We were happy to do a little exploring today. We got a slow start, eating a late breakfast and hanging around the trailer until early afternoon but we finally got our ducks in a row and headed toward OR-58 that goes east over the Willamette Pass in the Cascades.
Peggy, before we even made it the 200 yards to the highway, allowed us to become distracted and we started out turning up a local road with the tantalizing name of Lost Creek. It was a gorgeous drive through bottom land with dense forest separating the grass areas. We had barely started when we noted that the first farm we drove by had a high-lead yarder spar and a concrete boat in his front yard; hardly farming implements. The road crosses the creek a few times and it is a great drive but it is only a few miles before the road crapped out and we were forced to backtrack back to OR-58.
During our drive east on 58, Peggy kept it pretty close to the speed limit until we made it to Willamette Pass, one of a few passes crossing the Cascades in Oregon. The elevation at the pass is a bit more than 5100′. Some more pesky forest fires have been ignited in the last few days and up in the pass the smoke shortened up the view. We took a bit of a side trip to Odell Lake and it was very nice but our big hit for today was Salt Creek Falls where we pulled in on our trip back west out of the pass.
The pullout off the highway is not very impressive at Salt Creek Falls but, if you hop out of your rig and take a short walk, you can see this spectacular site. There are some modest interpretive signs that detail how the Falls were formed geologically and the result is gorgeous. The creek above the Falls runs down some rocky rapids before taking a gigantic plunge off a basalt cliff into a steaming pool some 285 feet below. And the fun doesn’t end there – there are some jagged cascades below the Falls as Salt Creek makes its way to the Willamette River. It is rare that we have encountered such stunning sights so close to vehicle access and with such a great walking path to the roar audible from the parking lot.
We hung out for quite a while at the Falls but finally had to head down out of the pass, driving along the shore of Salt Creek until it dumped into the Willamette River. The River really isn’t a river here but actually a series of reservoirs backed up behind large earthen dams. The drop between reservoir elevations is pretty small so I think the dams are mostly for domestic and irrigation purposes because even the larger dams had puny powerhouses and puny transmission lines leaving them.
We fooled around a bit more before heading home to Dexter Shores RV. We noted as we passed through the nearby intersection of Lowell that the state had set up an incident camp across the lake from our RV park. There were many camp tents (apparently, firefighters do not even get to rest when off duty because they are sleeping on the grass at Lowell State Park), food prep facilities and numerous portable outhouses. We hope these guys get a rest soon. It has been a nasty fire year in the Pacific Northwest.
We took a few pix along the way and you can see some of them if you click here