The weather forecast was a day of cooler temperatures, 60’s and s70’s. That sounded like good Boxster weather, warm enough to put the top down but not so hot that the sun would broil you in your seat. The plan was to go see some roads in the Coast Range up in the northeast corner of the state. I made a lunch and was off by 10:00, heading north on U.S. 99. The first leg took us–the Boxster and me–up through the farms and vineyards of the western Willamette Valley. Just past McMinnville, U.S. 99 turns east, so we turned onto Oregon Highway 47 to continue north. It was a pleasant drive through lovely countryside, not much excitement but few annoyances. Finally, near the town of Banks, we came to Oregon Highway 8 and turned left to go into the mountains toward the coast. This was one of the roads we’d come to see.
Oregon 8 turned out to be a pretty major route. It’s a two-lane highway, but it is a mature highway, wide and well graded. There seemed to be a lot of traffic in both directions. Despite the curves, people were going pretty fast. There are a number of passing lanes on the uphill stretches, so no one had to crawl along behind a truck. The highway crosses through what is called the Tillamook State Forest. I was getting hungry, so I started looking for a place to stop, preferably some kind of park with a picnic table a little distance from the highway. I saw a sign for a campground and pulled off onto what turned out to be a very narrow gravel road that traversed down a steep slope. Yikes. Too narrow, too long and too rough. It took me about ten minutes before I managed to turn around and get back to the highway. When I got there, a heavy truck was approaching; so I had to wait for it to pass before I could pull out. Great. But very soon a passing lane appeared, which let me get around it. And then I found something odd. There were no cars visible ahead of me. Nice. I started going a little faster–not real fast because that stretch was near the crest of the coast range and was really curvy. Plenty of cars were coming from the opposite direction, but I had my side all to myself. I went up over the top and started down the other side. Still no one in front of me. So I scooted right along, letting the Boxster have a bit of fun. Where had everyone gone? I don’t know. I had fallen into an inexplicable lacuna. I was alone for quite a few miles. Finally, I came upon a line of cars and rejoined the normal world of traffic.
About then I noticed a sign that said Smith Homestead Day Use Area. This was another fortuitous event. It was a lovely place with few visitors. I ate my lunch at a wonderful secluded picnic site next to the Wilson River. As it happens, there are quite a few campgrounds, picnic areas and hiking trails in the western half of the forest. It looked like a place E and I should come back to for some camping and hiking.
The Tillamook State Forest came into being as the result of a series of terrible forest fires in the years 1935 to 1945. The 1935 fire was the worst, burning 340,000 acres of old growth timber, trees that were up to 400 years old. The fire was started during a logging operation when friction created by a steel cable rubbing against a dry dead tree caused it to burst into flame. Fanned by high winds from the east, the fire burned for eleven days. Ash from the fire drifted as far as 500 miles out to sea. The fires stopped only when the weather changed and a thick damp fog drifted in from the west.
A second fire in 1939 burned another 190,000 acres. In July of 1945 two fires combined to burn another 180,000 acres. These fires came to be the most well-known because the forests they destroyed were on either side of Highway 8, which was then the most popular route from Portland to the coast. One of the fires began on the Wilson River, caused by a discarded cigarette. The cause of the other is unknown, though some believed it resulted from a Japanese incendiary balloon.
The fires left vast areas of desolation and were a great loss to the land owners, who were mostly large timber companies. Timber companies in those days were hooked on old growth and had little interest in replanting burned over land, so they simply abandoned it. The land eventually came to belong to three Oregon counties via foreclosure for unpaid taxes. Eventually, the state legislature approved a plan to merge the county lands into a state forest and appropriated funds to begin restoration activities. Restoration involved the planting of 72,000,000 new trees over the next twenty years. Of these, about 1,000,000 were planted by students and other volunteers. Today the forest consists of 364,000 acres of fifty and sixty year-old trees. There are also a few original old growth trees that somehow survived the fires, including two or three at my luncheon spot by the Wilson River.
After lunch we continued west on Highway 8 to where it ends in the town of Tillamook. There we turned south and started the long road home.
Twelve miles south of Tillamook lies the town of Beaver, Oregon at the mouth of the Nestucca River. The plan for the afternoon was to drive up Nestucca River Road for twenty miles or so and then turn south for twenty more miles on an unnamed mountain road that would eventually lead me to Willamina, Oregon. At that point I could get back onto a real highway and have an easy drive home. My travel guide said that the route through the mountains from Beaver to Willamina was about two thirds “two-lane paved” and one third “one-lane paved.” The one-lane part, naturally, was the middle third where the mountains were highest.
After some minor difficulty we found Nestucca River Road and headed east. The road was narrow, but it had two lanes. You could tell it had two lanes because occasionally you could see the faded remains of a yellow stripe down the middle. The first ten miles were fairly level with bucolic views of pretty little farms along the river. Then the road started climbing into the forest. It got curvier and a little narrower and there was no longer any trace of a center stripe. That was all right with us because there was hardly any traffic and the stripe had always seemed to be more like wishful thinking than anything else.
We weren’t going all that fast; well maybe a little bit here and there, but mostly not. We were just tooling along enjoying ourselves. The top was down and the temperature was perfect. How long could such an idyllic interlude continue? Not too long. A pickup truck appeared behind me, moving fairly fast. It was a smallish truck, and I couldn’t tell the make. Almost all trucks have front end brand emblems or badges. It appeared that on this truck the emblem had been removed. The truck was an odd color, a kind of beige with small slashes of a darker brown that appeared to have been applied in a regular pattern. But perhaps I only dreamt the pattern; I just got quick glimpses in the rearview mirror as we moved from sun to shade and shade to sun.
There was no way to ever pass on such a road and no place to pull over either, so we were fated to be together there for a while, that other driver and I. Eventually I decided to speed up; life would be more pleasant for both of us, I thought, if there were some space between. But that did no good. The little truck was able to pull strongly enough to keep pace. The truck seemed more at home on this sort of road and I wondered how many times the driver had been on it before. I wondered what the other driver might be thinking. Was it something like “Hey, I bet I can keep up with a Porsche on this road.” Oh dear. I decided to get serious, very serious.
We were on the “one-lane paved” section, which featured a very narrow road with lots of steep inclines and dozens of sharp curves, half of them blind curves around big pieces of mountain. Fortunately the road tended to widen just a bit at the worst of the blind curves; perhaps the makers knew what they were about. I stayed mostly in third gear, dipping into second at the sudden right angle turns and up into fourth very occasionally. (The Boxster has a six-speed manual transmission.) That kept the revs up to between 3,000 and 5,000 rpm, where the Boxster is very strong and very loud. Even though we were going mostly uphill I was braking a lot, blasting out of curves and charging up the tiniest straights before standing on the brakes for the next turn. The pickup fairly quickly disappeared behind me. The Boxster absolutely loved this kind of driving. It seemed to be laughing and yelling like a banshee. “Why,” it asked me, ” don’t we just do this all the time?” “I know it’s fun,” I answered, “but this particular thing is stupid. Just because you are so awesomely capable that I can keep keep from running off this road at these speeds doesn’t mean that we won’t run into something unexpected around one of these curves. That would be very bad.” “Fine,” said the car, as I gradually slowed down to a more reasonable pace. Alas, after a short while, shorter than I had hoped, the truck again appeared behind me. I could hear the Boxster snickering. We had to do it all over again, for real this time. I like pickups. I own a pickup. But pickups behind me bring out the worst.
So we went back into insanity mode and stayed there, cresting the mountains and heading down the other side. Gradually the road got a little wider and a little straighter, which meant we could go even faster. We met two other vehicles coming the other way, but they were no problem. We didn’t slow down until farms and houses began to appear. I was pretty much exhausted by then, all out of adrenaline. The Boxster wasn’t tired at all, but was sympathetic anyway. We never saw the little pickup again. Was it ever really there or was it just an apparition conjured up by an evil spirit of the place?
For the last few miles into Willamina the road was legitimately two lanes and there was a lot more traffic. The posted speed was 25. I noticed that the locals were going 50. It was a little disorienting. I settled on 40. By coming into the town via its back door, as it were, I passed by the largest lumber mill complex I have ever seen. Its owner, Hampton Lumber, claims that it was for a time the largest mill in the United States. I don’t think I want to see the current largest.
From Willamina I got back onto familiar roads for a sedate drive home. Such a different world.