Those Stupid Owls

Short Version:
A picnic, a ride despite my best intentions, goodbye Oakridge, and, of course, those stupid owls.

Long Version:
Eleven hours of sleep is a good thing. Even better when it's followed by a highly-caffeinated eggy breakfast picnic at the red covered-bridge. I was pretty wiped from our Alpine experience, and stated from the outset that I wasn't riding. Janine had other ideas.

Kim rode through the red covered-bridge area while we were breakfasting, and stopped to chat. Pretty soon we were joined by June, who was not only lovely, but also a veritable font of information about places to go and ride, all over the world. Unfortunately, the only bit I remember properly is that Bella Coola* has "gazillions of bears."

We hit the not-yet open brewpub for internets, then went in for a pint once it opened. Eugene from the Local Bike Shop was there, and was determined that we shouldn't leave town without riding at least one more of the many trails we'd not yet seen in the area. I said there was no way I was riding up any hills, and he countered by demanding that we allow him to drive us to the top of the Larison Rock Trail. We protested, but to no avail, and before long we'd hooked up at Greenwater Park, driven to the top of the hill, farewelled Eugene, and were rolling.

Up the hill.

The trailhead is some way shy of the summit of Larison Rock, and neither lovely wife nor I are the kind to NOT hit a summit when it's presented on that kind of platter, regardless of how tired our (my) legs might be. A short ride and a scrambly climb took us to the top of the rock pile, and then we were back on the bikes and pointed downhill, and hitting some serious pace. Some of the trail sections were scarily fast, others technical and tight. Almost all of it was fun, including the bits where we had near-misses**. The trail's not long, and soon we were back at the park, farewelling Eugene and Richard amidst the growing chaos of Mountain-Bike Oregon, which is a three-day, all-you-can-shuttle/eat/drink bikefest which sells out its complement of 300 twice each year.

And then we were off! Back up the winding road over the hills to the Cougar Dam, with a stop for a swim in the North Fork*** of the Willamette River on the way. We were just short of the dam when we decided to stop for the night, and we found a pretty excellent spot in which to camp, down a side-road from the highway, next to a lake inlet full of driftwood****. Cheesy quesadillas and vege-burgers downed, it was our bedtime. And wake-up time for the local screech-owl couple. To be fair, the birds making the unholy noise above our tent may not actually have been proper screech-owls, but the noise was definitely a screech, and the birds, when we finally mustered up the courage to get out of the tent and have a look at the source by torchlight, were definitely owls. And definitely unimpressed with having a torch shined in their big, dark-acclimatised eyes.

That the feeling was mutual was evidenced by Janine's first statement the next morning: "Let's go find those stupid owls and wake them up."








* = Small town on British Columbia's west coast. Very isolated. Came to our attention when we were in Vancouver, as the terminus of a proposed oil pipeline from Alberta. Topical, due in part to BP`s colossal Gulf failure, and in part to a newly-publicised leak from an oil pipeline owned by the same company, which has so far spilled an estimated three million litres of oil into a once-pretty river.

** = Including Janine nearly pulping a chipmunk

*** = Unlike NZ, where streams have unique names from source to the point where they're subsumed into larger, more politically adept water courses, Amerikan rivers seem to have been named at the point where they hit the sea, and backtraced from there. Which is all well and good, except that you end up with "The North Fork of the Middle Fork of the Clackamas River," which is ever-so-slightly unwieldy

**** = One piece looked uncannily like an enormous crocodile, launching itself out of the water with jaws agape