A Tour-egon of Oregon

Sorry; couldn't help myself.

I've made it to the northern border of Oregon, but I'm not finished with this state yet.

*BREAK*
I'm in a motel room. The room has a TV. The TV has Iron Chef on. I like food -- I like learning about it, cooking it, sharing it, seeing it, smelling it, and eating it. And because I'm on my road trip I'm hiking nearly every day, and with all that calorie-burning my appetite has increased accordingly.

What this means is that I can only write this blog during ad breaks, because whenever Iron Chef comes on the TV I wind up staring, slack-jawed, in a food-watching trance. And the ingredient is Parmesan-Reggiano. Damn that looks good.

Also: Alton Brown knows a shit-ton lot about food.
*END BREAK*

I've only taken care of Central Oregon so far, driving US 97 almost the entire length of the state. The Cascade Range has been my constant companion, and the snow-covered peaks have towered above to the west, from Crater Lake above Klamath Falls to Mount Hood now above The Dalles. Every place I have been shows the signs of volcanic origin -- lava beds, craters, talus slopes of pumice, even the towering dormant volcano peaks of the Cascades.

Crater Lakes was beautiful -- a perfect deep blue lake below a still snow-covered crater rim. Half of the roads in the park were still closed due to snows, and I had to make my way over snowfields to climb Garfield Peak above the crater rim village. It was my favorite hike so far -- only a few miles in length, but the snowfields made it feel like a mountaineering trip. Minus, of course, all the preparation and time and equipment and dangers.

Heading north to Newberry Volcanic Monument, I drove down one of the straighter roads I've been on -- fifteen straight miles through unyielding pine forest. I'm probably not going to do very well through the great plains if I have trouble with a mere fifteen miles straight.

Highlights of Central Oregon:

Newberry. A dormant volcanic crater four miles across, so massive that I couldn't tell until I reached Paulina Peak, the highest point in the park. There are two small lakes in the middle of the crater, and I camped by the larger one, Paulina Lake (notice the naming pattern yet?). I was met with a familiar sound -- peepers! Thousands of tiny little frogs serenaded me to sleep with their high-pitched peeping. I made a cooking fire entirely out of kindling (after spending a solid half hour collecting three massive armloads of downed wood nearby). I saw a movie that explained in great detail how a massive earthquake of never-before-seen devastation WILL strike the Pacific Northwest sometime in the next few hundred years.

Madras. Well, not so much. It's a little city with the Cascades in the background. But it's Jacoby Ellsbury's hometown, and that's good enough for me.

The Dalles Dam. It's freaking huge. Along with about a dozen other similarly massive dams, it's made the Columbia River navigable straight to Idaho, where Lewiston, Idaho is considered a sea port.

White River Falls. About half an hour south of The Dalles, hidden in a sleepy little farming valley. A perfect swimming hole at the base, except for the hidden rocks and very strong current (leading to more pointy rocks in the rapids downstream). A sunny little sand beach at the bottom of a lava-cliff canyon. A much better swimming hole than:

Smith Rock State Park. Which actually has some great little hikes, and what looked to be some prime rock-climbing. I was set to hop into the Crooked River for a dip after my hike there, when I saw:

A snake.

And it was swimming.

Now, I don't know much about snakes. I especially don't know much about poisonous snakes. If I were to draw a Venn Diagram, I would draw a large circle named "Snakes." Then, entirely inside that first circle, I would draw a smaller circle, named "Snakes That Are Poisonous." Then, completely outside of both circles and far away, like on a separate sheet of paper, a circle named "Snakes That I Know If They Are Poisonous Or Not."

I was pretty hot from my hike, but I wasn't going to take my chances with this snake. He had already demonstrated his ability to swim, and was slithering onto the shore. Poisonous or not, this snake was amphibious. That made him like the Navy SEAL of snakes. And I did not want to mess with that.

You don't mess with that kind of snake.

-out-

"I have had enough of these motherfucking snakes on my motherfucking plane!"
-Samuel L. Jackson