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Columbia River Gorge, Oregon
While the waterfall was pouring crazy symbols of my destiny
Good news or bad news, depending (as always) on your perspective.
As promised and/or threatened for some time now, I have actually put in just enough time to organize yet another slideshow, this one covering (generally) work related travel from 2010. This includes all sorts of random destinations- everything from a secret underground ICBM missile launch facility, to snow sculptures to cutting edge architecture to national parks to a great big tiki statue wearing a santa hat, all in locations from Maine to Florida, from Southern California to British Columbia, from Texas to Alberta- and all are fiendishly packaged (as always) with lots of pictures and lots of rambling little stories and descriptions, just as you like it.
We’ll start all this madness with a great way to start off a slideshow, at least in my opinion. This is Multnomah Falls, a 600 foot drop of water on the south side of the Columbia River Gorge, about a half hour west of downtown Portland. The falls is both a terrific roadside attraction (on a route with many such terrific roadside attractions) and, more importantly, a great place to get out of the car and climb the trail all 600 feet to the top. All along the trail there are gaps between the towering pine trees that afford views into the gorge or up at the falls or, at the very top, a view straight down the falls to see all that you just climbed up.
Of course before you climb the balance of the trail you get to cross that perfectly sited concrete bridge (the one that puts Multnomah Falls a level above all of the other Columbia River Gorge waterfalls), where the rushing water from the upper falls most certainly makes its presence known. Bring a raincoat if you go.
Farther west along the gorge (a terrifically scenic drive) is Bonneville Dam, a feat of modern engineering that is still no match for the gorge and mountains that surround it. Still it does have a fish ladder- a series of steps where local traveling salmon can jump their way up past the dam, (evading predators like bears and man along the way), finally get all the way upstream and, well, die. Once again you are reminded that it sucks to be a salmon.
On a separate trip (there is little logic or chronology to any of this slideshow), I was lucky enough to enjoy a quick layover in Vancouver, just weeks before the 2010 Winter Olympics. And while there are (probably) plenty of good things to do in Vancouver, I did my favorite- a walk (a pretty long walk at over ten miles) from my hotel up Granville Street and then all along the water- past Coal Harbour, past Stanley Park, past Lions Gate Bridge, past Sunset Beach, through Yaletown and all the way back. And even though the weather was worsening and the rain was going from intermittent to steady to heavy, it was all worth it just to get a chance once again to see the rocks and trees and the city and the sea.
As if having snow capped mountains all around you and the ocean (literally) within your reach wasn't enough, the almost all glass downtown of Vancouver can sometimes be a pretty sight as well.
Architecturally most of the buildings downtown aren't individually interesting, but taken as whole and taken as a composition the downtown can really be quite striking. Vancouver's downtown urban planning- often referred to as Vancouverism- realized early on that a downtown core needed and could easily support a large residential component, an idea which spawned the glass city but also has started to ironically push out some of the other core downtown functions, relatively important things like large office buildings where people actually work. It does however create and foster a quite livable downtown, something that the climate, the setting and the impossibly fresh Pacific Ocean air also probably all have something to do with as well.
The area covered by this slideshow is a fairly significant one, covering most of my weekends for these past eight months and close to eighty individual flights (I fly a lot). Not all of that time is spent in glamorous places like Vancouver or Oregon, most of the actual work seems to be in small towns either reachable by long drives or short connecting flights to even smaller airports. Such was the case with this site, Kamloops, British Columbia, halfway between Vancouver and Banff, a scenic small town nestled in the snowbound mountains and one of those many, many places I will likely not ever be able to find a reason to return to.
