San Francisco and Oregon

It's been a little while since I've updated this blog, and a few things (and a few thousand miles) have happened since. When we were done with Yosemite I drove back down to the coast to Ventura, CA, just north of where we left off for our inland detour. We had a nice time going out to the Channel Islands on a boat and hanging out for a few days for the Santa Barbara Solstice festival and other things. That festival was insane. Loads of middle-class California people in a trance state, dressed as peacocks or painted blue or you name it, dancing around throwing fire sticks, playing drums and just generally making complete idiots out of themselves but totally enjoying it! I imagined that kind of thing happening in the South... and couldn't really. People just seem to not take everything as seriously out here (except their cage-free tomatoes, diet free of "toxins", and street sweeping; they're very very serious about keeping their streets clean in California). Anyway, it's not a surprise to hear a bartender say something like "Hey! you can't smoke that out here... unless you pass it to me first (wink, wink)" or to have the police tell you "well technically... you're not supposed to sleep in your van here, but just keep moving around and have a wonderful time in California!" Unfortunately I got some kind of terrible sickness in Oxnard and had to waste a day in a motel room puking my guts up (not really what I had in mind for the day), but shortly after we were headed up the PCH.

The stretch of the PCH between Santa Barbara and San Francisco is amazing. Most people rave about how great Big Sur is, but the whole surrounding area is close to the same terrain. Sheer cliffs hundreds of feet down into the waves on rocky beaches below, and mountains thousands of feet high right at the ocean. Oh, and I bought a surfboard in Santa Barbara from some guy who had been doing research on amorphous silicon deposition at UCSB, but it took until about Monterey until I could find a beach I wouldn't kill myself on (here I was wishing for Pacific Beach in San Diego, still the best beach yet).

So we made it to San Francisco, which was great sure, but it was still a city with (I'd say) very subtle differences to any other major city out there. The difference between say the Sierra Nevadas and the Appalachains for example, is much more extreme and exciting to me than the difference between San Francisco and New York. So much of your experience of a city is the individual people you know there anywhere, so in most places you can find somewhere to fit in. I liked the fact that San Francisco is so close to these great places in Northern CA and by the beach too, but I wasn't a huge fan of all the people or the fact that there's this cold fog hanging around in the summer and you have to wear 2 sweatshirts on the 4th of July just to stay warm.

It's weird how old landmarks or symbols tend to crop up as tourist attractions once they've lost their relevance. Right now, operating on the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, is a Ben and Jerry's ice cream store, and a place that sells "tie-dye" printed t-shirts next to people my age taking pictures with the street signs. Cannery Row in Monterey is now devoid of sardine canneries, but has hundreds of tourists milling about in mirror mazes and souvenier shops. Yosemite Valley even is a long shot from how John Muir saw it I bet, still beautiful, but full of thousands of tourists eating breakfast burritos and driving Priuses around. You really have to figure out for yourself what's happening and not listen to the whole "tourist and travel industry" telling you what to see and do. Some of the coolest things I've seen so far on the trip I've discovered completely by accident, and some of the most hyped things have been very disappointing. Anyway, I was ready to get back into the mountains when we left San Francisco.

We were headed out to Crater Lake in Oregon to meet my parents for a couple days there and on the Rogue River. Crater Lake is at 6200ft inside of a dormant volcano. It's also 53 degrees and almost 2000ft deep (I went swimming but couldn't touch the bottom, even near the shore where it wasn't quite 2000ft deep). It's so blue, the ranger identified the color by its wavelength off the top of his head, 420 Crater Lake blue. And it is. You can see literally a couple hundred feet down and it really is some blue water especially when the sun is out.

After a day and a half exploring Crater Lake, we floated down the Rogue River on kayaks which was great fun. The first real time I've been in a boat this summer and the water was warm enough to be comfortable swimming in. We asked the girl at the kayak place about some mountain biking and hiking in Oregon for this week and got some great recommendations we checked out the next day. Unfortunately our POS GPS (this Tom Tom has been out to get us all trip) decided to take us on some Forest Service Roads that would be fine in maybe a Jeep, but were quite interesting in the van. (Still the worst road prize goes to the unpaved roads in Sedona, AZ tho) We found an awesome campsite in the Siskyou National Forest for $5 and we were almost the only ones there. Tons of trails around the area which I had to bike and run around on. The mountains here, the Coastal Range, kind of reminded me of maybe the Smokies, but with different trees. I liked Oregon already.

After a day in Bend, drinking some Deschutes beer, we headed to the Mt. Hood National Forest with another endless set of trails in the Cascades. I had a particularly good long run here just down a rolling trail next to a big creek. We stopped in Government Camp, OR on the way and found out from the chatty bartender that you can literally ski all year (even now in mid-July!) on Mt. Hood.

Next we made it to Portland, where we headed immediately to the Rogue Public House to drink some beers. We actually met some girls from North Carolina there who were meeting someone's brother in Portland. He had just moved out there about a year ago and he and his friends were really trying to sell the idea of Portland to us. It wasn't a hard sell. We went to a couple other breweries with the NC people and then called it a night. Oregon may be my favorite state so far. And I'm not really even done with it yet, we decided to leave now and come back later in the fall to maximize our time in... Alaska! That's right, as I write this, we're about 1400mi (a bit over halfway...) into the long drive to the interior of Alaska. I think we're in the Yukon territory still. Anyway, we stocked up on food and bought a case of Red Bull and have just been driving non-stop for about 36 hours now, only stopping for gas and sometimes animals in the road. We should be to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park sometime Monday afternoon (we left Saturday morning). I'll have to write a lot more about Alaska later I'm sure, but for now Canada is pretty beautiful (if very very lonely feeling up further north). And by the way right now it's almost 11:00PM locally and the sun is still very much up (it rose around 3:30).


Day 72, 10,540mi (and counting very fast right now)