My Trails

Rugged

Fish Creek

Yesterday I rode Honda up the Apache Trail. The road is paved for the first few miles and then becomes dirt just past a tourist settlement called Tortilla Flats. Along with hairpins turns and steep sections, the dirt surface is filled with potholes, ruts, and washboard ripples. It is a road suited more to motorcycles, jeeps and 4 wheel drive vehicles than cars, and Honda handled the drive without problem.

I turned around before I made it all the way to Roosevelt Lake. It was getting late and I mainly wanted to sample the road anyway. Someday I will ride all the way through.

Cave

After four months of touring the northwest, I will return to the Phoenix area in a few days. I have seen a lot of beautiful country and enjoyed the rambling lifestyle that has become the trails of my retirement. People ask me what part of the country is my favorite and I have to say it is the next place down the road. Sometimes it is hard for me to remember all the places I’ve been. In fact, I have to go back and read my blog to remember what I did.

San Luis Reservoir

Central California is dry as a bone and flat as a pancake. If they don’t get rain soon, It wouldn’t take much to turn it into another dust bowl. Below Sacramento on Interstate 5, I felt like I was driving through Kansas. On my map I noticed a National Park that I haven’t been to before and decided to make it the last attraction on my journey.

Situated below San Jose in the foothills of the Coastal Range is Pinnacles National Park. Pinnacles sit right on the San Andreas fault line. It was formed by molten rocks and lava that spewed out between the plates in the Earth millions of years ago and eroded to form towering spires of rock.

I asked Carrie Esau to go see the park with me and we had fun hiking, biking, scrambling through two caves, and enjoying the Ranger led campfire talk at night. I say campfire but there is actually no fires allowed in this park or just about any park in the northwest.

I am at Quartzsite tonight. It is still pretty hot in Arizona but I’m hoping for some nice temperatures soon.

Oregon Coast

Highway 101 along the southern coast of Oregon is spectacular. The road is cut high in the cliffs and open to expansive views of ocean meeting land in violent beauty. There are many pull-out places scattered along the highway and it is hard to pass by even one.

Last Sunday I rode down 101 from Three Rivers Casino to the Umpqua Lighthouse and took the tour. Richard told me the tour was good and worth a visit. I’m really glad I stopped because it was one of the least expensive and most enjoyable attractions I’ve done in a long time. I can see Richard and Dianna hosting a historical feature like a lighthouse; Richard would be good at giving lighthouse tours.

Inside the lens.

I have been using obsolete Internet information to find free places to stay as I travel down the coast. It happened last night that the Mill Casino near Coos Bay now has no free parking. I didn’t have another plan and didn’t feel like going on further so I coughed up the cash to stay the night. I did get free showers, dump, and use of the laundry room, so it kind of evened out.

I have noticed that there are many people who bike and backpack along the narrow shoulder of Highway 101. There is a lot of fast traffic on that road and in many places only about two feet separates my right mirror from the head of the cyclist. I try to pull over if I can but sometimes there is oncoming traffic. You couldn’t pay me to bike or hike along that busy road. On the whole AT there are only a very few miles that are along a road, and when I had to walk on one it was always a relief to get back into the woods.

Tonight I’m in California parked on a forest road along the Smith River. I’m only a few miles from Redwood National Park and will enjoy the big trees for a couple of days. No matter how many times I visit this area it always amazes me how big these trees grow. It is almost as if they should be called something different than a tree. It’s like comparing a lizard to a dinosaur.

Laundry Ripoff

What a ripoff this place is. I will steer clear of a laundromat like this in the future if I can help it.

All the machines use something called an “easy card”, a credit card type of plastic that all washers and dryers require to operate. The card itself costs $.49 and is only good at the store where it is purchased. You must add money to the card through an ATM type kiosk and it appears that no combination will come out even after you wash and dry.

To top it all off there are no single washers in the place. I wish I would have known about this before I rode down here.

Flown by two famous aviators

One thing I’ve noticed about the back roads in Oregon is the lack of any shoulders. Only inches from the edge of the blacktop and lane marker the ground falls almost vertical to a deep ditch or dropoff. There is hardly any place to safely pull off the highway. In the event you are startled by a deer, or nudged over by a large truck in your lane, or suddenly had a flat tire, you would surly suffer a calamity of great proportions down some unearthly embankment. Even when the road is on the level the builders decided to raise the grade six feet to make sure there were dropoff on either side. If you showed any normal, highway superintendent a section of this road, they would ponder only a second and say, “We should put a guardrail along here.”

All this got me to thinking today as I drove back to the coast from the Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, OR. The road over the coastal mountains was smooth but curvy and narrow. I was going the speed limit but several cars would pile up behind me anyway. If I’m going the speed limit I usually don’t worry to much about holding up traffic, but after a while I want to pull over and let them go by before someone gets too impatient and tries to pass on a curve. It sometimes was many miles before I could find a good place to pull over.

More airplanes

The museum in McMinnville is where the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes gigantic wooden airplane is kept on display. It was a little expensive to get into the museum but worth it. Not only is the Spruce Goose on display but hundreds of other aircraft and rockets. I spent four hours wandering through the place. You can see inside Hughes plane but it cost an extra $25 to go up to the flight deck and sit where Howard flew the plane.

STOL airplane

I’m back over on the coast near Florence. It has been raining today so I have been hiding, but maybe tomorrow I will check out the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. I have come half way down through Oregon. My plan is to continue slowly down the coast and then gradually ease up on the pace.