Category: Road Trips

There are many benefits to slow travel. We see more. We relax more. We have more time to absorb our new experiences and integrate them into our understanding of the world. For example, almost everyone in Corvallis knows how to get to Yachats: You take either U.S. 20 to Newport or U.S. 34 to Waldport, then turn left and drive down the coast until you see the Adobe on your right and you realize you’re almost there. It doesn’t take very long. But now imagine traveling from Corvallis to Yachats by first walking from Corvallis to New York City, then traveling by ship around the Horn of Africa, past India, through Oceania and across the Pacific to the Port of San Francisco. You could then finish by hitchhiking up U.S. Highway 101 to Yachats. Now that would be an adventure. For most of us, however, it’s just not practical. Here’s a better way.

Take Hwy 34 to Alsea and turn left down the Alsea Deadwood Highway. When you see a small sign for Little Lobster Valley Road, ignore it. Instead, stay on the paved road and bear right only when you see the obvious sign for Lobster Valley. Stay on Lobster Valley Road for a few miles. It’s a quiet valley, so don’t drive fast. Stop at the Lone Fir Cemetery if you like. When presented with the option of turning left onto Preacher Creek Road, resist it. Stay on Lobster Valley Road for some more miles until it ends at Five Rivers Road. Turn left, over the bridge, and follow Five Rivers Road for about eight miles. Keep an eye out for a right turn onto the narrow Buck Creek bridge. If you come to a red covered bridge in the town of Fisher, that means that you have missed the Buck Creek turn and will have to go back. Keep a better eye out this time. (We know this strategy will work because we have used it ourselves.) Once you find and cross the Buck Creek bridge, immediately bear right onto East Buck Creek Road. Follow the road past all the houses and up into the forest. Up there, the road is also called Forest Road 3705. In its upper reaches, it’s a little rough, so go slow and watch for potholes. There are some nice views along the way, especially for the people on the passenger side. (Whoopee!) The road ends at a T-junction with Forest Road 58. Turn left onto 58 and then, after just half a mile or so, turn right onto a quite nice looking gravel road that leads downward. Stay determinedly on this road. After a few miles it will turn from gravel to pavement. Ten miles after that it will spit you out onto Hwy 101 in downtown Yachats. Takes about three hours. Return via Mumbai.

NOTE: The following is a special (bonus) feature from the editors of Meandering On The Way. It gives a more complete account of M’s road trip to Idaho and Nevada. WARNING: If you are not interested in boondock camping and/or curious about that part of the world, this could bore you to tears. No one’s feelings will be hurt if you skip it.

Part 1: Thursday and Friday

Some online sources from Nevada say that the town of Jarbidge is one of the most remote and hard to get to places in the state. It’s way up near the Idaho border and it’s about as far from Las Vegas as you can get–in several senses. A Nevadan who wanted to visit Jarbidge would first go to Elko, which is in the northeast part of the state, and then go 106 miles farther north. The second half of the route is on gravel and they say that very last part is so rough that you need four wheel drive. Also the road is closed in the winter. People also say that the scenery along the way is spectacular; M wouldn’t know because he didn’t go in that way. He went in from Idaho, which is easier. If you start from Twin Falls, for example, the trip to Jarbidge is only 92 miles and there is a small town or two along the way. Much of that route is also on gravel, but the roads are mostly smooth and straight and do not require 4WD.

Which is fine if you live in Twin Falls, but say you live in Western Oregon. To access Jarbidge from Idaho, first you’d have to get to Idaho. The easiest way to do that is to take I-84, which begins in Portland, goes all the way across Oregon and half of Idaho, and passes right through Twin Falls. As we shall see, M didn’t quite do that, but he did start out that way. After dropping E off at the Portland airport, he drove the first 400 miles of I-84, stopping in the town of Ontario, Oregon, right on the Idaho border. It was a longish drive, but M didn’t really mind. He’d brought a lunch from home, which he ate in a neighborhood park in Pendleton. Once in Ontario he rested for the night in a motel and finalized his plans for the following day. His idea was to proceed into Idaho somewhat indirectly, traveling southeast, not by the easiest and fastest route but rather by the opposite of that. Just for variety.

After an unexpectedly awesome free breakfast at his motel (Clarion), M set off southward from Ontario on U.S 20/26, looking for the road to the Succor Creek State Recreation Area. He soon came to Nyssa, Oregon where he missed a turn, resulting in an embarrassing number of miles traveled in the wrong direction. He was in Homedale, Idaho before he figured this out. So the first challenge of the day was to navigate sideways across some Idaho farm country trying to somehow intersect with Oregon Hwy 201, which was the key to his finding the road to Succor Creek. He ended up traveling west on Idaho 19 until he re-crossed the border, at which point Idaho 19 magically turned into Oregon 201 and everything got easier. In the unlikely event that you find yourself looking for Succor Creek Road without bothering with a map or GPS, don’t forget to make that right turn at Nyssa. It’ll save you time.

Anyway, after 532 miles of pavement driving, M was finally onto a proper road. It was nice and wide at first but also dry and dusty. Quite dusty. M has a fiberglass shell on the Frontier and the seal between truck and shell is dust proof. But the truck bed itself is not sealed very well. In fact, pickup truck beds are specifically designed with the goal of making sure that water can get out of the bed. This means that there are actually large gaps around the tailgate.

To address this problem, M had recently made a dust barrier. This consisted of a strip of foam left over from the truck bed mattress project combined with a wooden frame. This trip would be its first test.

M had forgotten, of course, to assemble the dust barrier before he left Ontario. So now he had to pull over and do it by the side of the road. But that was okay. It was kind of nice to have a reason to stop and take in the view.

The terrain changed from flat to hilly. The road went only gently uphill, but the land on either side got higher. Soon M came to a sign announcing the Succor Creek Recreation Area. It was around there that the road reunited with the creek.

As he got farther into it, M realized that the Succor Creek area was not quite what he had imagined. He’d been thinking of something isolated, with steep roads and a very small creek. He was thinking that it would be treeless, uncrowded, and lacking in any interesting rock formations. Why, he now asks, was he thinking that? Why didn’t he know exactly what it would look like? There are tons of Succor Creek photographs online and it would have been easy to find them. But M feels that he already has a lot of second hand information, way too much. What he needs are a few more dreams, simple ones that he can keep a handle on, and then some first hand information to go with them.

The reality of Succor Creek is that it was not all that isolated and that the creek was pretty good sized. Moreover, the official camping area had trees–not big ones but definitely trees. Similar trees were thick along the creek. And it was in a canyon, a sort of deep one.

M’s first order of business was to find a place to camp. Anticipating a possible Friday evening influx of other campers, he had arranged to arrive on a Friday morning. There were two sorts of places to camp: the official campground at one end of the canyon and a number of informal pull-offs at various places along the road. M went up to the campground to check it out first. It had eight sites arranged in a cramped circle around a waterless restroom building. As mentioned, there were a few trees to provide shade. The four best sites were already occupied. And since their occupants all had large campers or travel trailers, the area already seemed crowded. (Ha! Little did he know.) He turned around and went back down the road. Most of the pull-offs were still empty. M found a beautiful one, nicer than he’d expected. And by nice we mean that it was away from the road, had access to its own stretch of creek and provided some beautiful views. There were no trees where he parked, so he had to use the truck to make some shade.

There was a steep little side canyon close by and M thought maybe there would be some kind of trail up to the top. He started looking for such a route. But it was not to be. After huffing and puffing upward for a while and finally finding himself in a place that seemed too steep for safety, he gingerly made his way back down. After that he took his chair down to the stream and sat there for a while. Could a person who was sitting down there take off their shoes and cool their feet in the creek? Yes they could, but not for long. That water was cold. After a while M went back up to his campsite, set his chair down in the shade of the truck and spent some time watching the gray cliffs on the far side of the creek. The cliffs didn’t really do much and didn’t have much to say. They did communicate that they were there, that they were getting pretty old, and that despite their great age they still planned to be around a lot longer than M would be. Was the difficulty in making conversation due to the fact that the language of the cliffs was too primitive to express anything beyond the basics? Or was it because their language was just so different from M’s language that he couldn’t really understand it? Would Google Translate help? Naw, M was out of cell range. It seemed hopeless. Was it time for dinner yet? (For another take on the topic of communicating with the natural world, see this poem by Becky Hemsley. –Ed.)

In the middle of the night M had to get up and discovered that the moon was up too.

Finding Jarbidge – Part 2: Saturday

In the morning M wanted to get started early, as he had a long way to go. But just before he left, he took a few minutes to walk up the hill and take this picture, which shows the first leg of the day’s planned route.

M had noticed the evening before that he had been right to have arrived early in the day. There’d been a lot of traffic on the road. And there was even more this morning. And when he passed by the campground, he found it transformed–jammed with a dozen vehicles, lots of tents and trailers and a whole bunch of people who seemed to be having a grand time. On the other hand, that was the end of the inhabited area of Succor Creek. For the next hour of his drive south M didn’t see anybody.

Just past the campground Succor Creek Road again parts ways with Succor Creek. The creek stays down low while the road climbs up the west slope to reach the more or less flat country near the canyon rim. Here’s a view back down into the canyon after M had gotten up out of it.

The road onward looked pretty empty, but M knew it went somewhere. Sure enough, after a while he started to see ranches again. Another sign of human presence was a giant parking area for some kind of high desert equestrian jamboree. He saw nothing of the actual event, just a fenced field that had been turned into a parking lot for pick-ups. There were twenty or thirty of those, each one hooked up to a horse trailer. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Where were the horses and their riders? Off having fun somewhere, but where exactly and what kind of fun was a mystery.

Soon there were more farms and ranches. You wouldn’t call the area densely populated–no one’s nearest neighbor was closer than three quarters of a mile–but there were enough families around to have an active school.

Next came a major waypoint in M’s plan to get to Jarbidge by indirect means. (You’ll remember that Jarbidge is in Nevada, but first he had to get to Idaho, and here he was still in Oregon. As far as indirectness goes, he was doing pretty well. But that couldn’t last forever.) Not many miles past the school, Succor Creek Road ended at an intersection with U.S. Highway 95. At mile 571 of his journey he was going back onto pavement. He turned right and headed south, looking to get back off pavement as soon as possible. Seven miles later, there it was: Cow Creek Road. Or was it De Lamar Road? M’s sources disagreed. Never mind, it was headed in the right direction. He happily turned left and was on the gravel again. Not only that, he was in Idaho! (Not that there was any sign, but that’s what the map said.)

Cow Creek Road led southeast up a pretty little valley with a creek running down the middle. The landscape was treeless, but there was verdant new grass in the pastureland nearest the creek…

M counted four widely separated ranch houses along the creek. His wasn’t the only vehicle on the road; there was a white sedan poking along ahead of him. Eventually it turned off down the half mile long ‘driveway’ of the third ranch.

A few miles past the fourth house, things changed a little. The road was still following the creek, but the terrain was a little more hilly and the land on either side of the creek was drier. That was also the area where the people who made the road had decided that it needed to cross the creek, not once but twice. On the day M was there the fords looked like this:

M had never seen fords like this and at the first crossing he had to stop and get out and study it a little. He was, after all, out there all by himself, with no chase car to pull him out if he got stuck. As it turned out, these were nicely made crossings, with a firm, smooth bottom that wasn’t as far under the surface of the water as it first appeared. Off we go.

In the next few miles the terrain started getting steeper and trees began to appear. M came to a junction with another road that came in from the southwest. The two roads merged and headed east into the mountains. There was a sign there stating that the road was not maintained and that if anyone who used it required search and rescue, that person should be prepared to bear the entire cost. That was okay with M, especially on a clear day in lovely weather. In fact, it’s a pretty good policy, probably too good to last. In the future, when the world has finished going to hell in a hand basket, the road will have been technologically enhanced. There will be an entry gate which automatically locks your vehicle into self-driving mode. They’ll tell us it’s safer.

As it was, M drove himself up into the mountains. The road got narrower and rougher, but still not too bad. Eventually he came to the site of an old mine. It appeared that at some point people had lived near the mine and there were several vintage homes just across the creek from it:

A short distance past the mine M passed some buildings that had definite signs of being inhabited, at least in the summer. It was pretty quiet and although M didn’t actually see anyone, someone was probably there. The road got worse past this point. It wasn’t steep but it was very narrow and there was little or no gravel, just natural rocks and dirt. There were big brown puddles of recent snow melt whenever you came to a flat part. Since there were no big washouts, it was easily passable, as long as you kept it slow. There was nice scenery to be had on either side, but M couldn’t take his eyes off the road much to enjoy it. Still, he was having a pretty good time, picking his way along, pleased that there was no other traffic. And then, of course, suddenly there was other traffic, a white pick-up truck heading straight toward him. It was a full-sized truck and even though M’s truck was smaller, it was hard to see how the two vehicles were going to get past each other. To M’s right was a steep drop into the river and on the left there was an equally steep slope upward. The oncoming driver found a place where the road was slightly wider, pulled over as much as he could, and paused, which was nice for him because he was on the upslope side and M was the one who was going to roll down into the creek if it all went bad. But it actually went fine. M crept slowly ahead, not quite sure about that right edge, just making sure he was as close as possible to the other truck on his left. There was about an inch of clearance between their respective side mirrors as he went past.

Later on there were two more oncoming vehicles, but he met both of those on less stressful parts of the road. And then, by golly, a big blue pickup appeared behind him! Geez, that made four cars over the course of less than an hour. Somehow he had gotten caught in rush hour traffic on the road to Silver City.

M knew he was on a road that led to Silver City because he had seen those words next to a dot on his map. He was decidedly not prepared for what he found when he finally got there. It turns out that Silver City is a booming tourist attraction, a ghost town whose body has been reanimated and repurposed from silver mining to 21st Century fun times in the mountains. (For photos of the town and details about its history, click here.) Late spring/early summer is high season for visitors to Silver City and on the Saturday that M came through there were hundreds of them. It was chaos, with dozens of vehicles trying to navigate through narrow dirt streets with more potholes than you can imagine. There were some hand-lettered signs saying that the speed limit was ten miles per hour. But with all the potholes and all the kids and their associated grownups running around it was best to go even slower than that.

There are about seventy structures in the town, all over a hundred years old. Silver City began as a mining boomtown in the 1860’s and prospered up until 1900, when it began its decline. By 1940 the one-time population of thousands had shrunk down to just one person, who proudly self identified as both mayor and fire marshal. The reanimation of the ghost town began in the early 1970’s, when someone reopened an old hotel. Although the land is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, all of the structures are privately owned, often by descendants of the original miners.

All M wanted to do was find his way through the mess. It took him a few minutes, but he did finally find a way out. Silver City is situated right at the pass, so he soon found himself descending the eastern side of the Owyhees. The road down into Idaho was wider and smoother than the one he had just come up from Oregon. There was also way more traffic. Besides cars and trucks, there were dozens of roaring OHV’s and dirt bikes. But the route also offered some beautiful views, which he was able to enjoy when he found a likely place to pull off and have lunch.

The rest of his day’s drive was uneventful. The road–now named Silver City Road–led down out of the mountains and into flatter country. At mile 626 of his trip the gravel surface ended and pavement returned. Ten miles later he had reacquired cell service. He told his phone to direct him to Mountain Home, Idaho, a largish town where he planned to spend another night in a motel.

What about Jarbidge? you may ask. Well, getting to Jarbidge from Mountain Home isn’t quite as easy as getting there from Twin Falls, but it’s close.

Finding Jarbidge – Part 3: Sunday and Monday

If M had actually been in Twin Falls, getting to Jarbidge would have been simple. He would have taken U.S. 93 south down to Rogerson, Idaho, then turned off the highway onto Three Creeks Road, then taken the third left onto 1520 N Road, which is also Three Creek Road. (Okay, that’s mildly complicated.) Anyway, Three Creeks Road is the key to finding Jarbidge from the Idaho side. It gets you within fifteen miles of the actual place.

Being in Mountain Home made finding Three Creeks Road a little more complicated, but M just did what Siri told him to do. The drive took three and a half hours to go just 150 miles. It was a mix of gravel and pavement. The first half was through farmland, most of it dead flat. Then came sagebrush country that had a few more hills. And then at the very end, just before the Jarbidge turn-off, M had a glimpse of more rugged country.

The last place in Idaho that M came to is called Murphy Hot Springs. Beyond that the road to Jarbidge got much worse. It was wide enough not to be scary and it wasn’t steep or muddy, but it was seriously bumpy. Nice scenery, though.

After ten or so miles of very slow going over the bumps, suddenly the road got wider and smoother. Though no human beings appeared, signs of human habitation were abundant. Eventually, there it was, the Jarbidge main drag.

After visiting the Trading Post and touring the jail, M drove out of town and starting looking for a place to camp. He found that there were several campgrounds in the area, all of them pretty basic, all of them a ways out of town, and all of them empty of campers. As he was driving around to check them all out…it started to rain. Around this time, he passed the spot where the Pine Creek West Fork flows into the Jarbidge River. Both streams were running high and it was quite a sight.

The rain stopped after half an hour. The clouds turned from gray to white and broke apart so that some blue was showing. There was even a little sunshine. Hmm, said M, who was not eager to camp in the rain. Now maybe this was just one passing storm–or maybe not. He took a little walk up the road and saw an abandoned mine up on the hillside that would be great to explore and maybe take pictures of. But just then the sky began to darken, in a rather serious way. M turned around and headed back to the truck. The rain started just a minute or two before he got there. The sky was all dark and showed no sign that the rain would be stopping very soon. “Okay,” said M after fifteen or twenty minutes, “I’ve seen Jarbidge. And now I’m leaving and going back to that motel in Mountain Home.” It was around 3:30 in the afternoon and it was another three and a half hour drive back to MH, but it could be done. He headed back to Idaho. As he made his way north again, along that ten miles of really bumpy road, the rain continued with no sign of slacking. Even in the rain the scenery was pretty nice.

M later thought that he probably should have just got a room at the Outdoor Inn, and some booze and grub to go with it. But if he had, he would have missed a rather spectacular drive back across Idaho. Once he got out of the canyons and hills and back onto the seemingly endless flatlands, he saw that there were thunderstorms scattered all over the place. At any given time he could see two or three of them: off to the right, off to the left, ahead or behind. Each storm featured its own dark clouds, thin streaks of lightening and dark curtains of rain. For a while the roads he was on were dry or just faintly damp. Then suddenly he came upon a minor flood and saw that the next twenty yards of road were covered with two or three inches of water. He slowed down as quickly as he could, but still made some quite spectacular splashes as the truck pushed through. It is more comfortable, of course, to travel through flood waters sedately, which he then proceeded to do. Though he could still see several thunderstorms in the distance, there was no sign of the one that had dropped these particular waters.

Later on, as seems inevitable, his route intersected with the path of one of the storms that he had admired so much from a distance. Oh what violence can be sown from drops of water and molecules of air! M survived this and reached his motel at around 7:00, not too much the worse for wear, but disappointed not to be camping.

On Monday M started for home, 556 miles away. With no need to get back immediately, he planned to stop for the night along the way. He was still owed a night of camping under the stars. He drove away from Mountain Home on I-84, passed through Boise, stopped in Nampa for gas, and crossed into Oregon at Ontario. He then got off the freeway and onto U.S. 26. Two hundred miles later he reached the Ochocos where he started looking for a place to camp. There’s a nice campground at Ochoco Summit, but alas he found he couldn’t afford to stay there. It was a self service place where you choose a spot, fill out a form, and then drop an envelope of cash into a slot. With a senior discount the cost was only $10, but M couldn’t swing it–all he had was a fifty and a five. So instead he got went back to the highway and found a nearby Forest Service road that led up the side of a mountain called Dixie Dome. Plenty of places to camp up there and no other campers at all. Plus, it wasn’t raining. Also, zero other traffic.

After a mountainside breakfast of bacon and pancakes, M found his way back down to the highway and headed for home. Luckily, this final leg of his journey took him right past the Sisters Bakery, where he used a credit card to obtain a chocolate donut and a marionberry scone. He got back to Corvallis in the early afternoon, after a journey of 1,509 miles.

He had found Jarbidge but hadn’t explored it properly. He’ll have to go back.

I was looking to do another forest road exploration, but I wanted something easy, a route that was short, easy to navigate, and not likely to feature any locked gates. This little trip filled the bill; just fifteen and a half miles off pavement, with just two or three critical junctions, all of which had clear signage. To get there I went east on US 20 through Lebanon and Sweet Home, past Cascadia and Mountain House, all the way to the turnoff for the House Rock Campground. This put me onto Latiwi Creek Road, also known as Forest Road 2044. Almost immediately I came to the access road for the campground. Ignoring that, I stayed on 2044 and followed it down into the forest.

Soon the road crossed a couple of narrow bridges and started climbing up out of the South Santiam River canyon, winding its way southeastward. The gravel was mostly smooth but had some pot holes and washboarding. The road climbed steadily and occasionally steeply. There were a number of places with views that would have been lovely if a person could have seen them through the smoke.

Forest Road 2044, ends at a T-junction with Forest Road 1509. I turned left and continued eastward and upward. The signage is good here. You can’t read it in this photo, but that little brown sign in the lower right points to 2044, the road I came up. It was pretty smoky at the junction and the smell of burning wood was in the air.

It’s easy to follow 1509. There are some little offshoot roads all along it, but it’s always easy to see that they are not the main road. There are three major intersections, where some fairly good looking gravel roads lead south or southeast. The junctions had good signage (see below) and all I had to do was stick to 1509.

One of the nicer parts of 1509 is where it passes through an area of really old trees. It’s not a large tract, just a few acres alongside the road that apparently have never been logged. I decided to stop and have my lunch there. I turned onto a smaller road called Road 30 and found a wide spot to park, then walked down a ways into an old growth swale to where I could find a log to sit on.

I enjoyed the sheer height of the old trees, but I also liked seeing trees of many ages. Most of the trees in Oregon forests were born in commercial nurseries and planted as seedlings after a clear cut, thus forming large tracts of trees of identical age and size. Here in this little spot, you see trees that just happened to sprout where a seed cone fell in a year when conditions happened to be right. There are trees of all ages– two foot high tots to fifteen foot teenagers to towering elders. And the dead merely lie where they have fallen.

Eventually Road 1509 ends at another T-junction. To the right you can take Road 1598 to continue east, but I was ready to head home, so I turned left onto Forest Road 15, a paved route that leads back to U.S. 20.

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.

Falls City to Silsetz via Valsetz, 6/6/21

Between the Pacific Ocean and the Willamette valley lie the mountains of the Coast Range. There are a number of east-west routes that run through the mountains. Highway 22 connects Salem to Lincoln City via Grand Ronde. Highway 20 connects Corvallis to Newport. Between these two highways, there’s a roughly rectangular area that has no major roads. The mountains aren’t too high, but the terrain is fairly rough and the area is populated only around the edges. The climate is very wet and not terribly cold, just about perfect for growing Douglas fir. So of course that’s what we do. It’s farming country of a kind and while there are no paved roads, there are lots and lots of logging roads. Our plan was to get to the coast by traveling through this area. We’d drive west from Falls City until we reached the site of the ghost town of Valsetz, roughly in the the center of the rectangle. From there we would make our way southwest in the direction of the town of Siletz. From there we could connect to Highway 20 and Newport. 

Some of the land in the coast range is part of the Siuslaw National Forest and is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, some of it is federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and the rest is owned by private timber companies. The patchwork pattern of ownership requires cooperation in the matter of road usage and some of the roads are open to the public, even when they cross miles and miles of private land. Recreational visitation on work days is discouraged–the roads are narrow and logging equipment is big–but on the weekends the loggers are gone and the roads are mostly empty.

We left Corvallis on a Sunday at 10:30 in the morning and by 11:15 we were in Falls City, where the pavement ended and the gravel began. As logging roads go, the first stretch of road west from Falls City seems like a major artery. It has only a few steep sections and is fairly wide–wide enough, in many places, for log trucks to pass each other coming and going. The day we were there, there was a fair amount of washboard. 

In the years from 1919 to 1983, this was the chief access route to Valsetz, a logging town that was established by a lumber company called Cobbs and Mitchell. Cobbs and Mitchell was a Michigan company, but by the early 1900’s Michigan had no more old forest left to cut. Looking for new horizons, the company acquired large tracts of virgin timber along the upper reaches of the Siletz River in Oregon.

In earlier times, loggers had lived in isolated logging camps, sleeping in company-provided tents, eating company provided food, and being away from their families for months at a time. In 1919 that era was passing. To harvest the upper Siletz, William Mitchell built a rail line into the area and created a semi-permanent company town. In addition to setting up a sawmill, the company built individual homes for workers and their families, set up company stores, and established a K-12 school. A dam was built to create an artificial lake to serve as a log pond. A post office opened in 1920. Mill workers could walk to and from work and logging crews could make daily commutes to the harvest areas via the company railroad. 

All of the land and all of the structures in the town were owned by the company. In 1924 Cobbs and Mitchell sold the entire operation to a new entity called the Valsetz Lumber Company. In 1959 the operation was sold again, this time to the Boise Cascade Corporation. Over the years the town’s population fluctuated between 300 and 1,000 inhabitants. In 1974 the Valsetz High School football team won an Oregon state championship.

By 1979, however, the old growth forest in the area was depleted and the company decided to shut down the Valsetz mill. After the shutdown all the structures of the town were removed and the area was replanted with fir trees. In 1984 the railroad was torn up and in 1988 the dam was removed and the lake was drained. Today, there is no obvious signs that the town ever existed.

We arrived at the Valsetz site at 12:30. Navigation had been easy so far, as we had had GPS location data on a forest road overlay of a satellite photo. The road to Valsetz is pretty easy to follow even without a map, but once we were actually in the area we found a couple of intersections where the GPS was helpful.

It’s still possible to deduce where the lake used to be. It is now crowded with ten and twenty foot tall trees, but the trees are clearly the product of natural reseeding, mostly deciduous and still not too large. The road splits at one point, with one fork going to the left going along the south side of the old lake and one fork to the right going along the north side. That northern road leads past the only obvious remnant of the project–the concrete and steel floor of the old sawmill. 

Here are two maps of the Valsetz area. The first shows the old lake as it was and how the road coming in from the east gets complicated as it splits into northern and southern forks. The dam was in the narrow section at the north end of the lake. The town was lower down in the east side of the lake.

The next map is a relatively recent satellite photo of the same area. The rough outline of the lake is still visible in the form of the lighter color foliage that grows in the old lake bed. (The very lightest colored areas, though, are recent clearcuts.)

After touring back and forth a bit to get oriented, we sat down inside the old sawmill foundations and had our lunch. When it was time to leave, we had to choose our route out of the forest. Our GPS compatible map had been nice, but Valsetz was at its extreme western edge and no similar map was available for the next part of the route. We had some print maps and these showed two possible routes. The road on the north side of the old lake led northwest from Valsetz before it eventually looped back down to the southwest, which was where we needed go. The road from the south side of the lake seemed to more directly in a southwest direction, but in its lower reaches it also looked to be somewhat complicated, providing abundant opportunities for making a wrong turn. So off to the north we went, leaving Valsetz just at the spot where the dam had been, following the outlet creek. On our map, that creek appears to be the headwater of the South Fork of the Siletz River.

The road was very different from the one we had come up on, narrower and less well maintained. In the upper reaches it was quite beautiful, often cutting across forested slopes giving us glimpses of fantastic deep ravines. The road had a gravel base, but it was old gravel and there were potholes wherever the road was level. There were lots of unmarked intersections. We navigated by trying keep a sense of where the main stream must be.

It was a long, slow descent, basically just following the path of the Siletz River, which is shown below. At the top of the map the South Fork coming up from old Valsetz merges with the North Fork. (Only a tiny portion of the North Fork is visible.) Just past the confluence point, the river starts to turn down toward the southwest. There are dozens of small tributary creeks and the river becomes steadily larger as it flows south. The larger it got, the easier it was to see that we were on the right road. Eventually we passed through the Siletz Gorge and finally came out of the mountains at Upper Farm, which is in the bottom left corner of the map. At this point we were back on pavement and headed for civilization.

In the northern part of the route, the terrain is rugged and the trees are thick enough so that an occasional clearcut is a welcome change. Lower down, the Siletz Gorge is a potentially wonderful place, but these days it is marred by intensive recent logging. In the photo below we have stopped at a place where one side of the gorge is currently covered with young trees, maybe five or six years old. New clearcuts are of course much uglier.

At another wide spot in the road these stacks of logs had been piled up and then abandoned, some of them recently, some of them a long time ago.

Now that we know this route, we can take it over to the coast anytime, provided that we’re not in a hurry. It does add four hours to the trip.