A trip down the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge will give you plenty of waterfalls to view like these two - Mulnomah on the left, Latourell on the right.  I climbed Beacon Rock on the Washington side but foolishly didn't charge my camera battery the night before so no pictures except the pretty pitiful ones from my iPhone.  Note to self...  Always charge battery every day and bring and extra.

North Oregon Coast

A trip along the northern coast of Oregon - it is spectacular...

Westport, the Columbia River

Cannon Beach

Tillamook Light

Starfish at the Haystack

Haystack

Three Arches

Crater Lake National Park in Winter

Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and widely accepted as the cleanest large body of water in the world.  The shrunken crater is thought to have been formed about 7500 years ago with the island on the left side more recent.  There aren't too many visitors this time of year - saw one car on the way in and one car on the way out.

This is the park hotel closed up for the winter....  REDRUM   REDRUM

Portland, Oregon

OK, here is a parting shot of Portland. I've also posted a small slide show from the trip. Note the sakura (cherry trees) in bloom along the river and also in the slide show. There are nice Chinese and Japanese gardens, it was green, and it is very obvious that things grow well here in the summer.

Old Town

It is raining in Portland. There are lots of things things Portland has going for it and some not so great. I know some people don't like the clouds, rain, and such but that doesn't really bother me. There seems to be a surprisingly large homeless population. I wonder why? There were two beggars rotating and using the same sign outside the coffee shop yesterday. Just a shift change I suppose.

There was something that struck me when we flew in and that was how developed the land is - all under plow or with streets and buildings it seemed.

Lewis and Clark made their expedition between 1803 to 1806. By 1850, Portland was a pretty good sized town. By the late 1800' s, the railroads had tamed the West and the American Indians were all on reservations. Within a few more years a lot of the rivers had been dammed and a substantial amount of the forest logged. The entire area had been wilderness and now only remnants remain.

Two hundred years later it is all drastically different. I have always thought that change has accelerated in my lifetime but I am not so sure. At least you didn't see that much of a change to the landscape when the semiconductor was invented or the internet was invented (not by Al Gore as sometimes thought). To take a place from wilderness to tamed in 100 years is pretty dramatic. One hundred years doesn't seem as long anymore since I have lived more than 50 myself. I wish they had left a little more of it pristine.

I think I wrote once that the rain forest seems to go on forever in PNG. It must have seemed the same to the pioneers.

Portland, Oregon

Here we are in Portland, Oregon. I am not entirely sure what to make of it. I like it, but it is not all that it could be I think. There is a river running through it, but it hasn't been developed very well. The city has interesting architecture, a mix of old and new. There are restaurants, bars, hotels, and some apartments downtown. There seems to be a good art scene and the public transportation is good. The fashion seems to be predominately grunge and lumberjack. There is a huge bookstore, and inside was an engineer giving a lecture with old fashioned slides on bridges. The photograph shows an old draw bridge with modern sculpture beside it that I could not quite decipher.