Category: Road Trips

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.

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.

Bakeoven  Road having ended all too soon, I turned north onto US 97 and began my trudge up to the Columbia Gorge. I say trudge because 97 is a main route and there was quite a bit of traffic in both directions, cars and travel trailers and a good helping of semis. Humans on the move. I joined in and went up through Kent, Grass Valley and Moro. This is wheat country, most of it being soft white wheat for export, much of it to China, so the matter of Chinese retaliatory tariffs is an issue. But the Porsche was in the hands of neither farmer nor economist, so we kept our eyes on the road and give the fields just a passing glance.

 Just north of Moro I stopped at a place called DeMoss Springs Park. It’s just off the highway, a few hundred feet from a big grain storage building. Spring-fed creeks surround the park on three sides and a dozen or so big cottonwoods and willows provide deep shade. I noticed some sprinkler heads that explained why the grass in the park was so much greener than the surrounding countryside. There’s an old metal swing set still in good repair, picnic tables both old and new, a food prep table with electrical outlets, and a tall faucet that did not yield any water. There was also an old covered stage. The stage itself was a wooden platform a foot and a half off the ground, about twelve feet wide and ten feet deep. The cover was a three-sided shed with a peaked roof. It had windows and a back door, all blocked with yellow tape. The front of the stage was also blocked, by a low wooden partition, as if to prevent performers from falling off or adoring fans from climbing up. The structure was all white with relatively recent paint. Only when I was leaving did I notice the big wooden sign where you can read about the once famous family for whom the town and the springs were named. (If you’re curious, see these notes from the Benton County Historical Society.)

US 97 was a letdown after Bakeoven Road, but that’s not to say that isn’t a fairly nice road in its way. On the day I was there there weren’t all that many trucks, not really, and the scenery was very fine, especially in the northernmost Oregon section from DeMoss Springs up to the Columbia. The highway crosses the Columbia at the town of Biggs, Oregon, the place where early travelers on the Oregon Trail got their first sight of the big river. Focused on my hunt for the Bickleton Highway, I did not linger there but went straight over the bridge into Washington and started the climb toward Goldendale. 

When I was about half way up the hill, I saw a sign for a scenic lookout. That sounded good, so I pulled in. I’d been noticing the stillness of all the wind turbines, a little eerie in all the haze. The gorge is a normally a windy place and there are wind turbines for miles and miles along the north rim. Never before had I seen such a calm day. The scenic viewpoint is an old one with a very narrow and sharply curved access loop as if it had been made for toy cars. But the parking area is full-sized, with eight or ten pull in spaces marked by fading white lines. There is no information sign, no trash bin, no benches, pretty much nothing at all, except for three aging asphalt paths. One leads left down the gentle incline, one takes off directly away from the parking area and one leads down to the right. But they don’t go anywhere. After eight feet or so, they widen out a into three different sorts of blocky, trapezoidal shapes, which is where each one ends. The view from each is basically the same, so I’m not sure why they have to be different or why they’re there at all. I liked ‘em though. They’re good.

As for the actual view, there was an oddity there as well. You can look southeast down a big shallow canyon to the river below or you can look north up the canyon to the prairie rim. The land was dry with low, grassy vegetation all yellow and brown at that time of year. That part was normal. The strange part was that there was another road visible from the view point, a road that also seemed to climb up from the bottom of the gorge toward the prairie rim, just as 97 does. And it looked new, with deep black asphalt and bright yellow stripes. Though quite narrow, it was a beautiful road, a mix of straights and looping curves, and there was nobody on it at, not a single car anywhere. I immediately thought that I should be driving there! But how would I find it? Where did it come from and where did it go? I looked down toward the river to see if I could tell where it met Washington Highway 14, which it would have to do when it reached the river, but in that direction it disappeared from view around a shoulder of the canyon. In the other direction, up toward the top of the rim, it just seemed to end on an empty hillside without going anywhere. The day was hazy and it was hard to see for any distance, but still it all seemed rather unlikely. I thought maybe I was having visions.

A few days later, I find the explanation. Though recently repaved, the road is not new at all. It was in fact built more than 100 years ago by Sam Hill, one of the leaders of the Good Roads movement. Completed in 1916, it was the first asphalt road ever built in Oregon. It was in use until the late 1940s when it was replaced by the current US 97. Since then, the upper part has been allowed to weather away, but the lower part has been preserved by its owner, the Maryhill Museum. The road is occasionally rented out to motorsport groups for hill climbing races. When not reserved, the road is open for public use, but only to pedestrians and bicyclists, no motorized vehicles allowed. So I have to call them and find out how much it would cost to rent it for a day… No, that would be crazy.

In the event, I left this mystery behind and proceeded on to Goldendale, where I managed to find the second of my daily goals: the Bickleton Highway. That wasn’t as easy as I expected. US 97 runs north and south while the Bickleton Highway is perpendicular to it running east and west. Sound easy? Well, as it happens, the two lines cross but do not meet, and their crossing is unmarked by any sign. 

Anyway, the Bickleton Highway is another fine road. It’s called the Bickleton Highway because, duh, it goes to Bickleton. Except that when it gets close to Bickleton, its name changes to the Goldendale Highway. Which is just as it should be, as I hope we all agree. The speed limit on this highway, whatever its name, is 50 mph, which is perhaps not quite as it should be. The population of the whole Bickleton/Cleveland area is less than a hundred, so there aren’t a lot of cars on the road, at least not in the early afternoon. Cleveland has a rodeo ground and also a hundred-year-old carousel that operates one weekend a year during Cleveland pioneer days. There’s not much else there, this despite the fact the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas lived there for a while (when he was two.)  Bickleton, on the other hand, is a real town with a market and a tavern–the Bluebird Inn. It is also home to the Bickleton Museum, which is where they store the Cleveland carousel horses during the off season. 

Not that I knew any of this at the time. I was just passing through, as they say in the movies. I was focused on just how far from home I was willing to go. To get home, I needed first to get back down to the Columbia Gorge. There’s a road that passes through the ghost town of Dot and meets the river at Sundale, for example. That would be cool, but on my map it appears to be partly gravel. I personally love driving on gravel, the dustier or muddier the better. But the Porsche feels differently. “I am not,” sniffs the Boxster, “a rally car.” So I turned south at Bickleton itself and took the paved road to Roosevelt, a 26-mile jaunt. The wind turbines were moving in this part of the world and the road jigged and jagged right in among them before dropping down off the rim. Dramatic scenery on a wonderful stretch of road. At the end of it I took a break at the Roosevelt riverside park, which was quiet and lovely. I sat and looked out over the river. On the other side there was a long freight train headed up river and up on the hill above the tracks, Interstate-84 was carrying its own constant load of traffic. It was all far enough away that both trains and trucks were mostly silent. Time to go home.

I spent the first night in a newish motel on the outskirts of Madras, Oregon. This was the view. One the left there’s a glimpse of US Route 26, which runs northwest out of Madras 119 miles to Portland. Madras is locally famous as the hometown of MLB outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury. It’s located just a few miles from the Warm Springs Reservation, where Ellsbury lived until he was six when his family moved to Madras. Forty-five miles northeast of Madras lies Big Muddy Ranch, the site of Rajneeshpuram. When Ellsbury was born in 1983, Rajneeshpuram was at its height; a year later it had blown up and gone. Here in 2018 I don’t see any traces of it around Madras, no Rolls Royces at all. The days are hot and the sky is dull with haze due to smoke from wild fires hundreds of miles to the south. The nights are cool. 

I planned to start by heading north on 26, but my goal wasn’t Portland. I was hunting roads, not streets. Specifically, I was looking for little secondary and tertiary roads–the old-fashioned kind that have lots of ups, lots of downs, lots of straights, lots of curves, and few other drivers. And with no trees to get in the way, you can see forever as you cross the rugged hill country and the lumpy plains. Did I mention the scarcity of other vehicles? Anyway, my plan was to drive up 26 for a few miles into the reservation. I would turn right at that point and go up through the reservation to Wapanitia, then turn east and go to Shaniko via Bakeoven, then up to Biggs on US 97. I’d cross the gorge into Washington and head north to Goldendale. From there I planned to go east on something called the Bickleton Highway. Then at some point I’d find a route back down to the gorge so I could start my return trip to Corvallis.

So it’s time to head out. Yes, sir, rarin’ to go. Well, semi-rarin’. Nothing to keep me here. The first thing I find out is that you can’t turn north onto 26 when leaving this particular motel. You have go south and find a place to turn around. Aargh.

Eventually I got turned around and drove on up to Warm Springs. I needed some gas, so I stopped at the Shell station there. I’d forgotten that unlike in the rest of Oregon, gas on the reservation is self-serve. Do I still know how to pump my own gas? Well, yeah. But I don’t get much practice, so I had to take it slow. There was an old man in a big pickup parked a few feet away in the shade. He was taking a long look at me. Well, that’s fine. I’d probably take a long look at me too. About the time the Boxster’s tank was full and the pump cut off, an old woman came out of the station building carrying a couple of paper bags, which I am thinking may have been breakfast since the station is also a store. She went around and got into the passenger side of the pickup. I got in my car, changed back into my driving glasses, and left it all behind.

I turned off of 26 at the right place, but soon after that, I missed my second turn and got pretty much lost. The signage on the reservation is accurate as far as it goes, but what I thought I remembered from the map turned out to be all wrong. I ended up going around in a circle and getting back onto the road I was on before, thus getting another chance to make the correct turn. It was kinda like making an extra circuit of a roundabout–embarrassing but not fatal. Of course this particular circle was four or five miles across, so it took a while. There were ranch houses out among the low hills and as I passed one I saw a new and mean-looking dark red Mustang coming down the long gravel drive. It pulled out behind me but didn’t try to pass, even though I was going pretty slow. The posted speed limit was 35, which seemed a little low for a rural highway with not much traffic, but presumably the local jurisdiction has its reasons. Maybe they consider it a residential district, since there were actual houses every half mile or so. Eventually I got onto the road I wanted–the one up to Wapanitia–and it turned out to be really beautiful, swooping down into canyons and rising up to cross the mesas. A lot of the land is too dry and too steep to be productive, which explains why the whites felt okay about letting the tribes have it.

In the middle section of the route to Wapanitia you can go for miles without seeing any signs of human habitation at all. Then, later on, you begin to see little flat places here and there, and eventually you start seeing ranch houses again. Pretty soon the ranches and farms come along more frequently. Then, once the landscape has changed almost completely from hills and mountains to high rolling plains, you cross an invisible line. This is where the good land starts. There’s no sign, but when you start to see older two-story houses built closer to the road and painted white, you know you’re off the reservation. I turned east onto Oregon 216 toward Maupin.

I didn’t expect much from Maupin, maybe just another tiny agricultural town on the plain, but it turned out to be a lovely place. For one thing, it’s not up on the plain. Instead it is perched on the west slope the Deschutes River gorge, a crease in the plains through which the river flows north toward the Columbia. It gets it name from someone named Commodore Perry Maupin, who established a ferry there sometime in the 1880’s. If Maupin seems more prosperous than most of the other little towns in this part of Oregon, it’s because of the money brought in by recreational visitors, who come either for the fishing or for the rafting. I noticed several rafting outfitters as I drifted through. I was looking for the road to Shaniko via Bakeoven, and sure enough as soon as I crossed the river there was a sign pointing left: Bakeoven Road.  

Bakeoven Road had looked promising on the map and it did not disappoint. It’s only 26 miles long, but it’s close to ideal. At the beginning it’s very tight and twisty as it climbs steeply up out of the gorge. The pavement is narrow with no guardrails and no perceptible shoulder. As always I tried the find a good balance between speed and safety, pleasure and fear. But that little piece of road is so tight, with so little room and such a long way down, that you can’t really take any risks at all. The Boxster was competent of course, but this sort of the road was not really its favorite kind of thing. But that section was short and I was soon back up on the high desert plain. The road there was much more to the Boxster’s liking, lots of short straights and fast curves, with enough ups and downs to keep things interesting. Not much to fear here; probably the greatest risk was of getting ticketed. I rationalized a little about that, thinking to myself that you’d have to be one weird cop to decide to hang out up here where there was really nothing whatever going on. I’m not sure if I saw any other cars at all. Maybe one or two. In the last few miles the straights were longer and the visibility was excellent. Wonderful road, but it was over awfully quick. I never did find Bakeoven. Too busy.

(to be continued)