2022-06-11 46 -122

Location

In the woods south of the Toutle Valley.

Participants

Expedition

This hashpoint didn't look especially promising in itself, but 2022-06-11 46 -123 did, so I figured I might give this one a shot on the way.

I drove up I-5 from Portland and then took Washington 504 to the Toutle River Valley, a small farming valley that I hadn't been through since the 1990s. From the village of Toutle I took South Toutle Road -- it's pronounced like "poodle," by the way -- and then turned off onto Frank Smith Road, which I followed until it ended abruptly at what could either have been a forest road or somebody's driveway. So, I turned around and found a place to pull over before getting out to walk. I brought along my cup of coffee to better look the part of "just a guy enjoying a walk in the woods."

Shortly after I left the car, I began to hear a mechanical noise of the kind that always gets described as being "like a swarm of bees." I didn't see anything out in the fields, though, and it got louder very quickly, and then I realized that I was across the road from the largest, densest, loudest swarm of bees I'd ever seen. I kept walking.

As I neared the place where the paved county road abruptly changed to a dirt track, I suddenly beheld the most dangerous animal: man. Specifically, a guy going out to post something in his mailbox. "Hi," I said -- "does this road go into the forest, or would I be walking down people's driveways?" He amiably told me that if I kept to the left I'd get to the forest gate, everything else was people's driveways. That wasn't anything I didn't already know from the map, but it gave me confidence that I could continue down the lane -- if anybody yelled at me, I could just say "well, the feller down there said that if I stuck to the left...."

Anyway, at this point it was just the familiar ritual of following the logging road to the smaller logging road, and then diving into the underbrush for the last hundred meters or so. And then getting back out. I took the usual array of photos -- the hashpoint, the road, the gate, and so on -- but I noticed that they had kind of a soft-focus look to them.

When I got back to the car, the bees were gone. I reset my GPS one graticule to the east, and continued along my way.