I thought time raced by when I was busy at work all the previous years, but I have been surprised to see how one day flows into another when we are on the road. Time seems to have accelerated, but I won't claim that it is because I am getting older although my lower back tells me otherwise because of all the sitting I do in the truck. Here it is a week and a half later since my last blog, I can hardly believe it. We have traveled up the coast of Oregon and Washington over this past month and I am woefully behind in capturing by word my experiences and feelings as we experience anew such beauty of forest and coastline, and quaint towns and villages. My sense is that Oregon's coast is prettier than Washington's, with the mountains and hills coming closer to the water's edge, sometimes towering over the ocean, much like Northern California's terrain. The roads are better for driving a big rig than N. CA, but some of that has to do with the terrain also. This is not to say that coastal Washington is not beautiful, but I have been taken aback by all the logging activity on the private land surrounding the Olympic National Park. Large tracks of forests have been clear cut and replanted. They call it sustained forestry, but I think I would very much more enjoy seeing the virgin forest with its diversity of trees and other fauna. The large stately trees are only stumps and the re-vegetated forests have trees of all the same size. Some tracks have branches piled up over 30 feet high, waiting for who knows what, maybe a forest fire. Many spots have been clear cut right to the roads edge, looking more like what a war zone would look like, utter destruction, a grey pale over the track of land. I have the distinct impression that Oregon's government regulates the beauty of their coastal areas more tightly than Washington.
Surprises. Having lived in Colorado with its Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in the southern part of the state, I thought I would not be taken aback by other sand dunes, and so it was a surprise to drive alongside and stop and experience the sand dunes that make up Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area located mid-coast, north of Coos Bay and just south of Florence. I remember one particular scene as we drove north down the highway something that astonished all three of us. We were enjoying the ride mid-morning amidst the sun-lit forests with the intermittent streams, rivers and clearings just a short distance from the ocean, a landscape with hills on both sides of our beloved Hwy 1. As the truck and trailer ventured down the road we looked up and out on the hillside ahead of us thinking we would only see the all-too-familiar green landscape of the hills before us. What caught our eyes instead at the top of the hill, yes top, a off-white sand dune basking in the sun! I thought sand dunes were at bottoms of hills, but in this case (and others we discovered ahead of us in our travels) they were at the top. This particular hill that I am describing is several hundred feet high thickly forested 3/4 (or more) of the way up. My first thought past the disbelief of what I was seeing was that I wanted to stop and climb it. Soon we realized as we drove through this area is that virtually every forested hill was a sand dune, most now hidden from view with vegetation. What we also discovered about this area, particularly around the town of Florence 30 miles to the north was sand dunes can exist in most unexpected places, interspersed with ponds or small lakes. Imagine a shopping center like Walmart, but by a different name, and right next door, just a few hundred feet from the main drag through town, there is a large sand dune of perhaps one mile square and forty feet high. A quarter mile hike outside of our campsite three miles north of town amidst forest and streams, you hike right into a sand dune area, miles from the ocean. These areas and others speak of a more turbulent time in geological past, or at the very least the action of the ocean that in some areas there is a gaining of land, and not a loss over the millennia. In this area, it must be the latter.
Just a couple more things I wanted to share concerning this part of our travels leading up to the Puget Sound. I generally like the towns we drove through along Oregon's coast, some showing a careful concern to cleanliness and zoning, pleasing to the eye and not overdone. They are real communities of families and individuals raising their children and enjoying what life brings, fed by tourism and fishing mostly; Brookings, Gold Beach, Port Orford, Charleston, Coos Bay and North Bend. I also liked Florence, Newport and Lincoln City. Seaside, where we stopped for church last week, the town was too small for my liking, but the people we met loved the area despite that the whole town and surrounding ground was at sea level. All I can say is that they were passionate about their love for the area and its people, a tribute to any town despite the lack of what might be considered basic services.
-Kevin
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