Obscured by Fog

Charleston, Oregon

The fog hung around all day today. Here on the coast the high was 55 degrees F. I went for a walk on the beach at 6 AM and found it difficult to find the path back to the RV park. The visibility has been about 50 feet all day. This is a picture of the halibut I cooked for Mrs. Phred yesterday.

We went to the Cape Arago State Park in the morning. At an overlook, we could hear herds of seals and Steller's sea lions arfing up a storm, but the fog obscured the rock that they like to rest on.

The cove at Cape Arago was free of fog. There were tide pools but the animals were not as colorful as the ones we saw yesterday. The sea anemones mostly looked like little mud donuts.

We did see one starfish. We also found a chocolate muffin and some birthday candles for our Skype session with grandchild # 4. Today is his birthday. He is six. We talked him and his little brother into blowing out the candles and they both blew so hard that little globules of spit appeared on the camera lens.

The Gold and Silver Falls State Park was a 40 mile drive into the interior. The temperature went up 20 degrees as we left the coast and hit the one-lane winding roads into the park.

Both falls were about a 1/2 mile hike.

Yesterday I got a haircut by a Vietnamese woman about my age. She told me about her recent five-country, five-week vacation to Asia. She booked the whole thing herself and took her husband. It was strange how many of the same places we had been...Da Nang...Saigon...Qui Nhon...she was a good barber. She didn't like L.A. so she moved to Oregon and met her American husband.

The Gold and Silver Falls State Park would have been hard to find without a GPS...the two falls each require a 1/2 mile hike. Mrs. Phred was ready to strip down to her panties and frolic in the waterfall...

I think our next stop, going North, is Winchester Bay.

What We Lost

Astoria, Oregon

Astoria is the oldest European settlement west of the Mississippi River.

First we visited the Astoria Tower. It was built on a hilltop overlooking the little port of Astoria. The story that celebrates the Lewis and Clark expedition that arrived at the mouth of the wild Columbia River in 1805 is wrapped on the tower in word and mural. You would have to walk rapidly around the tower about 15 times to get the whole story. Our legs feel very rubbery after walking up the 160 stairs to the top of the tower.

We spent time in the Astoria Maritime Museum. The Columbia River is an unforgiving place to sail into. "Crossing the Bar" where the massive output of the Columbia meets the wild Pacific has done in thousands of ships and small boats. We watch a movie about the specialized river pilots and "bar" pilots that help the ships navigate in and out of the Columbia.

The early settlers here pretty much wiped out the fur-bearing creatures in a few years and turned to salmon fishing. The apparently inexhaustible supply of salmon led to the establishment of dozens of canneries. There are pictures in the museum of horses drawing in nets with 60,000 pounds of Chinook salmon in each net. Fat, healthy fish, averaging 50 pounds each.

The wild Columbia has been tamed into a series of placid lakes by 13 great hydro-electric dams. A few confused salmon and sturgeon make their way up specially constructed salmon runs around the dams. Sea Lions have discovered these runs and gorge themselves on the spawning salmon, often staring directly into video cameras.

We are near a factory that hunted whales for mink feed and fertilizer until the 1972 ban on whale killing was established. They used to make ladies corsets out of the baleen that whales use to filter plankton and pretty much hunted that species to extinction.

Back down in Trinidad, California the second growth redwoods are only about 100 years old and five feet in diameter. Everywhere you look you see 18 foot diameter stumps that were logged out as if we had a license to cut down or kill anything with commercial value.