I took the Mazda into the forest last week, following a couple of logging roads from Cascadia, on the Santiam River, up over the hills and down to the Calapooia River. To get there I took Highways 34 and 20 east from Corvallis to a spot about 14 miles east of Sweet Home. There I turned right onto Canyon Creek Road (aka Forest Road 2022) and headed on up into timber country. If you look at a map of this area, the Santiam and the Calapooia don’t seem to be that far apart; and in fact the Calapooia is just 9 miles directly south of Highway 20 if you could travel in a straight line. But there’s a 3,700 ft ridge between the two places, so not even a crow could do a straight line. Instead you have to go up, down, around and sideways and it takes a while. To start with, Road 2022 follows Canyon Creek as it heads upward and to the southeast, a little deeper into the Cascades. Here’s a satellite view of the first part of the route.
The land to the west of Canyon Creek is mostly privately owned timber land; the area to the east is part of the Willamette National Forest. You can see that there has been a lot more harvesting recently on the private lands. This is not the case everywhere, but it’s clearly happening here.
Road 2022 is gravel, but it is a wide road and the part that I was on was well designed and maintained. It’s a sort of forest freeway, generally wide enough for log trucks coming from opposite directions to get past each other safely, provided the drivers are careful. I met a loaded log truck coming down as I was going up; there was certainly adequate room for us both. So it’s a nice road. Still, it is gravel, it is curvy, and it has log trucks…along with the occasional very narrow bridge–so it’s one of those roads where you don’t go fast at all unless you’re young. I took my time and enjoyed the scenery, which was lovely. Eventually I got to my next waypoint, which was the junction of Road 2022 with Road 2026. Where those two roads meets is also the place where Owl Creek flows into Canyon Creek. From the satellite, the junction looks like this:
Although you can’t see it in the above, the meeting of 2022 and 2026 is a T-junction. Coming up from the Santiam side, I could have turned left at the T and continued on 2022. That would have taken me a few miles higher into the mountains before connecting with Road 1509, which descends into the Blue River drainage. That looked like a fun route to try, but would have been many more hours on poorer quality roads, a bit much for today’s little jaunt. So I turned right at the T onto 2026, which would take me over into the Calapooia drainage. Not long after the junction, the road passed very near a clearcut like the one in the lower left corner of the of satellite photo above. I stopped there to have a snack and take a photo or two.
foreground and a couple of High Cascades peaks far to the east .
I noticed immediately that Road 2026 was not quite the thoroughfare that 2022 had been. For one thing, it was a lot narrower. I met two vehicles coming the other way. Neither was a problem, but we had to pass cautiously, making sure we were at one of the wider points in the road. I did not meet any log trucks, which was good. The road surface was good in most places, but there were several sections with frequent potholes, a few with standing water. Probably most any car could have made it through, even the Boxster, though that wouldn’t have been much fun. The Mazda CX-5 was very adequate; a pickup would have been perfect.
The road kept on climbing, sometimes traversing steep slopes that were so thickly forested that you had to look hard to see how steep they actually were. Here’s a picture of a stream crossing. I’m standing on the downhill side of the road above the culvert that this water has just come through.
For a mile or two the road follows the course of Owl Creek on the western side of Owl Ridge, still climbing. Finally, it took me up over one last hump at about 4,000 feet and started to drop down the other side. That meant that I was out of the Santiam drainage and that all the creeks I passed fed into the Calapooia. After a few downhill miles I started getting glimpses of the river to my left. Up this high, it didn’t look like much, more like a teenage creek that had just barely reached legal age and could now call itself a river. Soon after that I came to another junction, this one with Forest Road 2820, the route that would take me westward toward home.
Once I was onto Calapooia River Road I was headed in the right direction, but I was still some way up into the mountains. It turns out I had about 20 miles of gravel to cover before I got back to the world of pavement. The road was wide (or widish) in most places. The loose gravel surface was noisy and slippery but quite smooth, with no pot holes, ruts, or washboard humps. There was a nice mixture of curves and straights, plus a certain amount of open space on either side, which increased general visibility. I came upon just one other vehicle. It was the kind of road where you can go a little fast even if you aren’t young, as long as you don’t mind a bit of drifting now and again.
After ten minutes or so, the road turned to pavement at Woodraffe. Eventually I met up with Oregon Hwy 228 at Holley and returned to Corvallis via Brownsville, Halsey and Peoria.