Oregon – Tue & Wed 2 & 3 June

From Tacoma we headed straight down the Interstate through Washington, since we were a day behind where we had planned to be (so that we could see Roz) and we needed to make up some ground. So Washington may have had a nice coastline but we didn’t find out!

The Oregon coastline is really beautiful though, but unfortunately we timed the weather pretty badly. It wasn’t terrible, but just cloudy and overcast enough to make everything look pretty drab. A pretty common line for the day was, “That would be stunning, if it was a nicer day...”

We saw Haystack Rock, which I had seen dozens of beautiful sunset and sunrise photos of in competitions and stuff. When we saw it it was the middle of a remarkably drab day, so not quite as nice as the photos! It is still quite cool though.

Towards the bottom of Oregon we headed inland to Crater Lake, which was definitely our Orgeon highlight. I had stumbled across Crater Lake online when I was planning our trip, and then a guy in the gondola at Whistler had recommended it as a worthwhile detour off the coast. It was at least 500km off our path, and as we started climbing twisting roads up and up and up and up we were starting to wonder why we had come and if it would really be worth it. There were quite a few patches of snow on the sides of the road which soon turned to complete snow cover, which soon turned to massive banks of snow on the sides where the road had been cleared, and then to banks that were taller than the car! That in itself was kind of cool and we were starting to feel better about the detour, and then we came to a viewpoint of the lake... I was pretty much speechless (I think I groaned actually!!) – stunning didn’t even begin to describe it!!

Crater Lake is the deepest large body of water in the world and also thought to be the cleanest. It is fed only by rain and snow melt, no rivers or streams, and it has this amazing deep blue colour. It was created when a 3,600m volcano collapsed after an eruption (thought to be the largest eruption in North America in the past 640,000 years), and has a small island inside created by a second volcanic eruption. The average annual snowfall for the area is about 13.3m, so part of the road around the lake is closed until towards the end of June while they clear the snow. The snow is so deep that on a good day they can clear about 400m and some days they get through less than 100m.

Statistics aside though, we both thought that Crater Lake was one of the most beautiful places we had ever been to. Highly recommend it if you are ever in Oregon – well worth going out of your way for!

More photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/canadianmport/Oregon?authkey=Gv1sRgCNLo87fmtdzbGA#