Eclipse Adventure - Part 1

Come on now, you really didn’t think that Ann and I could live 20 miles from the totality of a solar eclipse and not figure out a way to experience it did you?  And us being the way we are (see how I very not-so-subtly made this a collective trait), us figuring out a good way to experience the eclipse turned into an adventure.  

It started out well over a year ago last summer when Ann and I first heard about the total eclipse.  We were preparing for a trip to the Painted Hills.  As part of our prepping for that trip, we logged onto the town of Mitchell’s website to check out camping opportunities and they were talking about how they’re in the path of totality (winds up the Painted Hills were smack dab in the center of the totality path) and YOU should plan on spending the eclipse in Mitchell.  The thought of photographing the painted hills with a total eclipse in the frame lasted about as long as it took both of us to realize, “Yeah, us and a couple of thousand other people with the same brilliant idea!”  Wound up that estimates were for 10,000 people (Park Service estimates) for the event.  (I haven’t heard what the actual numbers were.)  With visions of Oxbow Bend and Schwabacher Landing in Grand Teton NP in our minds (rows of photographers along the shoreline) and the unpleasant experience that gave us (despite the incredible images) quickly had us thinking about where else we might go.

Later, on the road back from a hearing in Bend, I stopped at the McKenzie River Ranger District Headquarters to talk to the rangers there about potential photo sites.  While they had a lot of good advice about various locations (some of which I had inquired about wound up being outside the zone of totality), the fact of the matter is we got so absorbed in preparing for Beast and our May adventure that April (the time when we could have reserved key fire lookouts, etc) came and passed.  There was just too much to do at that time.  

So summer arrived and with it increasing stories about the total eclipse and why being in even the 90% range is nothing compared to totality.  Face it, when it’s there, you’ve got to do it.  This is the guy when, as a kid one summer, after playing soccer with my friend Kevin by the New Carrollton city hall, we went to the High’s store for a soda and saw a crowd of mostly women screaming outside of the New Carrollton Sheraton (at the time, the closest hotel to the Capital Center where Elvis was to perform that night) and decided to check it out.  Kevin and I wound up sitting on a slope facing the hotel because, hey, you just might see Elvis.  Just as we finished downing the sodas the pitch of the screaming raised about 5 octaves and this white limo comes rolling out, pulls out of the parking lot onto the road right in front of us and, Hell’s Bells, there’s Elvis, who cooly rubs his hand through his hair as the vehicle passes not 30 feet away from us.  Then they get stuck at the traffic light and women climb all over the limo (now that was a sight), which slowly pulls away (women falling off the limo at that point) when the light turns green.  I was never a really big Elvis fan, but hey, it was Elvis!

Long story short, when you’ve got the opportunity - grab it!

There were really only two questions for us.  Did we want to try and make a photograph of the eclipse or just experience it?  And, where?  

The first was a lot harder than one would imagine.  As we’ve learned, specialty photography (and I would say photographing eclipses is a specialty in photography) is never easy (recall the seagulls from our recent trip).  And in this case, you’ll have only a couple of minutes to get it right.  We thought for a long time about just going some place and sitting back to enjoy it.  But . . . when you’ve got the opportunity . . . .

So starting in late July I began thinking about where.  Just about then, the stories started coming in - an estimated 1 million people expected to descend into Oregon for the eclipse, natural disaster preparedness teams were using it as a training opportunity in how to deal with the movement of people after a massive earthquake, tsunami or nuclear attack from North Korea (ok, I made that last one up), or a volcanic eruption.  Suddenly, not only did I have to think about getting from point A to B and back or whether locations might be available (sure, you could spend $350 for a weekend RV spot packed in an open field with a bunch of other RVs), I had to figure out how to find someplace interesting to photograph as a foreground and hopefully some place where we could have our preferred peace and quiet.  Spoiler alert - we pretty much succeeded.

With the stories of the coming apocalypse in the back of my mind, planning started, and in between first plans and where we actually wound up, well, that’s where the adventure comes in.  See, try as I may to keep it simple, it didn’t wind up like that.  Here’s a spread of locations that we explored and, eventually wound up.

We used a lot of tools in our planning, so I figured that I’d use this as an opportunity to show some of the tools we have at our disposal.

My first thought was to make the trip as simple as possible.  So that meant the coast was out of the question.  There is just one road that runs north-south on the coast, and only a few routes that run east-west to get to the Willamette Valley.  Those were obvious choke points that would make summer traffic along the coast look like a joy-ride (it isn’t).   The next possibility was a short trip up I-5, and a quick return trip before the masses started heading home.  The question was where, because I don’t know many places between Albany and Salem.  As I thought about it, I remembered that the rest stop between Albany and Salem is on the the north bank of the Santiam River, and since the eclipse would be happening to the south-east, there might be a view.

We had been planning a trip up to Portland so, on the way up, we stopped at the rest stop and I hiked down a trail that led from the far end of the parking lot down to the river.  Using the augmented reality function of a program called Photo Pills, I was able to guesstimate where the sun would be at the time of the eclipse (roughly 10:20, which meant above the bigger trees in the image below).  I took a screen shot of the view on my iPhone and concluded that, worst comes to worst, we at least had one possible image location.

For the next couple of weeks I didn’t think much about it.  Ann would mention locations where other people she knew were going and, as the big event approached, I thought maybe we should try and find something a bit more glamorous than “a rest stop on I-5” as our eclipse viewing area.

We used a couple of tools that helped us examine the path of totality.  The Washington Post had a wonderful online tool that you could scroll from one end of the country to another.  That site gave me the idea that perhaps we’d like to check out Madras, Oregon on the east side of the Cascades.  As the Post described it, you could watch totality descend from the top of Mount Jefferson to the west, and then hit you 17 seconds later.  

Another of the tools we used was on Avenza Maps (formerly PDF Maps).  It’s a company that takes PDF maps, and then georeferences them so you can see where you are on a map.  They have a slew of maps they sell, with many maps free.  For example, all of the USGS quadrangle maps for the entire country are free (as they are from the National Geographic website).  Avenza had a special eclipse map of the Benchmark Oregon Map, which we have in hard copy and electronically, so we were familiar with it.  You can see the blue dot on the bottom left of the image below of where our home is.  The rest stop site is to the north of us with a red pin.  The other red pins became locations we scouted, and eventually where we wound up.

The search around Madras gave us a few opportunities, but not much to explore.  One advantage was that the Crooked River National Grasslands are to the immediate east of the city and could be a great location for us to disperse camp.  The big disadvantage was that everything we saw about Madras was that it was going to turn into the zombie apocalypse.  Also, much like the area between Albany and Salem, I didn’t know the area.  I was pretty sure there weren’t a lot of tall geographic features or river/creek/water locations that weren’t highly developed, which meant that we’d have to explore to find something interesting to have in the photograph.  My searching didn’t pull up many hits on ideal locations that weren’t already known to the world, and my scans of the maps showed power lines criss crossing the landscape.  There didn’t seem any obvious places to target.

So I started thinking about where we could go that was near the center of totality and I thought about Mt. Jefferson.  Not from the east side, but from the west side.  Knowing that all the popular places would be packed, I turned to Google Maps, which has not only roads as a base layer, but an aerial image base layer and a topographic base layer.  What I was looking for was a dead end road that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, or as far away as possible from developed roads in active use.  In Oregon, that often means logging roads.  As long as the logging road was open (many are gated when not in use) I had no doubt that Beast could get us there because, well, she’s a beast!

Scanning over the area in Google Maps I came across a few locations, like the one below under the blue point.  That was the end of a track that included a couple of other potential sites (not on the image).

The reason the little brown area just to the south and west of the blue-marked spot above was not a contender was because it was on the wrong side of the ridge.  It had no view of Mt. Jefferson at all!  I suspected as much from the shading on the aerial photo, but this is where being able to change the base map to a topo map really comes in handy.

From the topo map, you can see that the point I was looking at is at the very tip of a ridge that overlooks the N. Santiam Highway and, as you’ll see later, has a clear view of Mt. Jefferson if, and this is a big if, in real life you can actually see it over the trees (then again, we have Beast to stand on top of if necessary!).   So this is the topo view of that area.

Another tool we use is Photographer’s Ephemeris, both on the iPad and online.  Photographer’s Ephemeris allows you to see the relationship of your site to the sun and/or the moon on any given day and time.  There are a lot of other tools in the program, such as the ones that allows you to set your photo point and the subject point, and to assist you in the direction the light will fall on the subject, but I used it to compare the line to the eclipse with features on the ground.

In the image below, I’ve set the photo point at a different location, which is a bit north and about 8 miles west of the point on the maps above.  This point was on a ridge line just north of Detroit Lake.  The grey line to the south east is the direction of the sun (a yellow line) and the moon (a blue line) at 10:19 on August 21, 2017 - the moment of eclipse.  Yellow and Blue make Grey, because they’re in alignment.  This site had the advantage of being a bit north of the ones shown above and thus brining the eclipse closer in line to Mt. Jefferson in the envisioned photograph.  The disadvantage to this site is that it was substantially farther away and had to look through an area that had forest fires earlier in the summer (some still ongoing).  Those fires had closed an area that I had also looked at as well that was much closer to Jefferson.  That site looked up a valley to the mountain that would have placed the eclipse very close to it.  You can imagine my disappointment with the closure.

As you might be thinking, we were looking at some pretty remote places.  The remoter the better because that meant that the likelihood of avoiding large groups of people.  You might actually say that we were looking for places not on the map, at least not on Google’s road maps.  And if you did, you would be right.

Once I had the different locations I was considering marked and on a map, it was time to head over to Google Earth.  In some ways it’s a lot easier to work with maps in Google Maps, but at least for 3-dimensional landscapes, Google Earth has one big advantage - you can get an eye level view of the landscape.  

So that remote point at the top of the ridge I was looking at above, well, this is what the view of Jefferson would look like from that point.  The hand (actually probably quite a bit higher) is where the eclipse would occur.  

I did this for several different locations.  Now if you think this takes a lot of time, you’re right.  Fortunately (not for our budget, but . . . ) this has been a slow couple of weeks at work (blessedly broken by a brief due to come in today that I’ll start working on) so I had a lot of time to explore the multiple points I scouted out.  Most weren’t nearly as interesting as the above.  

I tried much of the same sort of exploration for areas outside of Madras, and a bit outside of Prineville, but didn’t find anything nearly as good or any where I had any sort of confidence that it would give us an interesting photograph.  

At some point you have to call it quits.  You can never know with absolute certainty what a place will be like that you’ve never been to, and the one place I knew, the Painted Hills, we knew we didn’t want to be.  So after factoring in weather forecasts, fire forecasts (small fire north and east of Detroit Lake starting up, others to the north of Jefferson under control, huge fire much farther south in the Sisters Wilderness exploding, no major fires in the Ococho NF) we decided we’d try and avoid the crowds in Madras and try the ridge top view of Mt. Jefferson.  If that didn’t work out, I’d explored enough maps where we could wing it further west.

Sunday morning we packed up and headed up the McKenzie Highway (126).  The fire in the Sisters Wilderness had grown overnight and there was no view of the Three Sisters, nor even  of the skyline.  It was pretty much a wall of smoke, reminiscent of the wall of smoke we’d seen outside of Yosemite earlier this year.  I kept telling myself that was ok because we were turning north, just as we did in California.

We finally hit HWY 22 and turned northwards, and things immediately looked better.  Blue skies . . . for about 2 miles.  We drove up a ridge, crossed it and . . .  smoke.  As we descended into the valley things weren’t looking good.  We decided to travel on, and to test whether the smoke was low lying or whether it obscured everything.  We drove to our turnoff (at about 2,400 feet elevation) and started climbing on the logging road.  We drove up to about 3,300 feet to the first major intersection.  It was about half the elevation change we would make if we continued going to the point.  You could see absolutely zilch in the distance.  Even worse, looking upwards looked no different than looking to the side - the smoke wasn’t thinning, which meant it was likely to be as bad at 4,400 feet as it was at 3,300 feet.  Time to change plans.

So we turned around, backtracked, headed through Sisters and stopped in Redmond for gas.  If you’re going to go exploring, better with a full tank than a half full tank.  And since dummy me forgot to bring our hard copy of the Ochoco National Forest/Crooked River National Grasslands map, we hopped onto the online Avenza Maps store to download better resources.  (Boy do I love technology!). Since there wasn’t much to the Crooked River National Grasslands that wasn’t on our hard copy Benchmark Oregon Gazette, I downloaded the Ococho National Forest Motor Vehicle Use Map (which shows which NF roads are open and which are closed [even if not gated], for which you WILL get a hefty ticket if you’re caught on it).

Fueled up and with extra maps in hand, we decided we might as well drive up to Madras to see what the pickings were like there.  If that didn’t work out, we’d head down HWY 26 to Prineville.  

Just north of Terrebonne (near the lovely Smith Rock State Park) we ran into a traffic jam.  15 miles outside of Madras!  Popping over a hill, you could see it going on for miles.  No thank you!  I turned around at the first road I could find and we headed east.  The game plan - get as far north in the Ococho National Forest as we could to be as close to the center of the totality oval as we could get.  Dumping Madras was no big disappointment.  Nobody was going to see the eclipse descend down Mt. Jefferson anyway because, just as it was on the west side, there was a big wall of smoke on the east side of the cascades.  You never would have know there were mountains there.

The drive to Prineville, then northward was beautiful.  Even better, it wasn't smoke filled!  If it had been public land instead of private land, we would have pulled over at a couple of locations and had a beautiful bluff as our foreground.  But, as was the area all around Ashwood, a town north of Prineville (another site that I had scouted out earlier in the week), it was all private land.  We needed to find public land.

Once we hit Prineville, we headed north on NF 27.  As we approached the national forest we drove by the Moonshadow Festival at the Wine Down Ranch, a farm field full of RVs, cars, tents, a stage and vendors.  Just the type of place we were hoping to avoid.

We drove onward into the National Forest and, after a dozen miles, at the fork where NF 27 turned south, we kept heading north.  At that intersection was a nice little field, so I pinned it on the map just in case we needed to find a place, any place, to photograph the eclipse.  There were several dispersed campsites in the area, all full with people and we suspected that the field would probably be a bit more crowded than we’d like.  Maybe not Moonshadow crowded, but we were hoping for something a bit different.

We then headed down 2725, which quickly descended down hill into a valley.  Not exactly the elevation we wanted to be heading so we back-tracked and made a left on 2730.  By this point we were on gravel roads, generally decent but with patches of potholes and washboard.  As we drove along we passed quite a few dispersed camping areas, almost all of them occupied.  The couple of locations that were vacant, I pinned on the map.  Still, no views.  We turned around fairly quickly after the second site because it was clear that the road continued around a draw and there was nothing this side of the ridge. 

We checked out the second campsite.  It was a decent location, much bigger than most of the other sites, but like them, within view of the road (unavoidable).  We checked out the area a bit more and decided to reassess.  Do we grab this site and head back to the field in the morning, or risk it and go onward?  It was around 3 pm, so the day was passing and nothing was looking great.  

After a bit of discussion, we decided to keep scouting.  It may have been our determination (some might call it stubbornness) or it may have been the couple who were doing Yoga at their campsite right next to the intersection (nothing against yoga, it does wonders for my back, but not publicly), but an eclipse photo session at the field wasn’t sounding too appealing.  So we headed onward.  

As we drove into the draw, we looked up and saw an interesting bluff along the skyline.  “Man, would that be cool to have in the frame!”  Of course, that photograph wasn’t to be had because there was a steep slope to our left and woods as far as we could see.  But, turning the bend on the far side of the draw I saw a flat, open, golden area separated from the road by a stretch of trees.  I slowed down.  There was a gated logging road on the right side of the road just a bit later, so we turned around and parked by the gate and tromped off into the field.

We hadn’t thought of putting our hiking boots on, but after stomping through a hundred or so feet of trees and down a couple of terraces we wound up in a meadow.  A real meadow!  We hadn’t seen as large a flat open area as this the entire trip through the Ococho.  As we walked a bit into it and turned around in the direction where the eclipse would be, well, there was our bluff!

We walked around a bit more and, after checking Photo Pills for the eclipse location, decided that not only was this place the location for our eclipse photographs, we needed to get here early the next morning to photograph the meadow.  Because when an opportunity presents itself . . . .  Now, all we had to do was keep our fingers crossed that nobody had taken the campsite we’d explored earlier.

It wound up that we didn’t have to cross our fingers.  It was open.  

We set up camp, made dinner and discussed our plans for the next morning.  A few vehicles passed by that afternoon and evening, but no more than a handful.  We were pretty much as far away from others as we could reasonably get and that was fine with us.

As the day gave us a beautiful sunset, all we had to do was hope that the lovely clouds we saw disappeared by morning.