City of Roses

We were in the Portland, Oregon area for 10 days.  Of those 10 days, only the first 4 were rainy.  The rest were sunny and warm--in fact, almost too warm as it got to 87 a couple of those days.  (Our Texas family & friends will have no sympathy for us.)

We're glad that it did stop raining so that we could fully appreciate the beauty of the International Rose Test Garden in Portland's Washington Park.  It covers 4.5 acres and is full of roses, their blooming period peaking around the first week of June.  We were very glad that they were on schedule this year.  We actually made 2 trips to the gardens--the first trip was the first sunny day we had.  The roses that had bloomed were rain-weary, and the bulk of them had not bloomed yet. We decided to make a return trip the day before we left the area giving the roses as much time as possible to soak in the sunshine and for all those buds to open.  It was a good plan.

We were parked in Wilsonville, south of Portland.  Salem is not far from there, so as we usually do, we visited Oregon's capitol building.  We found it to be much more under-stated that any of the other capitols we've visited.  A local told us that the Oregon Pioneer statue on top of the building is re-covered in gold leaf every twenty years.

We took a drive along the Columbia River east of Portland.

We saw several waterfalls, but the most impressive was the Multnomah Falls.  The upper falls and lower falls together total 610'.  We walked up to the bridge and felt the chilly spray from the falls.

We took a drive along the Oregon coast.  The section we drove was picturesque, but it wasn't as rugged as we were expecting.  Perhaps we needed to drive further.

One of the stops we made while driving along the coast was in Tillamook.  There is a popular tourist attraction there--the Tillamook Cheese Factory.  We had eaten all of our Ohio Amish cheese a long time ago, so thought we'd give Oregon cheese a chance.

Between you and us, the Amish cheese wins hands down.

The highlight of our visit here was taking a helicopter tour to Mount St. Helens.

Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, so it's been a little over 30 years in recovery.  There is still a definite debris field downhill from this volcano.  In fact, this debris is 150'-200' deep.

The amount of vegetation that is re-establishing itself there is impressive.

Animal life and vegetation have both made a much quicker recovery than the scientists had expected.  Spirit Lake which is just north of Mount St. Helens and was greatly impacted by the explosion, has started to recover although it still has a long way to go.  In the picture below, the gray areas on the far edges of the lake are actually logs that were blown from the surrounding hillsides during the eruption, and are still there on the lake forming log mats.

At the peak of Mount St. Helens, you can see the blown-out crater.  In the middle of it, you can see that the lava dome is still forming.  As we flew over, we could see a couple of smoke vents.

We enjoyed our brief stay in Oregon.  This morning we left the state and moved to Gig Harbor, Washington.  We plan to visit Olympia, Tacoma, and Mount Rainier from this base over the next week.