Puddle Hoppers...Walking in Portland

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Monday, July 28th - Columbia Gorge Hikes (part 1)

I know, I know. We suck. The good news is that we have been walking (almost) every week, but it’s mostly been neighborhood walks, the Fanno Creek trail….stuff we’ve done before that isn’t very exciting to write about. With all our girls off at camp this week, though, we decided to take on a couple of the Gorge walks from the much hated ‘Easy Day Hikes’ book. I think we’re down to just one or two local walks from that stupid book and the rest are way out – like 50+ miles, which seems a little excessive for a book titled “Easy Day Hikes: Portland, Oregon”. My vote is that anything over 50 miles loses its easy day hike status. Driving 75 miles to make a 3 mile loop around Lost Lake just doesn’t seem worth it.

Okay, sorry, I’m putting the soap box back under the desk now. As I started to say, on Monday we headed out to cross off two Gorge walks, the Elowah Falls/Upper McCord Creek trail and the Wahclella Falls trail. Elowah was closer so we decided to do that first. The EDH book instructed us to take I-84 to exit 35 – check – and then turn west toward Hood River at the stop sign. Oookay. Hood River is actually east, but…we tried to follow the extremely vague directions and ended up back on the ramp for I-84. Stupid book!

No problem, though, the Wahclella Falls trailhead was only 5 miles further down the highway, so we decided to do that first and then circle back. This turned out to be somewhat providential, as this is a beautiful, gorgeous, stunning, magnificent - you get the idea - walk. The path runs along beside my favorite kind of babbling creek, so all you can hear is the water tumbling over the rocks, the birds singing…and me panting for breath, of course. Apparently local walks don’t build up much endurance for hill climbing.

The path goes pretty high up but there was always enough vegetation that I didn’t feel like I’d go tumbling off the path if I looked down. I’m not very good with heights, and narrow trails with no handrails and huge drop-offs freak me out completely. Not that you’d want to fall off this trail, it is steep, but it didn’t give me the heebie-jeebies like a lot of them do. The trail split after a while and as usual we chose the high road – get the hills out of the way first is our motto!

After a while the path headed back down toward the creek, and we could hear the falls and knew we must be getting close. Then we walked around the corner and…wow. I’m running out of superlatives, so you’re going to have to look at Katje’s pictures to see how lovely the falls are. It’s a huge spill of water that pours out of a narrow passage that it has eroded away over who knows how many years into a deep pool surrounded by mossy rocks...yeah, look at the pictures.

It’s only a little over two miles out, around the loop and back, and in my opinion is one of the prettiest hikes in the Gorge, which is known for its beautiful walks. Just don’t tell anyone about it – let them all go to the extremely crowded Multnomah Falls and leave this gem to those of us in the know.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Hillsboro-Orenco Station Walk

We start our walk at Orenco Station, lots of fog this morning!

One of the Gazebos we saw in the park, very pretty! We thought this would be a good spot for a summer wedding.

The 2nd Gazebo we came across, smaller but still very pretty

The floor under the 2nd Gazebo

Our walk takes us over the Max Station

We both really wanted to stop and go into this antique store (one of the original stores from the community of Orenco)

Yup, that is a chicken coop (seems I find them everywhere). This is a very fancy coop, it has real windows!

A beautiful old church we came across during our walk

Heading back to the car, this is the view before you cross the Max Station.

East Bull Mountain Park Walk

We came to walk this park to see a few of the Eagle Scout projects done this year (including Jack's).

lots of greenery

We stop and look at one of the Eagle projects, this is a rail and a set of steps (a boy from Jack's troop did this one).

We make our way over to where Jack did his project, looks very different from when we were here this summer.

More of the trail that Jack put in. Jack did a great job! His section of trail is the nicest along this whole trail.

Another Eagle project, stones leading up to a picnic area.

More greenery, very pretty out here

The end of the Park. Was a nice walk out here today.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

September 21st - Urban Dare! (oops - forgot to post this)

You may remember that one of the reasons we've been trying to build up our speed and stamina was because we were planning to walk a half marathon this fall. And you may have noticed that we haven't mentioned the half marathon in quite a while. Our friend Shannon was the one who talked us into it and then something came up, she couldn't make it and it wouldn't have been the same without her so we postponed it until next year. In the meantime, a deal came up on one of our discount websites offering this scavenger hunt type race through downtown Portland at half price. I immediately emailed Katje, saying that we'd probably suck at it but we should do it anyway because it sounded like fun and a little out of our comfort zone. And of course she agreed.

So Saturday morning the 21st we rode the Max downtown with very little idea of what to expect. From looking at the Urban Dare website we knew that we'd need to solve clues to find places where we would either take a picture to prove that we'd been there or face a challenge. We'd probably also have to ask strangers to pose for us. Fun. And WAY out of our comfort zone. So we met at Kell's Irish Pub at 11:00 as instructed, then waited until the 12:00 start time (note to selves: we don't have to be there quite so early next year).

Of course it started raining just as we were given our clue sheets, so we took shelter under a nearby awning and started attempting to solve clues. And holy cow these were hard! Things like, "Get your picture taken in front of a mural painted by Rone, an artist from Australia.", and "Donna Sheridan was played by Meryl Streep in this movie. Take your picture in front of a restaurant with this movie's name". We'd brought our internet-connected phones but found that searching on a phone is a LOT slower than on a computer, so going with our backup plan we called home and started our families looking up clues. After a few false starts (apparently 'wine pitcher' sounds a lot like 'line picture' to an 18 year old) the answers started coming in. The Yankee Champion statue is at Portland State University, the first chairman of the Portland Development Commission was Ira Keller...in retrospect we should have taken the time to figure out the clues first, planned our route and THEN started walking. It would have saved us quite a lot of zigging and zagging and a second trip out to Portland State to find a books mural.

Thank goodness we didn't have to ask six people to form a human pyramid (the example given at the Urban Dare website) - instead we got a trio of college students to do the 'see/hear/speak no evil' thing, and Katje got to pose as if she were proposing to someone. This was a highlight, as we found a wedding party doing their pictures at Keller fountain and got one of the groomsmen to participate. He was a great sport and this was a fantastic picture. The guy who checked us in at the end really should have appreciated it more.

With major amounts of help from our hubbies and my son we finally finished up in almost exactly three hours - not too shabby - and could probably have knocked a half hour off that time if we hadn't had to make that second trip to PSU. We met a lot of really nice people and learned a little about the city (it's a lot bigger on foot and when you're in a hurry!) and when we do it next year we're going into it with a PLAN. No, we're never going to get anywhere close to the winning time of 1 hour and 3 minutes, but I'm betting we had a lot more fun than the winners did anyway.