In Portland we first went downtown and toured Pioneer Courthouse Square,
checking out the famous signpost that points in all directions.
So with all these weather problems and road problems, we made a decision to skip Mt. Rainier, and continue west to I-5, and then south. We could come back to Mt. Rainier on the back side of our loop. Maybe we would get better weather and the roads would be fixed. As we drove down I-5 towards Portland, we also decided to cancel our next planned destination, Mt. St. Helens. Because we started very early, we arrived in Portland around lunchtime.
In Portland we first went downtown and toured Pioneer Courthouse Square,
checking out the famous signpost that points in all directions.
Portland is famed for its roses, and June is the time of the Portland Rose Festival.
We love roses, so we headed for the International Rose Test Garden
in Washington Park. Here there are over 400 different kinds of roses cultivated since 1917.
The first picture shows only a portion of the garden. It was all that I could fit in the frame.
If you look on the right side
of the picture, on the path, there is a vertical yellow mark which is actually a person looking at roses.
From this same negative, I enlarged this section to produce the image labeled "Roses and their Admirers."
This picture also gives a better idea of how many roses were there.
Nearby are the Japanese Gardens maintained by the Japanese Garden Society of Portland. These are well worth a visit. They are so picturesque that I took a series of pictures there. The entrance to one of the gardens is through a wisteria arch shown in the first picture. I enlarged the center so you can see that this arch frames a view of a 5 level pagoda within the garden.
I'm not sure why I inserted myself into this picture of a raked stone garden.
This type of garden is one of the most interesting, I think.
It uses stones to symbolize the ocean (go figure). That's a really impressive
Japanese Maple in the background, too, by the way.
Then we headed east out of Portland, along the Columbia River,
and entered into the Columbia Gorge Recreation Area.
The weather was still drizzling from time to time, but it didn't stop
us from enjoying some of the waterfalls along here. The one we liked best was Multnomah Falls,
because it is very tall, and has a really picturesque arch bridge above the lower falls,
framing the upper falls (if you stand in the right spot, which I did).
The black mark in the center of the arch bridge is a person who is admiring the
falls up close.
We continued up the gorge, enjoying the scenery, until we reached a spot where I could take a good panoramic view of the gorge look back down the river towards Portland, as well as up the river towards the town of The Dalles. these two pictures were taken at the same time. Note the difference in the weather. Looking back towards Portland, you can see how rainy it gets. Looking up the river towards The Dalles, the rain is gone. This is why the eastern side of the mountains is called the "Dry Side." the Dalles gets much less rain than Portland, despite being only an hour's drive east on I-84. We finally got past the rain, and we spent the night in The Dalles.
The road goes behind Mt. Hood, and there we encountered snow. We did not have tire chains, but fortunately it did not accumulate on the road. The trees were all a grizzled white appearance, leaving us with the impression that it snows here every day, regardless of the season. After we passed Mt. Hood, we drove through the Warm Springs Indian Reservation and then south towards Bend, Oregon.
Once past Mt, Hood, we drove south towards the city of Bend.
I took a picture of the Three Sister Peaks in the distance.
While driving through this relatively flat and dry
landscape, on our way towards Bend, we suddenly crossed a bridge over a deep gorge.
This was so unexpected, that we stopped for a closer look.
This beautiful gorge seemed quite out of place. The river that carved
it is the "Crooked River". The green
arch bridge in the picture is the one we had just crossed (from left to right).
Behind it is a second newer bridge that is not finished yet.
Out of the camera's view, is a third arch bridge
which carries railroad tracks.
We proceeded to Bend, where we turned off the main highway to follow the
"Cascade Lakes Highway." This road is closed in winter,
but had recently opened. It goes up between Mt. Bachelor and the Three Sisters, and then goes south
through Deschutes NF. As we approached Mt. Bachelor, a popular ski resort area and a
beautiful mountain in its own right, We took this picture.
Once we drove past Mt. Bachelor, the snow increased dramatically. At one point it
was 10 feet high right at the side of the road. We stopped where a road
crossed the highway. The road was not plowed, so there was nothing more than a place to
park. We parked and Steffi took a picture of it, using Steve as a size reference.
Eventually we returned to the main highway and continued south to Diamond Lake Junction.
The road goes east and back up into the mountains. This is the way to the north entrance of
Crater Lake. However, even though it is June 8, this entrance is closed because there
is too much snow in the Crater Lake National Park.
We continued south so that we could enter Crater Lake NP via the south entrance,
which is open all year. As we went up, the snow just got higher and higher. When we finally entered
the park and found the Visitor Center, the snow was up to the second storey. Fortunately,
there was a tunnel to allow visitors into the Visitor Center.
The ranger told us that the north entrance would not likely open for another month,
because of the extremely large amount of snow they had received this year. The rim drive,
in fact, was only open for a few miles to the Wizard Island overlook. The remainder of
the 32 mile drive was closed by the snow. We took a picture of the incomparable lake
from near the VC parking lot. You can see Wizard Island.
We followed the road counterclockwise around the lake as far as it would go,
to Wizard island Overlook. There we met a family having a picnic.
Their food attracted a Clark's Nutcracker. I took a picture of the bird and then
took another picture of the lake, this time with Wizard Island dominating the scene.
Since that was as far as we could go, we resolved to return in late summer some other year, and exited the park, heading southwest, towards the coast, and the California state line.
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