Owls, Growls, the Interstate, Portland!

Our second morning in SeaQuest dawned not sunny, but at least not raining. A band of crows pursued an owl past our site as we breakfasted, then we broke camp and were off to Growler's Gulch. Found the place with minimal issues, kitted up and set off. It was fairly wet from the several days' rain we'd just experienced, so most of the steeper sections we left alone (apart from the one we walked up). No maps meant slow progress - we were building stick arrows at every intersection so we could find our way back to the van. Discovered a couple of times that we weren't the only ones to have used this trick - there were already arrows at some spots. Eventually we discovered that we WERE the only ones who'd been using that trick, when we hit a junction where we'd already laid two different arrows, pointing in two different directions, on two separate previous visits. Effective though, as we made it back to the van no problem. Like many of the places in this area, we'd like to go back for more - hopefully we can convince the Highlander Cycles folks that they want to play Growler guides for a pair of directionally-challenged kiwis!

As usual, we were later getting away than we'd planned. This time, we decided to eat as we drove, and I did my best to cram food down before hitting I5, the Interstate Highway that runs down from Canada, through Seattle and Portland, and on southwards. Lucky I did, because our first Interstate experience was of being near-nailed by a HUGE truck, then sandwiched between four of the buggers for a while. Eventually I managed to extricate the van from their (unintentional, I'm sure) rolling blockade, and we were blasting south towards our second Vancouver* at non-truck speeds**. After a seemingly very short while, we hooked off the I5 and onto State Highway 14, heading east. This road started as what would be termed a motorway in NZ, but within thirty minutes and as many small towns had shrunk to the equivalent of the back road between Tauranga and Rotorua; windy and narrow and steep in parts and with limited visibility with occasional spectacular views of the Columbia Gorge, for which we had to turn around and go back to for photographs. Several times.

Beacon Rock is the core of an old volcano****. We climbed up it.

Beacon Rock State Park holds not only Beacon Rock, but also Little Beacon Rock and Mt Hamilton, We didn't climb either of them, as it turned out*****, but we did walk up to the Hadley and Rodney waterfalls, and the Pool of the Winds, all of which were pretty cool. Saw another owl on the way up - it was spectacularly disinterested in us and our photographically-inclined desires, turning its head (like it was on silky-smooth bearings) in our direction only when the camera was lowered. It did this twice. Stupid bird. Met a local chap called Dave up near the falls. He was wearing Icebreaker gear, which was quite a good ice-breaker. He convinced us that Hood River and its surrounds should be on our itinerary (windsurfing and kiteboarding capital of the world, hiking and mountain-biking hub, etc), so we added it.

First, though, there was a night under canvas in Beacon Rock State Park to attend to. We met a conclave of squirrels, some people from Wisconsin, and a high-speed deer, whose hooves hitting road surface had had us wondering what on earth was coming before it blew past. The campground was under some high-voltage power lines, which sizzled occasionally, and had a lot of gnats and recently-trimmed raspberry bushes.

We left relatively early (10ish) the next morning, bound for Portland. We started by driving away from Portland, upriver, then crossed the Bridge of the Gods to the southern bank of the river and hooked westwards onto I84, past cliffs and waterfalls, and into the city.

It was around midday, and it was raining, and it was the opening day of the Rose Festival, and we'd finally made it to Portland!







* = Vancouvers in BC, Canada and in WA, USA are both named for the same bloke, Captain George*** Vancouver, who is - I think - something like the Captain Cook of the Pacific Northwest

** = 75mph for not-trucks, 65mph for trucks. In real terms, this translates to 60-90mph for non-trucks, and 70-80mph for trucks

*** = First name may not have been George

**** = Make a classic volcano-shape from something. I suggest dirt, or some kind of delicious food. Poke a hole down the middle of the volcano with your finger. If your volcano is made of delicious food, lick your finger. Fill the hole with something which will set solid - some kind of special mixture of mud and ash would probably work well, as would melted chocolate. Wait for the stuff in the middle to set, then remove the exterior. Use a glacier for geo-historical accuracy. The ash-mud/chocolate core should be left as a standalone entity. This is how Beacon Rock formed, sort of

***** = We hungered