Chapter 61 - Crater Lake & Olympic Peninsula
October 12, 2000
9/27 We left Portland, Oregon, this morning, bound for Crater Lake National Park. We headed south on Interstate 5, and it took seemingly forever to get out of Portland's industrial sprawl. First stop, Swan Island Dahlias, in Canby, Oregon a grower, national wholesaler, and retail distributor of these flowers. A great many acres of Dahlias, in all colors but blue, all in full bloom. A separate display garden had just a few examples of each of hundreds of different types of Dahlias from 2" miniature collarettes to 10" formal decorative blooms. Fanciful names such as "Pooh", "Lemon Candy", "Bashful", "Bliss", Dizzy", "Spartacus" and "Sweet Dreams" were just fun.
This area has a high concentration of such businesses, growing many different kinds of flowers, shrubs, and trees. Just down the road, we stopped at a roadside farm store for fruit and vegetables and ended up talking to the owner for half an hour. He's a railroad nut, and has built a miniature railroad through his farmland. He has a substantial machine shop, which he showed us, and he built the railroad cars himself. He said he makes more money selling train rides to kids than from selling farm produce. He was "downsized" from an aerospace industry 35 years ago, and has been operating this farm ever since. He rhapsodized about the local climate - ideal for growing an incredibly wide range of produce. He had a row of Kiwi vines bearing fruit beside his barn.
At the Dahlia farm we saw Ponderosa Lemon trees and other semi-tropical things growing outdoors, protected in the winter only by a makeshift sheet-plastic shelter. We can't get used to seeing tender plants like fuchsias and cyclamens growing vigorously in many gardens, apparently without any winter protection. This valley is 60 miles inland from the ocean, but still is heavily influenced by the coastal weather - lush greenery, moderate temperatures, and lots of clouds and rain in autumn and winter (which fortunately hasn't started yet). He said the low temperature last winter was 26 degrees F.
In Salem, we stopped at Deepwood Estates, to walk through the interesting gardens. The mansion is also open for tours, but we contented ourselves with the gardens - autumn flowers still blooming vigorously. One of the best blue-flowered borders we have seen was handsome — with hydrangeas, asters, and lesser blues.
Just past Eugene/Springfield, we turned onto SR 58, following the Middle Fork of the Willamette River Southeast into the Cascade Mountains. The river is dammed in several places, forming substantial lakes. Although not a big river, some of the dams do have hydroelectric generators. We stopped for the night at Casey's Riverside RV Park. We're camped about 50 feet from the river, which at this point is a mass of noisy fast-flowing whitewater. Another camper said that it's normally good trout fishing, but that the water is currently too high for good fishing. The high flow rate is due to a dam release - apparently lowering the reservoirs in preparation for the imminent rainy season.
9/28 Continuing on SR 58 through the Cascades, we topped out at Willamette Pass (5100') before descending to US 97, which trends north-south through a broad interior plateau at about 4500' elevation. The vegetation changed quickly as we came over the pass, with the east side becoming more desert-like as we descended. After about 20 miles, we turned west again on SR 138 for 15 miles to Crater Lake Highway, which then led us South to Crater Lake National Park. We came into the park from the north, and the only campground is in the south part of the park, so we got a wonderful preview of Crater Lake as we drove along the west rim of the lake on the way to the campground.
We found Mazama Campground only about 1/4 full. It had been scheduled to close for the season in two days, but because of the unseasonably nice weather, the closing was delayed until October 15. It's a pleasant park, nicely spread out through a subalpine forest at 6000' elevation. There are no hookups at any of the campsites. We chose a site near the edge of Annie Creek Canyon, surrounded by tall Noble Fir, Mountain Hemlock, and Lodgepole Pine trees. After setting up camp and relaxing for a while, we headed out for an early evening circumnavigation of Crater Lake.
Crater Lake is indescribable. Even though we've seen lots of pictures of the lake, the pictures didn't prepare us for the impact of the real thing. The water is arguably the clearest in the world (white objects can be seen 140 feet below the surface), and this clarity contributes to what may be the deepest, bluest, color of any lake on the continent. The lake is in a caldera roughly five miles in diameter, with the surface at 6176 feet, surrounded by steep lava and pumice cliffs extending 1000 to 2000 feet above the lake. The water is 2000 feet deep in places. The rim road indeed comes very close to the rim in numerous places, and there are many pullouts, the majority of them big enough to accommodate large RV's (at least in this uncrowded season).
The geological events which formed this unique lake and the surrounding volcanic terrain are fascinating, and are well described in the park literature and in the Visitor's Center.
The literature we read before arriving discouraged RV travel on all but the western portion of the rim road. But this is obsolete information, and we found that the road is good enough for the biggest vehicles all the way around the lake. We didn't leave enough time for all the gawking and photographing we wanted to do at each pullout, and by the time we finished the loop, it was getting quite dark.
9/30 It's hard to believe it's the last day of September. The weather has been wonderful (mostly clear, 65 degrees daytime, 45 at night). We've hung around the lovely campground, making short expeditions to the Visitor's Center, to Rim Village (a collection of well-built rustic stone and log buildings, including a hotel), and to several lake overlooks. Dave did a couple of hikes. The first was to the summit of Mt. Scott, which at 8900 feet is the highest point in the park. It was a fairly easy trail, well maintained and generally smooth. The trailhead is at 7600 feet, so the total elevation change is only 1300 feet, with a round-trip distance of about five miles.
Mt. Scott peak is sharply defined, dropping steeply in all directions, and thus gives a 360-degree view, with Crater Lake dominating the foreground to the west, and several large lakes visible in other directions. An old fire lookout cabin sits on the exact top, but is closed up and appears not to have been used for many years. This hike offers one of the best views to be found anywhere, and as mountain hikes go is remarkably easy. Don't miss it.
On another day, Dave walked the Annie Creek Trail. A mile of the trail skirts the edge of the campground, running along the edge of a canyon. The other half of the trail returns along the creek, in the bottom of the canyon, over 100 feet lower, connected by a steep switchback descent and ascent of the pumice walls. I also bushwhacked on up the creek to its source - a big fast-flowing spring, which sometime in the past had been neatly walled in with massive rocks. I speculated that Crater Lake must have a leak, to provide water for this spring. The lake surface is about 150 feet higher than this spring, so it seemed plausible to me. But a ranger at the visitor's center claimed that none of the local streams were fed by the lake.
While sitting in our campsite, we were visited every half-hour or so by the local wildlife. The timing was so regular that I suspect they make systematic rounds of this section of the campground. This crew of beggars included a golden-mantled ground squirrel, four gray jays, and a steller's jay. The squirrel and the gray jays were very tame, sitting within a foot of me, waiting for a handout. The steller's jay was a bit shyer.
10/2 Decision time! It's getting cold here (30 degrees when I awoke this morning), and we're running out of food. But where shall we go? There have been few times when we were quite this undecided. East is country we haven't been in. Southeastern Oregon, the Northeast corner of California, the Southwest corner of Idaho, and particularly the Northwest corner of Nevada seem rather empty on the map, and it would be fun to go poke around and see what's interesting there. It's also tempting to head straight south and spend some time at Lassen National Park, which we visited only briefly 30 years ago.
But the long-term weather forecast is unusually good, and it's also tempting to go west to the Pacific coast and see it while the sun shines. (We drove down this coast almost two years ago in early November, and it rained continuously from Seattle all the way into Northern California). And if the weather really wants to co-operate, it would be nice to head back north up the coast to the Olympic Peninsula, which we skipped on our rainy trip two years ago, and last visited 26 years ago.
Out of all those possibilities, the coast won out, and we started driving west from Crater Lake, along SR 62 and then SR 227. This turned out to be a very pretty drive - quite a bit of it along the scenic Rogue River as it descends from the Cascades through a series of canyons. A brief jog north on US 101, brought us to SR 42 which we followed the rest of the way to the coast. After a stop for groceries and fuel in Coos Bay, we continued out to Charleston, stopping at Oceanside RV Park.
10/3 Shore Acres Gardens was originally the home of lumberman and shipowner Louis J. Simpson in the early 1900's. It's a spectacular setting near the tip of Cape Arago, originally several hundred acres along sandstone cliffs which drop straight into the surf. Sea lions were barking on tiny islands just off shore. The mansion is long gone, but the beautiful gardens live on. They have a relatively formal design, with clipped boxwood borders and masses of spectacular dahlias and roses at this season. Lots of unusual trees and shrubs, many of majestic maturity, since Mr. Simpson's ship captains kept picking up exotic specimens all over the world and bringing them back to him. The large rhododendrons should put on a nice show in the spring, when tulips take the place of dahlias in many of the beds. Graceful large crane statues were attractive accents in a Japanese-style pond.
Bright blue sky and ocean with waves crashing on offshore rocks made for pleasant vistas off nearby Sunset Beach SP cliffs, but the brisk wind was cool. The sharply tilted sandstone layers were capped with a horizontal sandstone layer near the top of the shoreline cliffs, but eroded into peaked teepee shapes offshore. A hike on the sandy campground beach (no shells) capped the afternoon. Later, bright stars made a few minutes in the cold wind worthwhile as Helen re-acquainted herself with the fall constellations.
10/5 We headed north along the coast, aiming for Olympic National Park, sticking to the coast as much as possible, enjoying the frequent viewpoints, lighthouses, high cliffs, and blue Pacific. Just after crossing the D River, we turned into Devil's Lake State Park in Lincoln City.
The D River is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's shortest river (440 feet), joining the freshwater Devil's Lake with the Pacific Ocean. The state park has three separate sections, all bordering the lake - two are day-use only. We found a few full-hookup sites unoccupied, and quickly chose one as darkness descended. The sites are perhaps a bit closer together than most Oregon State Parks, but still quite nice. The no-hookup sites were nearly all empty — everyone seems to want electricity on these chilly autumn nights. The park is fully reserved for the upcoming Columbus Day weekend.
10/6 Three Capes Scenic Route is a 38-mile loop which leaves US 101 and follows the coastline, past Cape Meares, Cape Lookout, and Cape Kiwanda. It's a narrow twisting road, sometimes in deep forest, occasionally right along the coastal cliffs. It is, however, paved and in good condition and is not a problem for a large RV (except for a few tense moments when passing a log truck.)
Oregon has a very large number of parks and scenic pullouts along the coast. But some of the pullouts and picnic areas do not have adequate turn-around space for large RVs. It's important to look carefully before entering. There is usually (but not always) a small sign at the entrance indicating that turnaround space is limited.
Cape Meares Lighthouse is on a promontory which gives panoramic views of the coastline and of Three Arch Rocks National Wildlife Refuge - large offshore islands whose high cliffs are a major nesting area for common murres and tufted puffins. The lighthouse was staffed by a retired full-time RVer who started life as a coal miner near Scranton Pennsylvania. The lighthouse itself is somewhat unique - made of steel plate. It's quite a low building, since it's on a cliff which provides the proper height above the ocean. It's no longer an active lighthouse, but still contains the gigantic rotating fresnel lens which allowed a kerosene lamp to be clearly visible many miles away.
Just south of Tillamook, we stopped at a Naval Air Museum, housed in a huge old blimp hanger. The hanger was built in the early days of World War 2, almost entirely of wood since steel was in very short supply. It's one of the world's largest free-span spaces built of wood. The collection is focussed on Navy fighter and fighter-bomber planes from WW-1 up almost to the present (the newest plane is an F-14). There is also a scattering of civilian and foreign planes from various eras. Many of the planes have been painstakingly and beautifully restored to better-than-new appearance, and most are in flyable mechanical condition and are flown occasionally.
A highlight for me was a rare P-38, a unique and very successful design of which very few still exist. While we were in Anchorage, Elmendorf Air Force Base had a big celebration when they unveiled a P-38 that had recently been pulled out of the ocean in the Aleutian Islands and restored. Unfortunately, it was displayed somewhere in the middle of the base, and couldn't be viewed by the public except on one day of a base open house, when we weren't there.
We've always enjoyed Tillamook cheese, so we couldn't resist stopping for a factory tour. It's a big operation, currently producing 18 million pounds of cheese per year and using most of the milk from a county full of cows. The main product is cheddar cheese, although they also make some colby and jack cheese. They have a nice video illustrating the entire process of making cheddar cheese, and overhead viewing platforms from which the entire manufacturing operation can be viewed, from cooking and culturing vats to a packaging lines where we watched 40-pound blocks of cheddar being semi-automatically chopped into one and two pound blocks and then wrapped in the familiar Tillamook plastic package. This packaging line was surprisingly labor intensive with people manually feeding the assembly line and frequently adjusting the weight of individual blocks.
After getting evicted from the cheese factory, 20 minutes after their 6 p.m. closing, we had only about half an hour of daylight left to find a campsite. The county campground guide showed quite a few places along the next 10 miles of highway 101, but the long holiday weekend and good weather is a problem. The first several places have "full" signs posted. Two of the RV Parks are "members only". The sun had set by the time we pulled into Barview Jetty County Park, in Bay City. They had plenty of space, perhaps because they are a little over-priced, but we were grateful to have found a spot for the night.
10/7 SR 105 loop: Cannon Beach is a popular tourist destination, and was very crowded on this holiday weekend. We crawled through town in bumper-to-bumper traffic. In the middle of the crowds, we were startled to see Linda and Brian, Helen's niece and her husband, walking down the sidewalk. We had heard earlier that they would be here for the weekend, but didn't know then that we would be here, and hadn't even considered trying to find them. There was no place to get off the road, and they were with a group, so we had a very brief reunion in the middle of the road, and then continued driving.
It would have been nice to park and take a walk over to the beach - but there didn't seem to be a chance of maneuvering our big rig into a parking place in the traffic, even if we had found an empty parking place. So we settled for driving out to Ecola State Park, just north of town. The 3-mile drive out to the park is a narrow, twisty blacktop strip through the rain forest, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass, with occasional very steep slopes and very sharp turns. We made it with the trailer, but I'm glad we didn't meet a tour bus along the way. The views up and down the coastline from the promontories in the park were worth the trip. Crescent Beach, just to the south of the park, is a long strip of smooth sand completely hemmed in by high cliffs, blocked on both ends by rocky ridges extending out into the ocean. A steep narrow path led from the park down to that beach, far below. We didn't go down there. Within the park, we tried to leave on another narrow road which headed north. It turned out to dead-end at Indian Beach, still within the park, with barely room enough for us to turn around in the small parking lot.
After Cannon Beach, the road trended inland and the terrain became more conventional (tree farms and rolling cattle pastures) until we came to Astoria, Oregon's northern-most city, where we crossed into Washington on a very long bridge over the mouth of the Columbia River.
This portion of Washington is quite sparsely populated, with only a few tiny towns and little traffic on the two-lane highways — quite a contrast to the Oregon coast. It's nearly all forest, but forest that has been clear-cut and replanted, with few hints of the original old-growth rain forest.
At Long Beach, we detoured to drive past the extensive cranberry fields. They are all level and diked so that they can be flooded, but were currently dry, apparently with the harvest complete.
The fog closed in, and darkness began to arrive early, so we stopped at Kenanna RV Park, in Grayland, Washington. It's a large full-service RV Park that was nearly empty - again quite a contrast to the Oregon beach, where everything seemed to be full. Their property backs up against a state-owned beach, but it's a long walk. It's a quarter of a mile "to the beach", but then the beach itself extends for another quarter of a mile before we reached the water. One of the widest expanses of sand we've seen - quite flat. For some reason no dunes have formed in this area.
The campground manager said there was a good restaurant just three miles up the road, so after dark we unhooked and drove to the Sea Star restaurant for a late dinner. Helen had oysters, the largest and tenderest we've seen, freshly harvested by Brady's in a local bay.
10/8 A complimentary newspaper was delivered to our door at 8 A.M. This is our 308th RV park stop, and that's the first time it's happened. It began raining during the night, and continued raining off and on (mostly on) for the rest of the day. Reluctant to face the weather, we spent the morning reading the Sunday Seattle newspaper, not getting on the road until past noon.
The ground fog lifted above the treetops, so the visibility for driving was pretty good in spite of the wetness. Much of today's drive was through very rural country. Tourist businesses were few. Small towns are located on harbors, with commercial fishing boats tied up at docks along rivers barely wide enough for the boats to turn around. Huge piles of oyster shells sit in front of commercial oyster businesses. Much of the forest has long been managed as tree farms. Occasional signs along the road indicated the history of the trees - showing when the trees were cut, planted, and thinned. One section was clear-cut in 1916 and again in 1986.
We arrived at a small Visitor Information Office in Olympic National Park in mid-afternoon. After spending a few minutes asking questions and looking over the literature, we drove another few miles up the road to Kalaloch campground. The park literature has a "recommended maximum length" of 21' for every campground in the park. The lady in the office assured us that we could safely ignore this number at Kalaloch and Hoh campgrounds, and perhaps at others as well. Indeed, we had a choice of several campsites where we would (barely) fit. The biggest sites are just wide spots in the campground road, where RVs parallel park at the roadside - the simplest form of "pull-through". It feels a bit uncomfortable to have campground traffic driving by a foot or two from our windows but, fortunately, there was very little traffic.
The National Park contains about 50 miles of Pacific beach along the western edge of the Olympic Peninsula. This is a fairly recent addition to the park, and is just a narrow strip along the coast, separated from the rest of the Park (which spans most of the high mountains in the interior). Highway 101 stays fairly close to the beach, so that the ocean is frequently visible and parking areas with beach access are also frequent.
We slept well, with the soothing roar of the surf as a constant background.
10/9 The rain has stopped, at least temporarily. It's still overcast, but we can't tell if this is a high fog that will burn off during the morning, or higher clouds that will remain all day. It proved to be just a temporary lull. Mist settled in again as we headed up the Hoh River Valley into the Hoh Rain Forest. Much of the land we drive through is not part of the National Park and has been logged at least once. The old-growth forest begins at the park boundary, just a few miles before we come to the Hoh Visitor's Center. The Visitor's Center is small, and the interpretative material is limited, but still very interesting. They have a large collection of mounted plant specimens. The number of different mosses, ferns, and epiphytes is truly amazing.
The highlight of the Olympic Peninsula was our short (about a mile) walk on a trail which begins at the Visitor's Center and loops up through the rain forest. The weather was appropriately rain-foresty, with moisture dripping slowly down through the foliage, and puddles in every little depression on the forest floor. The trees are huge. The forest is a mixture of Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar, and Sitka Spruce, and all three species average over 200 feet tall in this area, with individual specimens topping 300 feet.
Everything is festooned with multiple layers of greenery. Tree trunks and branches have a thick layer of moss, out of which grow ferns. Horizontal branches all have dangling beards - several different species of epiphyte looking sort of like what people in the Southeast would call Spanish Moss, except that up here, the colors are assorted shades of green. The heaviest collections of these air plants are on the occasional big-leaf maple or vine maple trees. The maples grow as an understory tree, with the vine maples having fantastically contorted shapes, so thickly covered with air plants that the shape of the tree itself is sometimes hidden. Interestingly, we see no vines.
The drive back out to US 101 and then around the northwest side of the peninsula was anticlimactic. The forests are managed tree farms, and the highway is far inland with no ocean views. In Port Angeles, we detoured to visit another National Park Visitor's Center, but got there too late. Many of the park facilities are closing at 4 p.m. in the slow season. We had been thinking about doing the Hurricane Ridge drive up into the high mountains of the park, but the mountains were hidden in clouds and dense fog. So we continued on to Chimicum. As advertised, the weather dried out as we passed through Sequim (pronounced "squim"), and by the time we were settled into a campsite at the Escapees park near Chimicum, the sky was mostly blue.
This area - reputedly centered around Sequim, is in the "rain shadow" of the Olympic mountains, and only gets 16 inches of rain per year, compared to 100 inches or more in the mountains and over 50 inches in Seattle. Although it's not far from Seattle on a direct line, it is separated by several arms of Puget Sound, requiring a circuitous drive to a ferry, or alternatively, a rather long drive south through Tacoma. As a result, commuting from here to work in the big city is impractical and the area feels quite rural, with plenty of undeveloped land. Some of the hillsides offer spectacular views of water and snowcapped mountains. We've added this small area to our list of possible places to settle permanently.
10/10 At midnight last night, just as we were getting ready for bed, the big master fuse for our batteries failed, immediately plunging us into darkness. The charging system for the batteries immediately went crazy, since it can't work properly without a battery load, so I also had to shut off our 120 VAC power. After getting out the flashlights and looking at the situation, we decided to spend the night without power and worry about it in the morning, in better light. Even our propane refrigerator was dead - it requires 12v. power to operate the controls. But we won't be opening the door during the night, so it will stay cool enough for safety. Fortunately, our little catalytic propane space heater uses no electricity at all, so we had a warm, if dark, night.
In the morning, I discovered that the fuse had broken mechanically, due to vibration and to weakening of the plastic fuse holder by battery fumes (it's mounted on top of the battery, under the same cover.) This 200-amp fuse is specialty item that is not readily available. I had purchased it at West Marine four years ago during a major upgrade of our electrical system. While browsing the local yellow pages, I was pleased to find that there is a West Marine store in Port Townsend, just eight miles away. What a pleasant coincidence! I jumpered around the fuse to get things working temporarily.
After lunch, we took a drive out to Port Townsend, on the tip of this little peninsula, for sightseeing, groceries, and a new fuse. The entire downtown area close to the waterfront dates from the 1890's - attractive masonry buildings, with typical Victorian design details. Much of this historic area has been restored. The waterfront is busy with a ferry terminal and large marinas with a mixture of yachts and fishing boats. On a point just beyond Port Townsend is Fort Worden, now a State Park. We drove through, enjoying the nicely restored old buildings and the waterfront.
10/11 After hooking up the trailer, we drove local roads to Bloedel Reserve, a large garden along the east coast of Bainbridge Island. It's operated by a private foundation and admits visitors only by reservation. Two miles of winding paths lead through a wide diversity of plantings - all designed to look natural. The intent is to provide a peaceful place for contemplation and enjoyment of nature, not as a showpiece. The Bloedel family built the garden, a piece at a time, for their own enjoyment. There are no annual flowers and few perennials. Unusual trees from around the world have been planted (some are now quite large), but are not identified, except in booklets available from the gatehouse. One area is a "moss garden" - perhaps an acre of ground covered with a dense carpet of mostly native mosses. It's shaded by mature trees, with an understory of native shrubs such as huckleberry (a red-berried shrub typically 4 feet high, related to eastern blueberries). Several attractive ponds, and a small waterfall, add to the diversity. The stucco mansion is attractive, although of modest size (as mansions go) and restrained design. The first floor is open to visitors. The Japanese-style guest house had a clipped grass/raked gravel front yard, and the deck out back looked over the small Japanese garden. I would rather stay here than in the mansion!
We returned to US 101 and headed south, enjoying views of the Hood Canal. As we passed through Olympia, we used the last hour of daylight to visit a small Japanese Garden adjacent to City Hall in downtown Olympia. Its only an acre or so, but is a very attractive and pleasing design, one of the nicest of the small members of this genre we've seen. As darkness descended, we drove a few miles south of town to Millersylvania State Park. The park has large pull-through sites with water and electricity, under big pine trees. Finding our way into a campsite in the forest in the darkness is never fun — generally involving wandering around with a flashlight to find an appropriate site. Driving the rig through narrow twisty park roads, hemmed in on both sides by big trees, is difficult, since looking in the rear-view mirror to see if the trailer will clear a tree as we turn a corner shows only blackness.
10/12 With trailer in tow, we drove to Mima Mounds, a State Preserve only 10 miles from our campsite. It is an area of very unusual, and still controversial, terrain — an odd scene when viewed from the 10' high platform. Hundreds of acres of basically flat land are covered by smooth rounded mounds, up to seven feet high. The mounds are tightly packed together, and arranged in an almost, but not quite, regular grid. Many theories have been proposed for the formation of these mounds. The theories that have some scientific basis include: gopher mounds, built by a long-gone dense population of gophers; who found it easier to mound up the soil than to dig in ice age permafrost; irregular cracking of a silt- and gravel- loaded glacier, followed by melting and erosion; "mud-cracking" of a layer of permafrost, followed by melting and erosion. Each of these theories has some supporting evidence, but also has unresolved issues. An interesting mystery.
Continuing south on Interstate 5, we stopped at Longview, Washington where we had called to make a reservation for a tour of the Port of Longview, on the Columbia River. As seaports go, this one is fairly small, with perhaps half a dozen berths for large ships. They have an inactive facility for storing and loading grain, a very active facility for unloading bulk cargo (mostly fertilizers), and a storage yard and loading facility for logs - generally bound for Japan. Two ships were berthed - one unloading urea (a nitrogen fertilizer) and one loading logs, which were already piled high on the decks.
From Longview, we continued along the river for almost an hour, then crossed into Oregon at Portland. We chose Roamer's Rest RV Park in Tualatin, about 10 miles south of central Portland. This is a much quieter setting than the last place we stayed in Portland, being well away from the airport and several miles from the Interstates. The Pacific Highway, 4 lanes at this point, contributed some noise - but not enough to bother us. The campground is terraced into a wooded hillside on the bank of the Tualatin River. It's a pleasant setting, and the park is neatly maintained, with paved RV pads and roads and lots of lush grass. It feels a bit claustrophobic, however, due to very narrow roads and pull-through sites which aren't quite long enough. Instant-hookup telephone lines at every site are a major plus.
10/13 The Tudor Choir, a 14-voice a cappella choir from Seattle, performed at St. Mary's Cathedral, in downtown Portland. We heard this group two years ago, bought their CD, and were pleased to be able to hear them again. They lived up to our expectations, giving a polished virtuosic performance program consisting entirely of sacred music from the Renaissance period. Although the Cathedral is a large space, the small group of large well-blended voices filled it with sound. From our down-front seating, the acoustics were crisp, but with a long reverberation time just right for this music.
10/14 The Choral Arts Ensemble of Portland (Roger Doyle, Music Director) presented an all-Bach program at The First Christian Church in Central Portland. The program included the cantata Wachet Auf (BWV 140) and the motet Singet dem Herrn (BWV 225), as well as three shorter and less familiar works. The 39-voice choir gave a competent and enjoyable performance. The nine-member orchestra (using modern instruments) was outstanding, with the oboe solo in the cantata being particularly impressive. The choir often sounded weak, sometimes drowned out by the small orchestra. We don't know whether to blame the voices, the director, or the acoustics. The soloists in the cantata, drawn from the choir, were good, with soprano Jennifer McDonald particularly enjoyable.
10/15 Japanese Gardens and Classical Chinese Gardens share many design principals, but the gardens resulting from these principles are quite different in design and feel. We visited the fairly new Portland Classical Chinese Garden. Helen toured this beautiful garden after braving a long waiting line to get in. This walled garden, a city block square in old Chinatown, was very much like the Sun Yat Sen garden in Vancouver. The crowd on this sunny day overwhelmed the serenity one usually feels in such gardens, but the beauty was still apparent. City skyscrapers are visible from inside the walls, but they seem otherworldly, alien, set apart, and do not intrude until one tries to take a photograph. The carefully selected rocks and their dramatic placements, the reflecting ponds, the wooden screens, the strategically placed windows and picturesque teahouses, were especially effective. If I had unlimited funds and a need to withdraw from the world, I would build a Classical Chinese Garden for my retreat.
Dave walked the streets of the surrounding area, discovering a large and interesting flea market located underneath the Burnside Bridge. The streets have a surprisingly high population of homeless people, sitting in their derelict vans parked along the curbs, or walking down the street with all their belongings in a plastic bag or in a collection of shabby packs.
This afternoon's concert was in Kaul Auditorium, an attractive new performance hall on the campus of Reed College in Southeastern Portland. The acoustics were fine, at least from where we sat, but the seats are narrow, thinly padded, and uncomfortable. The concert was a sellout, with standing-room-only people scrambling for a few no-show vacant seats as the program began.
Chanticleer, America's only full-time professional chamber choir, is a 12-voice all-male a cappella ensemble. They sing everything from medieval chant to contemporary jazz, and often commission new works by young and innovative composers in a variety of styles. This concert is the 4th time we've heard them since beginning our full-time travels. Although there are several new faces in the group since the last time we heard them, the group sounds, if anything, better than ever. The entire program was wonderful. For me, there were three high points:
A particularly moving performance of "When David heard that Absalom was slain" by Thomas Tomkins. I've heard this piece many times, and performed it myself more than once, but never heard it done so effectively.
A relatively new piece called "Voices of Autumn", composed by Jackson Hill, after a period of studying Buddhist liturgical music in Japan, and using many old Japanese stylistic techniques - a pentatonic scale, glissandos, and ornamentation derived from chant and ancient Japanese court music.
An encore, the spiritual "Sit Down", with composer/arranger Joseph Jennings called up from the audience to do the spectacular solo. It was wonderful to hear Joe's voice again. He injects a magic element into these spirituals which makes the entire group sound different. Joe sang with the group until a few years ago, and has been its Music Director since 1984. His sensitive spiritual arrangements were a major part of Chanticleer's success in the early years.
After the concert, we had dinner at the Blue Nile Restaurant in traditional Ethiopian style.
10/16 A lazy day, with some time spent planning our travels for the next week or three. We'll be leaving Portland tomorrow, headed generally toward Lassen Volcanic National Park.