Road Trip

It wasn’t supposed to be a road trip.  It was supposed to be a nice short vacation to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Southern Washington with lots of photography planned out.  Spend the night at Panther Creek Campground, do a 6 mile hike to photograph Falls Falls the next day, moving on to a home base at the Lower Lewis Falls campground.  Hike the Lewis River trail the next day to photograph the lower, middle and upper falls, and maybe catch a side falls on Copper Creek near where it connects to the Lewis River.  The next day there was Big Creek Falls, Curly Creek Falls, and Twin Falls.  We’d planned for the possibility of some night photography of stars, with potentially a great viewpoint from the McClellan pull-out.  And then to end the week with a trip up to see the east side of Mt. St. Helens.  A nice Tuesday - Saturday vacation that would give us a day to recover before starting work.

That was the plan at least, but it didn’t work out that way.

As usual, I started checking the weather starting about 10 days out.  It went from good, to not so good, to better in the days leading up to the trip.  A couple of days out it even said it would be cloudy for a couple of days, but no rain, even though they were forecasting rain for Eugene.  Stupid me stopped looking at the weather forecast at that point - the forecast was on the upswing so why bother.

Tuesday started out well.  Yes, we were having showers in the Eugene area, but it wasn’t bad and about half an hour north, things were fine.  We got to the Columbia Gorge around noon and decided to have lunch at one of the new breweries at Cascade Locks.  Things were a bit overcast but the weather was nice and we ate outside.

About half an hour out of Cascade Locks we pulled into the Panther Creek Campground.  We scouted out the sites, picked one we liked and started pitching the tent.  Everything was just fine until we moved everything into the tent.  Drip, drip, drip - the rain drops started falling.  I went to pay for our spot and by the time I got back it was a light rain.  We thought it was a shower, and it was the perfect opportunity to take a little nap.  At one point the camp host swung by, we chatted a bit and he said he thought the forecast was for rain.  For 3 days.  That didn’t sound so good.

A bit later the rains broke and we decided to go find Panther Falls.  Well, it wasn’t where we thought it was.  We couldn’t find it!  And by the time we were heading back to the campground, it was raining again.  So we decided to take the short drive back to Stevenson - within cellphone coverage - to have dinner and to scope things out.

Well, we found out the camp host was right.  Rain, rain and more rain.  Time to reassess.  Ann suggested eastern Oregon.  I said, how about the painted hills?  Ann thought that was good so we scoped out camping areas near the Painted Hills, went to the NFS website for the closest one and everything looked good.  Our plan would be to see if things break overnight, if not, we head southeast.

Sometime in the middle of the night the rain stopped.  As Ann and I got up and got dressed, it started again.  So we broke camp in the rain.  By the time we were headed back to Stevenson - like dinner the night before, we just weren’t up to making breakfast in the rain in a place that was supposed to be a one-night campsite - it was really raining.  At breakfast we reconfirmed the campground, checked out a couple of other resources, and of course the weather forecast and decided driving down in the rain and having several sunny days was better than 3 more days of rain (and the likelihood we couldn’t even see Mt. St. Helens in the clouds).

We headed east and the rains came down.  As we drove south, the rains came down off-and-on.

The road trip wasn’t bad though.  In the Dalles, we did a Yelp search for a coffee shop and found a great shop in an old stone church.  On the way down we drove through some fascinating landscapes - rolling hills, tight gorges, flat plateaus.  We stopped at the White River Falls state park, a place we’d contemplated making a trip to go photograph.  We’re glad we stopped because it’s one of those places that are nice to look at, but no way to photograph.  We continued our drive and the farther we drove, the less frequent the rain until eventually we had partly cloudy skies.

At one point we drove down a ridge line that was black on one side and vegetated on another.  It’s fire season and that one must have been a big one.  We kept driving, taking a very circuitous route on smaller roads.  You get a very intimate experience of the landscape that way.  We stopped off wherever it felt right, like this stop on the John Day River.

As we were nearing Hwy 26 near Mitchell and the Painted Hills, we passed by a gathering of 4 Forest Service helicopters and a couple of fire crew teams.  We’d been passing NFS and other fire fighting vehicles for a while and saw a camp in Fossil as we drove by earlier.  In Fossil, while getting gas, we saw a map of fires in the area, but it didn’t include anything anywhere near the painted hills, so I wasn’t too worried.

Since we had to pass the entrance road to the Painted Hills (officially the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument - Painted Hills Unit) on the way to the campground, we drove into the park to make sure we could arrive before dawn for sunrise photography and to see if we had to pay fees.  Everything looked great!

So we headed westward to our campground and timed our trip so we would know when to wake up.  The campground isn’t “near” the Painted Hills, no marked campgrounds are so we headed over to the Ochoco National Forest.  About 3 minutes out of the park we pass a red triangle on the side of the road - “Incident Ahead”.  And we start to see black in the hills.  We keep driving, more black.  We’re climbing now and we pass a flashing sign “Heavy Smoke - No Stopping Next 5 Miles.”

We started worrying at that point because we were assuming (correctly I might add) that the Ochoco Divide Campground was at the top of the ridge.  Well, we got there and . . . it was still smoking and was blocked off.  The next campground was another 20 miles down the road.  The scene wasn’t pretty - it wasn’t an intense forest fire - trees were still standing and you could see bits of green here and there, especially right along the road where it was easy to fight the fire - but the place was burnt and still smoking in places.

We decided to head back the other way and to see about Mitchell.  We got there to find fire crew campsites in the city park and signs for other makeshift fire crew camp sites up the hill.  Out of desperation we stopped at one of the two hotels in town.  They had a room!  When we asked for two nights they had to check - yes, they had rooms available.  As the front desk person said, “People have pretty much stopped coming out this way because of the fire, so you’re in luck!”

The next day we got up at 3:30 to get into the Painted Hills early.  We took some sunrise photographs for a couple of hours.

Fortunately we had time to move to a few different locations.

As the sun began to rise a bit higher, we decided to go exploring.  Our map showed a dirt road that headed north towards the John Day river, so we went exploring on gravel and dirt roads for a few hours.  We even found a couple of places we could get to the river and photograph.

As the sun was getting intense, we decided we’d go back to our little kitchenette “cabin” and have dinner for lunch, so we could get out for sunset photography and stay as long as we wanted.  Ann made a great stew, but only made half the recipe.  I asked, “Do you think this is going to be enough for tomorrow’s dinner too?”  Her reply - “What do you mean tomorrow’s dinner, you only got the room for two nights - we’ll be out of here tomorrow?”  Duh . . . . I guess it was just par for the trip.

So we went out to the Painted Hills that afternoon and explored a bit more while the sun was still pretty high.

We hiked up a hill (500+ feet in 3/4 a mile) for a great view of the hills.

And of course did some photographing as the sun set.  We decided to bag the night photography so I could get a good night’s sleep for the drive home.  A day early.

The next morning we decided to made a side trip to the Jefferson Wilderness area on the way home.  We had planned to go camping at the Canyon Creek Meadows the weekend before, but a forest fire had started near there a couple of days earlier and we were concerned about being in the news as one of those people who needed to be evacuated, so we cancelled.  When we were scoping out things in Stevenson, WA, we read that the fires near there were moving north, not west, so it might be ok.

It was a good call because it was a nice side trip.  The area had been hit by several fires over the past 10 years - you could see the burnt trees - but there was at least ground cover coming back and plenty of Madrone bushes and small Doug Fir trees.  It gave us hope that the blackened desolation of the Ochoco Forest wouldn’t last forever.

The nearly 5 mile hike was serious, but we got to see the mountain wild flowers in the meadows and get a great view of Three Fingered Jack.  The lighting wasn’t the best, but we’re planning on making a trip soon to do some night and early morning photography to get some better light.

So here is a map of our road trip, not quite the stay-in-one-area trip we’d planned!

Overall, it was a road trip of rain and fire.  Fortunately Ann and I never lost our sense of humor about it and we just went with the flow.  In Oregon, there are always lots of options . . . you just have to keep up with what’s happening where because you never know what you might wind up with.

And for those of you who are interested, not including the maps (of course), all but three of the above photos were taken with an iPhone.  Today’s technology is pretty amazing.