Hello Everyone!
It’s been a beautiful week of spring weather here in north-central Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The days have been warm and sunny and the evenings cool and pleasant. It’s the kind of weather where I don’t really want to do anything but sit outside and read my book and enjoy the day. Thankfully the days are long so there seems to be time for that and to keep exploring. Oregon is such a pleasant and relaxed state, making it a wonderful place to enjoy such fine spring weather. Cherries and strawberries are coming back into season which makes me happy and flowers are blooming like crazy everywhere I look. I’ve spent the week chasing waterfalls, exploring small towns, finally making it to the end of the Oregon Trail and exploring the state’s capital city of Salem. My camera has been busy and I’ve really been enjoying my week so let me get right into it.
After finishing up this post last week I went out to have a look around downtown Lebanon. It’s a quaint and quiet little town but it didn’t have much to offer. I stopped into a little bar called Sam’s Place for a beer and then called it an early night.
On Thursday I took off first thing and headed out to see the Hoffman covered bridge out near Scio. This was a great, fully functional bridge with a 10 ton weight limit still in daily use. It was quiet enough out there when I visited to take a few photos on the bridge, which was pretty cool. From there I made my way into Albany for the day. Albany is a cute little city of about 56,000 people situated on the Willamette River and founded back in 1848. The area was settled by brothers Walter and Thomas Monteith who named their new town after their hometown in New York.
When I got to Albany I set out to fix my refrigerator which hasn’t been working properly in months. My general strategy for many years has always been to turn it on with propane overnight and freeze some blue ice packs in the freezer. Then I turn it off in the morning and the ice packs keep it cool all day. The propane hasn’t been running it lately, so I’ve just been buying ice and using that instead. With temperatures rising a bag of ice is only lasting a day or two and the cost adds up after a while. I thought it was something minor, but RV repair is never cheap and even if it only took someone an hour to fix it would still easily run me $150-200. I had myself convinced that I didn’t know anything about refrigerators, but in fact I do know a lot about working with propane as I often fix my camping stoves when I’m guiding tours. Pulling the jet was considerably more difficult than it should have been as it was in a really tight position (and I needed a metric wrench since it’s a Swedish fridge) but I eventually got it out. I cleaned everything and got it back together the next day and it has been working better than ever. That made me feel pretty good about myself.
While the jets were soaking in alcohol to clean them up, I went out and had a nice long wander around downtown Albany. The pride and joy of the town is a beautifully built/restored carousel. They were lucky enough to have the mechanism for the carousel, a 1909 Dentzel, donated by the great-grandson of Gustav Dentzel himself. The mechanism was painstakingly restored and the animals were all hand-carved by local volunteers. It’s a beautiful sight to see. In the evening I went to catch a fun performance of The Pirates of Penzance at the Albany Civic Theatre. This is a Gilbert and Sullivan show which premiered in New York way back in 1879. You can tell it’s an old show, but it’s still fun and I really enjoyed the production. It was a nice way to spend my evening in Albany.
On Friday I headed down to the nearby town of Corvallis, home to Oregon State University. Corvallis is a great little college town which reminded me more of my own college experience at Penn State than Eugene did. Downtown Corvalis is pleasant and walkable and the university itself is quite beautiful, having been designed by John Olmsted, son of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. I spent much of the afternoon in the Corvallis Museum which is a new museum for old things. While there are some great old artifacts to see with some excellent interpretive signs, the museum is modern and sterile. It was still a good museum, though, and I enjoyed learning some more about the history of the area. The museum had an amazing temporary exhibit which really caught my attention. Called Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America, the exhibit features incredible photos from Matika Wilbur, a photographer who spent over a decade interviewing and photographing American Indians from all of the 562 federally recognized tribes. She let her subjects come as they wanted to be photographed, so some are in traditional regalia, some are in jeans and cowboy hats and many are somewhere in between. Her photos are magnificent and I loved that she was showing us such a broad cross-section of people, all living with one foot in each of two very different worlds. If you get the chance to check out some of her work, I would definitely recommend that you do. Leaving the museum, I stopped for a beer at the Corvallis Pub, an English-style pub by my old pals the McMenamin brothers. I’m such a huge fan of how they restore old buildings and hotels that I can’t not check out their places when I see one (Corvallis Pub used to be a fish and chips restaurant and it’s a beautiful old Tudor-style building). In the evening I went to an interesting spot called the Old World Deli, which was not only that but also a brewery and music venue. The band playing was called Flying Eye and they were very much inspired by The Grateful Dead. There were a lot of old hippies there for the show and it was a lot of fun.
Saturday morning I got up and went for breakfast at the Wise Cracks Café. There was a counter to sit at, but no old men were sitting at it and dishing the local gossip which was disappointing. Breakfast was pretty good though, and the young man serving me was a student who reminded me of the many Saturday morning shifts I had to work when I was in school (so I tipped him extra). After breakfast I went for a stroll down to the local farmers’ market which was particularly good. Set up down by the river, it was quite a big market with lots of vendors. I found it had a lot on offer and was very pleasant to just meander around. Leaving the market, I popped into the library for an hour or two to get some work done and then took a long walk around Oregon State’s campus. Outside the student union the school was hosting a Pacific Islander Festival featuring music, culture and food from the islands. The guy performing when I was there was wonderful and it had me swaying in the sunshine like I was on the Kaanpali Coast on Maui. I sat and enjoyed the music for a while and then continued to wander the campus, enjoying the old brick buildings and the flowers.
I left Corvallis in the afternoon and started heading towards Salem. I stopped for a nice glass of pinot noir at the West Hills Vineyard and some wonderful strawberry shortcake at Aspinwall’s Fruit Stand just across the highway and then made my way into town. My first stop was the Oregon State Capitol, their third capitol building after the first two burned to the ground. Built in the 1930s in an art deco style, it’s an interesting looking capitol. It won’t go down as one of my favorite capitol buildings, but it had character and certainly isn’t the worst looking capitol in the country either. From there I took a nice long stroll downtown and ended up at an upstairs ballroom at the historic Grand Theatre for an album release party for a singer-songwriter named Lane Norberg. I had never heard of him, but it sounded like a fun event so I went. I’m glad I was there because there were only like 14 other people in the room including the woman who opened for him and her father. Regardless, the music was good and it’s always nice to support local musicians. After the show I went and had a couple of beers around town and then called it an early night.
On Sunday I set off towards Silver Falls State Park to hike the Loop of Ten Falls Trail. It was Mother’s Day so I of course I called my mom before I took off and wished her a happy day. I’m sorry I couldn’t be home with her this year to celebrate, but I’m a long way from home at the moment. In my mind, I couldn’t imagine people would take their moms or wives to go hiking in a state park on their special day, but apparently that’s what people do in Oregon because the place was quite busy. It was a beautiful day though so I set off into the rainforest to seek out all of the waterfalls I could reach in a day. I think the full loop was a little over eight miles, but was mostly flat with only a few hills to climb. I loved it out there, even with the crowds. The trail even went behind several of the waterfalls and some of them were absolutely massive.
After my hike I headed on up the road to the little German inspired town of Mount Angel and went straight to the Benedictine brewery run by the monks at the little monastery on the hill. It closed at six so I wanted to be sure I got there in time to properly support the monks and all of their monastic work. Their beers were delicious and I enjoyed kicking back on the patio with my book and soaking up some rays in the late afternoon. When they closed up for the night I went back into town so I could wander the streets and take some photos. It was quiet down there and when the town glockenspiel went off at 7pm, I was the only one there to watch it (it was better than most in the U.S.). Satisfied with the photos I had, I cruised back down the road to the small town of Silverton for the night. It was getting dark by the time I arrived so I took a nice little stroll around town and then tucked into a little bar called Mac’s Place for some dinner. Mac’s Place has been a bar for over a hundred years, but the building it’s in dates back to around 1885. It survived both of Silverton’s devastating fires, so it was clearly the place to be. The bartender was great and we chatted for a while and I got a German sausage for dinner which just seemed appropriate after my time in Mount Angel.
I stuck around Silverton for a while in the morning and I was glad I did because there’s more to it than there seems at first glance. Seemingly at the top of the list, there were several tributes around town to Bobbie the Wonder Dog. Bobbie was a collie/shepherd mix which a local family owned. They loved Bobbie and took him along when they went on vacation to Indiana. Bobbie ran off and disappeared somewhere in the Hoosier State and they thought he was gone for good. Boy were they surprised when Bobbie showed up back in Silverton six months later, having somehow made the 2500 mile journey home. Oh, what an adventure he must have had. A hundred years later, Silverton still remembers this precious pooch. Silverton is also the hometown of Don Pettit, one of the longest serving astronauts in American history. He spent 590 days in space and, at 71, was the third oldest astronaut to reach orbit. There were some beautiful murals and ghost signs around town and a wonderful pedestrian covered bridge over the river with cutouts halfway across for some benches to sit and enjoy the view. It was a nice little town and I’m glad I decided to have a good look around before taking off.
From Silverton, it was back to Salem for the afternoon. I had some errands to run when I got back to town and stopped in the gym for a quick workout. Then I went out to The Farm, the home office for the local minor league baseball team, the Marion Berries. Marion berries are a local Oregon berry developed right there in Marion County and they are hyper local and well-loved across the Beaver State. But Marion Barry was also the name of our long-time mayor in Washington D.C. who was once arrested for smoking crack with a prostitute. That makes Salem’s Marion Berries my favorite named team in the country and I had to stop and buy a T-shirt while I was there. The whole staff loved my story and how excited I was to be there and it was a fun stop to make. Go Berries! From there I went for a quick visit to the old Oregon Mental Asylum, a gorgeous old Victorian institution and the filming location for the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The museum was closed, but I enjoyed taking a few photos of the main building. From there I went back to the State Capitol to take a tour and see the interior. The inside of the capitol wasn’t much better than the outside, but it was nice enough. There were some pretty murals in the rotunda and I particularly appreciated the carpet in the legislative chambers – Douglas firs in the House and fish and wheat in the Senate. Leaving the capitol, I went up the road to the Salem Theatre to catch the movie Omaha. It was exceptionally slow and certainly not particularly inspiring. I won’t spoil it for you, but I could in about two sentences. If I were you, I’d skip it. I was glad it only ran for about 90 minutes which still felt like an eternity. It really could have been a ten minute short-film that told the same story. It was nice to be at the cinema though as it’s been a while since I saw a movie.
Yesterday I ran some errands in the morning and then set off north again. My first stop was in the small town of Aurora which was the site of an old German communal colony in the Oregon Trail days. It sounded like it was a decent place, but it fell apart when the next generation didn’t want to live a communal life. They married outside of the community and divided up the communal property and carried on. The museum in Aurora really did a great job of telling the story and Betty, the lady working there, was just lovely to chat with. From there I moved on up the road to Canby which has the oldest standing train station in the state (now a museum which was closed when I visited). And then I continued on to Oregon City, the end of the fabled Oregon Trail. I spent most of the afternoon in the museum, which was overpriced but interesting. There was a lot to read and I like to read but it was a bit dense. There was an actual wagon which had made the crossing on display which was pretty cool. I enjoyed the film and definitely learned more about that last leg of the trail. Most people arrived in the valley in late fall or early winter, so too late to start planting or building homes. Many took their wagons off of the wheels and lived in those for the winter. Some found lodging with local families. Most depended on the community in Oregon City to support them through that first winter and then hopefully took it from there. Of note was a man named John McLoughlin who was in charge of the area for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The HBC did not encourage helping Americans in any way as the whole region was a disputed territory between the U.S. and England. McLoughlin knew that if he didn’t help these new settlers with credit to buy and plant crops, they would likely all starve the following year. His kindness to the new settlers has been remembered by naming him The Father of Oregon. His house is preserved by the National Park Service (though sadly only open on the weekends). I was at the museum right up until closing time and then hit the library for a while to edit some photos and work on this post. In the evening I took a stroll down the hill to wander around town for a while. Oregon City is nice enough, but it has certainly seen some better days. I popped in somewhere for a quick beer and then called it a night.
This morning I went down to ride Oregon City’s municipal elevator, one of only four in the world, which connects the upper and lower towns (it had been closed by the time I got there last night). At the end of the day, it’s just an elevator, but it was probably quite something when it was built back in 1915. I had another wander through downtown, took a few photos and then hit the road back south. I stopped at the overlook for the famous Willamette Falls, the second biggest waterfall in the country by volume, surpassed only by Niagara Falls in New York. For many centuries this was an important gathering place for the local Indian tribes who fished there for the salmon which were the mainstay of their diet. Early pioneers used the waterfall’s power and volume to build a grist mill and a lumber mill. Willamette Falls is the reason why Oregon City is where it is and it only became more industrial as the town grew. Today you can hardly see the falls at all through all the industrial buildings surrounding it. That’s all supposed to change over the next few years, though, as the town plans to redevelop the area and open it up for tourism and visitation. I hope they do because it was probably a beautiful place at one time. Leaving the falls, I headed south again and am finishing this post up at the little library in the town of Woodburn.
I’m headed back to Salem tonight to catch up with a friend. There are still a few things I want to see around the capital as well before I take off. From there I will have a few days in Greater Portland, seeing some things I’ve missed in the past and hopefully catching up with all of my friends around town. I should be on my way east and back towards Idaho by this time next week, but you’ll just have to check back and see how far I got. Enjoy the wonderful weather this week, wherever you are, and thank you, as always for reading.
-Mike