Photo Journal of Oregon

Alright, get your bandwidth ready....

The wife and I flew from Manchester to Chicago to Portland, OR to Klamath Falls, OR for our first interview. First up, a few views of downtown. It's a nice smallish town of about 40,000 total. In terms of geography, it reminds me a bit of Augusta. There is a "downtownish" area, but much of the town is spread out, and not superconcentrated within a few blocks.

And a couple views from the edge of town

Needless to say...it's quite picturesque. It's a beautiful valley nestled between several mountains, and the lake you see, Upper Klamath Lake, is the largest lake in Oregon. We spent a few days there, and I feel perfectly comfortable saying on the blog that I really liked the program. It's a smallish hospital that's undergoing a massive rennovation, and quite honestly, is going to be the nicest, most advanced hospital I've ever seen. One of the things the wifey wanted to do while we were on the West Coast was to see the Pacific ocean. Most of you know just what an Ocean lover she is, so we planned on it from the start. It turns out that this part of Oregon is pretty rural due to the geography. The "next town over" of any size happens to be 60 miles away over a frozen mountain pass, and the quickest drive to the coast (Crescent City, CA) happened to be 4-5 hours away, so...we got in the car and started driving... We drove next to Klamath Lake for a while, and kept seeing scenes like this...

...which we THOUGHT we lakes, but no...everything you see in this picture up to the base of those mountains is farmland. We got fooled three times by the damn things. As you can see, things are starting to look a bit more snowy...they got, in fact, MANY bits more snowy. This is what the road looked like for 20+ miles.

It's worthy of note, that in Oregon, the State does not use salt or dirt on the roads, they spread traces of gravel. Yes, it is MUCH better for the environment and I applaud them for that, but it does make for...slower driving. You can just make out some groves that are grated into the ice pack. They might give more traction, but as you drive down the road, each ridge grabs at the tire if you're not exactly perpendicular, and you can feel the car being pulled left and right as you go. It took a while to adjust, but we made it unscathed, and emerged into another of Oregons many climactic zones. High desert --> snowy mountains ---> to this...

One of the things that really struck us both was the residential planning in this part or Oregon. There are VAST stretches of essentially untouched wildreness, pocked with housing developments with hundreds of houses parked on top of each other. It's certainly a different kind of "rural" compared to northern New England with lots of old farm housess on big parcels of land. The area looked like this for quite a while, until we got to one of California's Refwood State Parks.

This was a motorcyclists PARADISE. Miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of twisty, switchbackery through these breath-taking valleys and over ridges. We were quickly struck by 1) just how tall these trees were and 2) just how straight they grew. This land would be an old shipbuilders dream if there was an easy way to get these monsters out of here. We tried and tried to come up with ways to really capture just how massive and impressive these trees really are, and after hours of brainstorming, we gave up. There is no way to appreciate the size of a redwood / sequoia forest (Trees of the same genus) unless you see it with your own eyes. At this point of the trip, we were just driving through. On the way back, we stopped for a few hours and took a few pictures that might give you a vauge idea of just how big we're talking about.

We eventually emerged out of the forest, and after a short time, we arrived in Crescent City, CA. A town that feels somewhat like Old Orchard Beach in Maine. Bustling in the summer, shuttered in the winter. This was the view from our hotel balcony.By this time, sunset was beginning to approach, so the next photos of the beach weren't quite as grey as they appear here.

We had a great evening, and woke up to this the next morning before we headed back to Klamath via the Redwoods...
So, time to head back to Klamath Falls. We decided to stop at the State Park to explore a little more. From some of the promotional materials on the CA State Park website, it turns out that this was the park George Lucas used to film the planet of Endor in "Return of the Jedi". So if you want a sense of the place, go watch the movie! (Sorry we found no actual Ewoks). As I said before, you can't appreciate the scope of these forests until you see them. Maybe this will give you an inkling...

By now, our necks hurt from looking up so much, so it was back through the park...

...towards the mountains...

...over the mountains...

...past those tricky fields...

...and back to Klamath Falls...

...where we got on this and flew to Portland, OR.
...and that, is...the rest...of... the story.