were on our side, and we found a dry picnic area that was also the trailhead to a four-mile roundtrip hike to a beautiful waterfall. We took the opportunity to stretch our legs and set off for a couple of hours. After the hike, we drove towards Hood River through the Oregon Fruit Basket. We stopped off at a couple of roadside stands, but were disappointed at how expensive the fruit was (we realized later that the season was severely delayed due to the weather…so the prices were marked up.) When we arrived in Hood River, we wanted to visit the Full Sail Brewery, but had just missed the last tour. We took a short walk down the main street to peak at some of the shops and then picked up the highway along the Columbia River. We found a little campground up the road from Horsetail Falls and decided to stop for the night. We hiked up to the falls through a dense, humid forest before dinner. One thing is certain- there is a lot of water in Oregon!
The following day, we were ready to explore the Columbia River Gorge. We started at Multnomah Falls (the most famous of the gorge and the fourth tallest in the U.S) and hiked up through a beautiful forest with other hidden waterfalls. From there we stopped off at the historic Crown Point viewpoint over the Columbia River (which starts in British Columbia) and then finished the road to Portland. I did the same trip last year when I was visiting family and was lucky to have a beautiful sunny day with views of Mt. Hood. Unfortunately, we had an overcast (but dry) day and missed out a little bit on the charm of this road.
Tags: BIG TRIP 2011, In English 2005-2006, Oregon
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