2010-03-28 45 -123

Location

North of Hwy 26, Near Bacona, Oregon, in the roadway

Participants

Jim

Plans

Jim's planning on going. He's also dreaming about continuing on to Clatskanie, but he'd have to get up fairly early to do that. (But, not as early as those who left the day before to get to Idaho!)

Expedition

Well, I didn't get up early to go geohashing and then head on over to the Columbia, which turned out to be just as good. I found the initial roads I was looking for, but I missed the turn off of the paved road. Partly, I expected that a large green sign with two street names would be a little before the street itself, especially if it is a 55MPH highway. But I forgot I'm in Oregon.

So, I turned around and headed back to the find what looked like a person's driveway, but really was the road to the hashpoint. The soon-to-turn-to-gravel, one lane, windy road to the hashpoint. As I'm driving up it, I'm thinking "I have a bad feeling about this" and "I wonder where I can turn around without plunging off the rather steep slope to my right." The gravel road degraded to dirt and then to very large rocks, making speeds larger than a few miles per hour very rough.

I encountered one road off to the left, but it seemed too soon, and it had a locked gate and a sign that appeared to forbid access, so I continued on. The next road ended quickly with a locked gate, and didn't seem to head in the right direction, so I went back.

Closer inspection of the sign on the gate revealed that it didn't prohibit access except when we'd be in the way or in danger. Weekends were okay, so I changed footgear and headed in. I started up the fairly steep hill and found soon that the GPS was pointing to the left into very dense forest. Clearly the other gate was the way to go, but I was hungry and tired, and the car was thirsty, and I didn't remember the other gate was being quite a friendly as this one, so I gave up and headed out.

I headed a little bit north to Vernonia. There I found a gas station to feed my car. (It was a little more expensive, but I felt I should support the local economy.) And I found a nice cafe with Mediterranean food and had a gyro wrap that was very good. Vernonia got hit hard in the floods a few years back, and has been struggling to recover. After my lunch, I went back home to work on some projects there.

Upon getting home, I closely inspected the Google Satelite image and found the second road was clearly the right one. I'll have to make a habit of printing that out for my next trip to the logging roads.