Tuesday and the Gorgeous Gorge

I spent the last couple of days in Boardman, Oregon. It's a small out-of-the-way town scrunched between Interstate 84 and the lolling Columbia River.  The Columbia River and her Gorge need to be on everybody's bucket list. As one drives along I-84 from east to west, one is blasted with the sheer beauty of nature run wild and there is something magical about the way the river and its gorge morph east to west from a wide lake-like expanse, between brown desert hills, then through a stage as a ruggedly beautiful flowing river between immense crags of granite and windmills, (yup, hundreds of them), ending up as a gentle blue winding expanse, thanks to multiple dams surrounded by immense pine covered bluffs and rocks that just plain...soar. 

Names like Maryhill Museum,  Rooster Rock, Multnomah Falls and Vista House jump at you from signs along I-84. Another bit of what has to pass as one of man and nature's most successful collaborative sleights of hand is how the Gorge going from west to east just isn't the same one you see when returning home traveling west. Really.  I feel strangely calm after the 190 mile drive today. You see I haven't had time in the past two days to obsess about politics, I was working after all, and I listened to music all the way home from Boardman this afternoon. Last night's sunset was incredible...above, that little cone in the background is Mt Hood. The far bank is Washington State. 

I stopped along the way as I drove home today, at various view points and I stopped at the former site of Celilo Falls.  I had passed by it so many times in the past and had to stop this time. Before we put in The Dalles Dam in 1957, Cililo Falls (formerly Wyams Falls) was the premier fishing spot for the native Americans of the region. We flooded it. No more falls. I love the electricity but folks, we took away their lively hood and there is an "Oregon's History" placard there in the little park they have built for travelers stating that destroying the falls in no way meant the loss of the Indian way of life...and they still have a treaty that lets them fish :o/

So what are my takeaways from the drive? I am even more astounded by the sheer power and the beauty of the gorge and the Columbia herself. You have to go see it, drive it both ways. I understand some prehistoric ice dam  in Montana gave way and the torrent created the Pelouse in Washington and the boulders and water carved out the Gorge. What a visual. What words could we use. Can't you imagine?  Maybe some pol will piss me off tonight, but I doubt it. Going back to work in Tillamook tomorrow, it's my daily drive through the Wilson River Valley through the Pacific Coastal Range...oh and the weather was fantastic.


And it is a nice, clear day here in Oregon